The ones around know too much about us...
Commenting to a post by someone else, I brought up this thought that I had at the conference the other week.
One of the papers was on late nineteenth century French literary reinterpretations of late eighteenth French libertine literature. The thing that struck me about it was the speaker mentioned certain late C19th French male literary intellectuals rabbiting on about how much better, more feminine, more womanly, more alluring, were late C18th ladies of an aristo libertine type (my feeling is that this wasn't just about fictional figures, it was also about their image of pre-revolutionary women of a certain type).
Which had me going 'It's Woman as Other, only this time it's about history rather than geography!'
Because there's that whole thing about 'Women from X', where X = some other culture which is not like the culture the men live in, are so much more feminine, sexy, what women should be like, knowing how to treat a man, rather than the women who are actually around them and part of the same.
I think I might invoke here a notion of 'micro-cultures' within larger cultures, because this is probably also not unrelated to class-othering as well (the most egregious examples of this I've seen are those cited in Matt Houlbrook's Queer London about the middle class fetishation of the working class man and guardsmen as somehow more 'primitive' and sexual).
Doubtless there are lots of reasons for this.
But perhaps one is that it's possible that if women are part of the same micro-culture it's harder to see them as Other? it might even be that they come over really as pretty much human beings (rather than mysterious, fascinating, alluring, etc). Or at the very least they are perhaps not sufficiently different from a chap's sister or other female relatives... Also women of the same micro-culture are probably pretty much wise to the men in that micro-culture and their funny little ways and quirks and up to their tricks.
And thinking that perhaps familiar women who are in a position that's fairly close to some kind of equality aren't really that good at being super magnifying mirrors to male magnificence (a concept for which I am, of course, indebted to V Woolf) - which also makes me think, isn't there also a version of this where the difference is age?
But there's something intriguing, if rather icky, in the assumption that the women here now are nothing like so attractive as women somewhere else, in space or time.
I wouldn't say this is a universal phenomenon (thinking e.g. of Darwin and the remarkable degree of cousin-marriage within his kinship network) but it's one that, I think, is reasonably common.
I was led to muse as to whether there is a similar phenomenon with women. I think there is a version of it, but it's about finding the new stranger in town attractive rather than the boring dreary blokes she's known all her life - cf Rosamund in Middlemarch, not to mention all those miller's daughters who fell for passing handsome soldiers and similar folk-tale motifs. (Maybe this is just a healthy evolutionarily sound drive to exogamy kicking in?) I suppose there was the 'Sheikh'-mania of the 1920s...
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