Boy Toys
One of my best friends wrote a brilliant essay for this month’s Elle. I’m guessing the audience for The American Scene doesn’t overlap much with that of Elle, which is a shame, and so I thought I’d bring it to your attention. The subject is: dating male models. Apart from the fact that the essay is terrifically witty and fun, it also offers powerful insight into the future of male-female relations.
Consider, for example, Min’s advice to those who hope to date male models, a passage that alludes to an ugly truth about human nature: mating is often (not always, thankfully) driven by insecurity.
My secret to dating male models is simple: Tell them they’re smart. They’re caricatured as feebleminded and vain—an occupational hazard of a profession based on looks—and have become something of a cultural joke, like male nurses or secretaries.
In reality, the male model is well traveled, urbane, charming, conversant, open-minded, scheming, and self-promoting. Unlike the female model, he hasn’t been mentally preparing for his modeling career his entire life: He probably just stumbled into it. He sees his good fortune, therefore, as accidental and ephemeral, which leaves him emotionally detached from his work. Nevertheless, he is plagued by a sort of intellectual insecurity, which a girl can exploit. While I was fascinated by his exotic world of glamour and jet-setting, he was just as intrigued by my world of reference books and research projects. I would ask what Karl Lagerfeld was like, and he’d ask with equal wonder about Stephen Jay Gould (well, after I explained who he was). I would brag about his model ranking to my friends, and he’d announce my SAT scores at parties, which went over surprisingly well. Each male model I dated told me he had never met a girl like me: smart, but easy to talk to; nerdy, but still pretty hot. I was never sure if I was unique or had simply come from a world different from his, but I took the praise eagerly.
By reassuring the beautiful man that he was smart, I was merely telling him to realize his intelligence. And in return, he would help me to realize my own beauty.
After detailing the nature of her own hotness (something I hope to do more of in my own writing), Min writes:
When strangers asked if I was a model, I reveled. But the popular boys in my school who ranked hot girls said they’d have put me at No. 1 if I hadn’t shaved my head or worn lederhosen. I barely made the top 10.
As an avowed head-shaving enthusiast, this disappoints me.
At the close of the essay comes the following:
Sometimes I feel I’m forced to be an apologist for my fetish for good-looking men. Then I remember that men display identical tastes to mine, preferences that tend toward the young and professionally pulchritudinous. Women my mother’s age have told me to find a man who would be a good father and provider, meaning: food, shelter, a steady income—stability. I smile and refrain from telling them that I can afford my own food and rent and that my friends and family give me support and love. About the only thing that I can’t give myself is that flush of excitement upon locking eyes (and lips) with a really gorgeous guy.
Which is to say, as women surpass men in educational attainment and professional accomplishment, we men need to prepare for a radically different future — a future in which we spend hours tweezing our eyebrows and “juicing” our pecs. I don’t like it, but turnabout is fair play.
Isn’t telling a man he’s samrt pretty much universally a good idea if you want to date him, model or no? My wife thought so…
— Matthias · Jan 26, 01:22 AM · #
Whoops- smart, not samrt (sort of refutes my wife’s flattery)
— Matthias · Jan 26, 01:24 AM · #
As a recovering model dater myself I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece.
The dynamics of pedestrian-model dating seem remarkably similar across genders. The key to get a model — anyone — of course remains playing off their insecurities. Models are almost always insecure, precisely for the reasons Min highlights — models are successful by accident, and rely for their success not just on the opinions of others, but on the opinions of others of what is most meaningless about them.
The reason I stopped is because there is always a bitter aftertaste to the exercise. Whenever I think about dating models, I think about the guy who said: “To seduce is to die as reality and to live as an illusion.” I also think about that Ukranian girl, but that’s another topic altogether… Without even having to channel Christian morality, seduction intrinsically violates the categorical imperative. You could say: “To be seduced is to die as an end and to live as a means.”
But then again, when both people agree to serve as a means for the other party, perhaps the categorical imperative is respected (when I want to be treated as a means, it is treating me as an end to treat me as a means). A lot of things could be said about the contractualization of relationships…
I’m not sure what my point is, or if I even have one. I’m certainly not prescribing anything for anyone. But anyway, it was an entertaining and insightful article, which tapped a well of common experience and triggered lots of fond memories.
— PEG · Jan 26, 02:28 PM · #
This sounds only half right to me. More women may put a premium on good looks, but only when those looks are tied to the more ensconced qualifiers of charm and status.
In reality, the male model is well traveled, urbane, charming, conversant, open-minded, scheming, and self-promoting.
I doubt an incredibly attractive model who was provincial, boring, dogmatic, stupid, and self-loathing would get very far with women.
— JA · Jan 28, 06:43 PM · #