I’m beautiful. It’s lasted quite a long time, this beauty of mine, but it won’t be lasting much longer because I’m forty now, as I’m writing this, forty now and probably by the time you read it forty-one, and so on and so forth, and we all know it ends up as worms or ashes, but for the time being I’m still beautiful. More or less. Less than I used to be, despite the regular application of henna to my graying hair and concealer to the rings beneath my eyes. Less than Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, who is precisely my age. Less than many of my students now — but still, perhaps, a little more than my eleven-year-old daughter.
I’m also intelligent. Less so than Simone Weil. My intelligence, too, is already going downhill — though differently from my beauty — and it, too, will end up as worms or ashes. But still. For the time being I’m quite intelligent.
When I say I’m beautiful and intelligent, I’m not boasting. All I’ve done is take reasonable care of the beauty and intelligence programmed into me by the dice toss of my parents’ chromosomes. How is it possible to boast about things for which one is not responsible?
We are dealt a hand at birth: some of the cards are genetic (skin color, musical talent, bunions), others cultural (religion, language, nationality), but all are given rather than chosen. Later, as adults, we can make a conscious decision to change a few of the cards in our hands — by converting from Catholicism to Judaism, for example, or by moving to another country, or even by having a sex-change operation — but the original deal inevitably leaves its deep and indelible imprint on us.
I’ve never quite understood people’s boasting about their destiny-dealt hand, though it’s certainly a ubiquitous phenomenon. Perhaps my own origins are too bland to have instilled in me this sort of pride: it’s never occurred to me to derive self-esteem from the fact that I was born in Calgary, Alberta, or that I was raised a Protestant, or that I have white skin, or that I am female. Likewise, I’m responsible for neither my beauty nor my intelligence, which have been two undeniably salient features of the forty years I’ve spent on this earth so far — and which, until today, I’ve never had the courage to write about.
My beauty has gotten me many places, to some of which I very badly wanted to go and to others of which I did not want to go at all. Over the years, I’ve watched it attack and corrode borders, then take me with it into foreign territories. These borders are erected between age groups, social classes — all sorts of hierarchical entities — in order that society may function as predictably and as decently as possible. They are not solid brick walls. Beauty eats them away.
I was not particularly beautiful as a child. I started getting that way at around age fifteen, when I was a junior in high school, and as soon as it happened I seduced and/or was seduced by my creative-writing teacher. He was ten years older than I, and, shortly before the end of the school year, he took whatever virginity I had left after childhood sex games with my brother. I was thrilled, flattered, crazily in love, and, for a long time, proud — yes, proud, for this was something in which my responsibility was implicated. The love affair was a serious one. It culminated in engagement — an engagement I broke off at age eighteen, when I fell in love with someone else. For nearly three years, then, my life revolved around this man. There was no sexual harassment involved.
Ah, but was he not taking advantage of his position? Of his superior education? Of the intellectual awe in which I held him? He certainly was, just as I was taking advantage of my youth, my beauty, and whatever innocence I still appeared to possess. We wanted the same thing, which was to be in love with each other.
Let us be careful. Let us be subtle. Let us not be polemical and deliciously angry and righteously indignant. The subject is a messy one, as messy and as contradictory as the species to which we belong, so let us not pretend to tie up all its loose ends and get it straight and iron it flat. Would I like the idea of my daughter sleeping with one of her teachers? No, not at age eleven. At what age, then? At an age when she has acquired a will of her own, a desire of her own, and an intellect capable of critical discernment — in other words, at an age when (and if) she wants it. I tend to think that in her case that might be never, but naturally I don’t know.
Last spring I was at a literary cocktail party in Montreal, standing in a corner, drinking wine with my brother and an eminent, elderly Quebecois writer, and the conversation came around to the cases, currently hitting the headlines, of young boys who’d been sexually abused by priests in Quebec’s Catholic schools. “The problem with this whole outcry,” my brother said suddenly, “is that it’ll make it impossible for actual love affairs ever to take place in those situations again.” I saw the older man do a double take and then — to my utter astonishment — heard him say, “Yes, you’re right. I had that experience myself. Of course, I wasn’t ten or eleven years old; I was sixteen. But still . . .”
The man was now in his seventies. It had probably been several decades since he’d dared allude to this experience, his teenage love for one of his teachers, but the memory of it was still vivid enough to make his voice tremble with emotion. Clearly, he had loved that teacher, just as I had loved the one to whom I became engaged. And because we loved them, we also learned a great deal from these seductive teachers. They fed our intelligence, brought our bodies and our minds to life. I read a thousand books because of mine.
Again, the child’s age makes an important difference — and also his or her psychological vulnerability. I am by no means challenging the fact that students can be, have been, and are being sexually manipulated or abused by their teachers; I am only asking that we not leap from this fact to the grotesque conclusion that bodily awareness should be radically eliminated from all pedagogical situations. In my own teaching experience, though it so happens I’ve never flirted with students, let alone slept with them, I’m fairly sure my beauty has contributed positively to the stimulation of my students’ brains, and thus to the transmission of knowledge and ideas.
Other borders eaten away by my beauty I would definitely rather have seen preserved. For example, I could have done without having my thighs stroked by the gray-haired doctor who performed my first gynecological examination, or my eyes stared into longingly by the bespectacled young dentist who removed my impacted wisdom teeth. Probably since the Stone Age, beautiful (and less beautiful) girls have needed to learn to defend themselves — whether through sarcasm, cool rejection, or karate chops — against these annoying infringements on their integrity. They can come from almost anyone — including, unexceptionally, women. The only criterion for whether this behavior is oppressive is whether one is made uncomfortable by it — that is, whether or not there is space and desire for response, interaction.
At the age of twenty, I came to Paris to spend my junior year abroad, then went on to spend my senior year abroad and to do a master’s degree abroad, and now, twenty years and two French children later, I have hit upon the perfect inscription for my tombstone: “Once abroad, always abroad.”
Oddly enough, despite Frenchmen’s worldwide reputation for being sexually obsessed, my dealings in France with professors, employers, gynecologists, dentists, and shrinks have all been relatively maul-free. It seems to me that, as a general rule (and with all the usual caveats regarding this sort of generalization), the French accept the fact that they have and are bodies. The prevailing social decorum is not as all-or-nothing as it is in the States, where the choice seems to be between overt sexual contact or feigned indifference to all physical characteristics. In France there is an intermediary level of communication based on the constant exchange of glances, witty remarks, hand gestures, and the like. Both men and women take part in this exchange. As the French do not attempt to rid social existence entirely of physicality, they are not in such a state of patent contradiction and frustration as are the Americans (I think I’m speaking mainly of white Americans here). In short, the French tend to value the art of sublimation.
Americans, it would seem, are taught less to love or enjoy their bodies than to take care of them. As a people, they seem to conceive of physicality essentially in terms of health, exercise, self-defense, autonomy, and how-to sex manuals. When one roams the aisles of American supermarkets, one essentially has the choice between health food and junk food; plain, ordinary, wonderful, unprocessed, unimproved, unadulterated food is virtually impossible to find. Americans are becoming phobic about what they put into their bodies — no other country in the world diets so much or suffers from so many eating disorders. In the realm of eroticism, analogous extremes are represented by pornography and The Joy of Sex. It is as though the American people require everything erotic and gastronomic to be quantified, verbalized, exhaustively described and dissected and discussed.
As a result, they often seem unaware of the whole aesthetic, interactive dimension of their bodies. Taking this dimension into account can imply concealing as much as revealing, modesty as much as brazenness; it is the opposite of “letting it all hang out.” I once had a beautiful, young, long-blond-haired American female student who came close to getting herself lynched in Morocco by sauntering across a field wearing nothing but short shorts and a halter top. A group of Arab peasants tore after her waving pitchforks — and she was not only terrified but totally nonplussed at the aggressiveness of their reaction to her body. She was just being natural! By European standards, beautiful, young, long-blond-haired American girls who stare men straight in the face are not natural; they are flirts. By North African standards, they are prostitutes, if not witches. No, I’m not defending the veil; I’m simply marveling at Americans’ lack of sensitivity to the manner in which other people, other peoples, might respond to their bodies.
Certainly, sexual harassment, on the job and elsewhere, exists in France, but that is not quite what I’m talking about here. I am talking, rather, about the way in which a certain degree of eroticism is not only tolerated on the social scene but considered a normal part of it. Like my American students today, I was enraged and humiliated, when I first came to Paris, by the stares, whistles, and muttered remarks of men I passed on the street. Likewise, my first attempts to take pensive, solitary walks in the cities of southern Italy invariably ended in fits of hysteria and tears. But the native women in these countries know perfectly well how to handle “their” men. And rape rates are far lower than in the United States, where playful, tacit, intangible erotic exchange in public is increasingly taboo.
Admittedly, there have been occasions in France on which I’ve felt my beauty to be a handicap. Once or twice I’ve narrowly escaped rape; more than once or twice I’ve had devastating doubts about whether a person’s enthusiasm for one of my books or articles might be more due to my big blue eyes. This has tended to make me insecure — and even, sporadically, miserable. But I refuse to exaggerate: these are small dramas. My beauty has never made me nearly as miserable as I would be were I an assembly-line worker, or a crack addict, or a mother on welfare.
I have also — calmly, naturally, as every beautiful woman knows how to do — allowed my beauty to bring me minor favors and advantages: faster service in restaurants, greater courtesy in libraries, more humorous and less expensive exchanges with policemen. The occasions have been countless — and unavoidable. To avoid them, I should have had to disguise myself by wearing thick black glasses and dressing in frumpy clothes.
Listen, I would like to lay all my cards on the table for once. Every human being on this earth is a combination of a mind and a body, an intelligence and a beauty — greater or lesser; now greater, now lesser; forever in flux and forever in interaction. Having worked at such wildly disparate professions as masseuse and feminist journalist, nude model and English professor, bar “hostess” and guest lecturer at prestigious universities, I am probably in a better position than most to revolt against the bad faith so prevalent in the U.S. today. Its adherents pretend that our minds do not live in bodies, and that we respond to each other’s minds independently of each other’s bodies, and that professors can teach and students study without their bodies ever being present in the classroom, and that bosses and employees and colleagues can interact professionally without their bodies ever being present in the office or factory — and that, moreover, it is possible for bodies to burst miraculously into existence when, in private, darkened bedrooms, all systems are suddenly said to be “go,” after having been forced to be “stop” all day long, in every other situation.
These American bodies are no longer allowed to smoke, they are no longer allowed to joke, they are no longer allowed to smell; all of their sexy ambiguities have been banished to oblivion; war has been declared on their capacity for innuendo; flirting has been outlawed because it presupposes inequality (or, more accurately, flirting underlines, renders flagrant and therefore undeniable, the inequality that in fact exists between the beautiful and the less beautiful, the intelligent and the less intelligent, the funny and the less funny). Oh, at all costs let us not recognize such inequality. Let us cover our eyes and pinch our noses and plug our ears before it. The workplace is for getting work done, and schools and universities are for getting an education, and restaurants are for eating, and bars are for drinking, and streets are for striding purposefully from one place to another, and none of these places is an appropriate place for bodies, for sensuality, for sidelong glances, for flirting (because flirting leads to rape, and the eyes of a man on a woman’s body are already a miniature version of rape); all forms of physical exchange between human bodies must be as predictable and safe and contractual as the sale of a house.
Again, let me attempt to be clear and discerning and calm. People who study well and write good papers, whether they are beautiful or ugly, brown or yellow, tall or short, should receive good grades; and people who have appropriate qualifications and experience should never need to consent to being sodomized by the powers that be in order to get a job or a degree or a promotion. The role of beauty — and every other culturally or genetically inherited factor — in such situations as legal trials, political elections, thesis defenses, and tenure hearings should be as close to zero as possible.
In public life, in other words, modern democratic institutions are rightly required to be blind to physical traits. At the opposite end of the spectrum lies lovemaking, in which physicality is all-encompassing. But in between the two there is social existence — life on the job, in the neighborhood, at school, in the subway; a fascinating, shimmering, shifting mix of public and private, physical and spiritual, proximity and distance, conformity and spontaneity. This crucial middle ground (of which physicality is but one of numerous dimensions) is currently being eroded to nothingness in the U.S. by maniacal moralism and ludicrous legalism. And when social interaction is thus invaded by moral imperatives and declarations and calculations, the compulsion to aberrant sexual behavior is worsened, not attenuated.
What I am not saying (I insist, politely banging my fist on the table) is “Hey, men! Hunting season open all year!” All forms of sexual coercion are repulsive, but we must be careful or, under pretext of policing them, we shall lose a vast and rich dimension of human existence — namely, the hundred silent languages of bodies, which vary from country to country, social class to social class, milieu to milieu; the complex, moving languages through which, wordlessly, endlessly, men and women ask and answer questions about each other; the way we move, suggest, demur, wiggle, giggle, arch eyebrows, light cigarettes, graze a hand, a cheek, a shoulder blade; languages that allow us to manifest wonder, admiration, tenderness, arousal, delight, defiance. But then, what if desire becomes aggression? What if it becomes manipulation and threat and blackmail? What if it becomes forcing and pushing, shoving and battering? Well then, if it becomes that, there are already laws against such things. But if it does not become that, then it becomes life.
What we have a right to in this life, as even America’s Declaration of Independence acknowledges, is not happiness; it is, rather, the pursuit of happiness, which is a very different thing indeed. In the same way, the concept of equal rights in no way implies we are or must pretend to be identical to one another. If a deck of cards contains fifty-two fours of diamonds, what sort of passionate poker game will anyone be able to play?
My daughter is also turning out to be beautiful and intelligent, which means that, in addition to teaching her to eschew boasting about it, I shall need to teach her certain things about what sort of treatment she can expect at the hands of the world, just as parents have always prepared their children for the (positive and negative) effects of being Ukrainian, Tasmanian, Jewish, Catholic, white, black, hemophiliac, red-haired, skinny, knock-kneed, and so on, including all the possible combinations of these traits.
Though all of these factors will have more or less weighty consequences depending on the geographical, historical, political, and social context in which one grows up, they are part of the hand one is dealt at life’s outset. There is no fatalism here; I don’t mean to suggest that once you get your cards the game is tantamount to over. I simply mean that all of us play the game according to the cards we have in our hand — bluffing and feinting, discarding and drawing, trying to influence the other players, winning and losing. The progressive/liberal/revolutionary philosophies we have espoused over the past couple of hundred years have tended to blind us to this simple truth, recognized universally by novelists and children: one deals with what is dealt.
This essay originally appeared in Salmagundi as “Dealing with What’s Dealt.” A portion of it was reprinted in Harper’s.
— Ed.
