I watched the Victoria’s Secret fashion show this week. I love watching it. Not for the erotic titillation that men get out of seeing women strutting in bras and panties, but for something else…the experience of the lightness inherent in each of the model’s being. The joyfulness, the playfulness, the youthful vitality that is so alluring…the backstage singing along to the music, the dancing, the lifting of their arms into the air when they walk to embrace the universe filled with their just ‘being’. I reminds me very much of when I watch little girls twirl. Boys don’t twirl, but give a little girl a flouncy skirt, a piece of sheer fabric, a ribbon tied to a stick and invariably it is over their heads or in front of them moving watching it; feeling it dance in the wind.
Each year the costumes in the show enchant me. Last year there a set of wings that looked like a trellis in a garden with ladybugs and a spider web that I loved. This year, the old fashioned New Orleans collection with the cameo’s and lace parasols spoke to me—oooh! But there was something that they did this year which was interesting to me beyond the pretty…at the end, the models talked about each other telling stories of who they were beyond that of lingerie models. One was fearless and they showed her hang-gliding. Another in her nerdy glasses with all of her latest electronic gadgets; a third and her love of music. I thought about this in the terms of secrets being more than just Victoria’s. It was an invitation for all of us who watched as if we could have whispered to these women ‘tell me a secret about you’ and they did. It reminded me of the inherent charm of little girls with breathy giggles in young confidences that practice building trust between best friends. In fact is the trust that causes the friendship to deepen. The Victoria’s Secret models allowed us a hint of who each woman was; beyond that of a piqued prurient interest. They were grown up secrets; the juxtaposition between the essential dignity of a woman to withhold the defining parts of herself from an audience of millions and allowing just a tiny secret to be known. It was intriguing…it appeared that each of us watching were chosen for an esteemed invitation to want to know more.
It is male of the species that need women’s secrets revealed to them. The bawdy cat calls during burlesque shows of not-quite-take-it-all-off…shadow dancers…a sneak peak of a woman’s ‘scanties’; bras and panties, garters and stockings, girdles and curlers, bathrobes and slippers. What made little boys turn into fascinated men, was that they weren’t supposed to see those parts of us. They don’t understand the opposite of who they are. The simple buttoning of shirt, the zipper pulled up on a pair of trousers. But undergarments…these are the hidden, modest domain of women…and that only a chosen man…a man who was worthy of by either her love or his seduction could provide for him a hidden world to discover. To a man, there is a untapped beauty in a woman’s sexual modesty that sexual promiscuity belies. In a world filled with easy access to pornography, strippers and barely clad women in music videos, it is what is hidden that is most pleasurably titillating; what man doesn’t dream of a virgin? But a world of intentionally withheld of a woman’s curves, her corsets, her powders and her perfumes..that is the stuff of dreams. And yet even in a world where all should have been revealed on the catwalk, the producers knew that it wasn’t enough—and it wasn’t enough because a woman’s dignity is in her secrets. It is a thought provoking premise; that secrets are decidedly a female; inherently a part of a woman’s genetic code and no amount of modernity can completely shut it down; and men know it.
What happened to the age when a man would never dream of asking a woman her age, her weight or what happened to cause the failure her last relationship? What causes a man to blatantly ask why you aren’t married? (Or even worse, the verbalizing of ‘you’d make some lucky man a wonderful wife’.) What is secret is what is sacred…a place in time where a woman’s fertility was tinged with awe and deference. Instead, we have this week’s online ‘tell all’-- ‘good news…Kourtney Kardashian is pregnant with her second child’. Really? Is it good news that this woman had two children out of wedlock to a man who is allegedly an addicted smoker and alcoholic? I cringed watching the birth of her first child when Kris Jenner, with tear filled eyes said on national TV how proud she was of her daughter. Kris should have been ashamed of her daughters’ repeated poor choices and judgment.
I thought about Michael today, and how he asked to have the link to my blog. I told him no; and he wanted to read it; when I declined his offer, he wanted to read it even more. He googled me to find it. He wasn’t the only one. When I told another man that I wasn’t interested in having him reading my blog, that he couldn’t be trusted with what I wrote here (he had been copying my blogs to place into his own) he also couldn’t bear to live with thought that he was unwelcome in this place. That although this blog is read worldwide, what I write here still resides within the place in my heart of my secrets. It is a place of self-love; a place that hides and protects, yet paradoxically reveals.
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