Thursday, October 30, 2008

Professional Women

Riding on the Go Train into Toronto yesterday, I was surrounded by young professional women, dressed in desperately-tight slacks and pointed shoes- always clad primarily in black. Surely someone else has noticed how lacking modern professionals are in any sort of style- wearing the sort of clothes that would seem too dour at a wake is not improved by buying them two sizes too small. Maybe the tight clothes explain why they all looked so uncomfortable. They would sit there reading magazines anxiously, flipping the pages as if to break them, fidgeting and tapping their feet rapidly, supremely dissatisfied with the world around them, and somehow kinesthetically bitchy.

On the way home, in the standing-room only Go train, I listened to two of them crammed in next to me complaining for the entire ride home about the young men who have been disappointing them. The common theme seemed to be that worthwhile young men respond to these worthwhile young women with ambivalence. At a certain point, I wanted to interject: “Look- they sort of want to date you because you’re attractive; but they sort of don’t because you’re hyper-bourgeois, boring, and a bit miserable to be around.”

I suspect it’s not just because I’m married that I find women my age to be so remarkably unattractive. I think that so few young women are sexy anymore because so few of them seem to be remotely sexual; they exude a sort of resolute joylessness that seems to be incompatible with sexual pleasure. Professional women especially move about in these jerky motions, like wind-up toy soldiers. Instead of treating their body as a pleasure sensor, they treat it as a problem, or a project to work on; or conversely as a tool to get at some abstract goal. People wonder why the professional classes don’t reproduce at a higher rate, but have you watched the way they move and dress? And so many of them are stick-figure thin now: how can I believe that a woman who can’t enjoy a slice of pizza could enjoy having sex?

Why is it that a culture that is so militantly focused on “fun” insists on limiting pleasure to tiny little boxes in their lives? It's no wonder that the professional classes aren't reproducing- yuppie men and yuppie women are not remotely sensual or sexual; they just buy the trappings of sexuality.

1 comment:

clairev said...

I love you.

that's it.

c