THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE FEMALE:

Scenes From the Exhibitionists: The fairer sex shows (and tells) too much. (KAY S. HYMOWITZ, January 12, 2007, Opinion Journal)

Some people believe that it is lingering misogyny rather than naive exhibitionism that leads the public to define women by their sexual anatomy and proclivities. Perhaps there is something to that. But the exhibitionism surely doesn't help. It seems that men, despite their reputation as braggarts, actually don't find self-exposure all that appealing. Where are the male counterparts to Britney Spears and "Girls Gone Wild"? Jessica Cutler, the D.C. sex-blogger known as Washingtienne and a one-time congressional intern, is now being sued for $20 million by one of her gentleman callers, who for some reason preferred that his bedroom antics remain, well, in the bedroom.

In the highbrow world, Philip Roth clearly writes autobiographical novels, but it took a bitter ex-wife--the actress Claire Bloom--to rip off the fictional veil and give us the private Roth. Tom Stoppard, interviewed recently for the New York Times Magazine by Daphne Merkin (she once wrote an article about being spanked, by the way), hopes that his biography will be "as inaccurate as possible. . . . I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers."

Why men have become more discreet than women, assuming they have, is one of those cultural mysteries that is yet to be solved. But the fairer sex might want to take a lesson from Mr. Stoppard, who notes that it's not any sense of modesty that makes him reticent; rather it "has to do with not making myself available." To throw your intimate self before the public is to risk having your identity mauled by a mob of hyenas, and you will probably suffer for it. As Samuel Beckett said to Doris Lessing's lover when he heard that the novelist had used him as a model for one of her characters. "Identity is so fragile. How did you ever survive?" He peered at the man. "Or did you?"

You sell what you have.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 12, 2007 11:13 PM