Snow Blind

You must take the following with a caveat. Someone I liked ended up with someone about twenty years younger than me. So there is bitterness here. Secondly, I wanted to say that I know couples with age difference and none of what I describe here applies to them.

When I was fourteen I went to Paris, France with some other girls in my class. All of us had half-grown female bodies with baby fat molting into breasts, and runny zits and retainers and the like. In celebration of the occasion I chopped my hair into a jagged bob and dyed it black. It was the ‘80s, so I also owned a pair of chartreuse pedal pushers that I wore with real live sixtie’s cock-roach killer flats. I really thought I was the shit. I was experimenting with make-up and figuring out ways to blanch out my freckled skin with foundation and baby powder. I felt “cool”, may be sexy for seconds at a time, but never a threat to any real grown-up woman. Certainly not a Parisian woman.

Parisian women scared the bejesus out of me. They seemed self-possessed to the point of complete imperviousness. There was no quaint Midwestern exchange of grins with them on the street. It was just us peering up to all the pretty Simones only to receive the sullen, hard, enigmatic looks you see on the catwalk. All the Parisian ladies seemed exceedingly thin with protruding collar bones, dressed in form-fitting Diane Von Furstenberg wrap around dresses. They all smoked, had raspy voices and jingling gold bracelets.

I was completely shamed by the overwhelming disdain we received. I figured it was because we were literally ugly Americans. I was wearing lime green on nearly a daily basis, and some of my friends wore sports jersies and clunky Dr. Scholl’s with coral painted toe-nails. Our bodies had that adolescent misshapenness. We had acne too, a crime to French women, right? We were just an aesthetic grotesquery to them I was sure, and I figured that since Paris was all about strict elegance, we were begging to be shunned. It was explained to me later, by my teacher in fact, that Paris is also all about romance and stuff, and that the Parisian women didn’t like their men distracted by young girls.

What the fuck? WE were a distraction? I couldn’t fucking BELIEVE it. These women, with perfect flanks and jingly gold bracelets were threatened by fourteen-year-olds from the Home of da Cubs?

I see now that how we felt about ourselves, with our marketing-induced body dysmorphia, may not have been how we were perceived. And I am regretful to say that I kind of know now how those French women felt.

There is nothing new about the lure of a young girl/woman. I’ve read Lolita, I know who Scarlett Johanson is. I even wrote for “Barely Legal”, a magazine that trades on the sure bet of young female flesh. (Listen, I know there’s senior porn, but that’s irrelevant). As women represent the physical world (mother earth,etc.), aging female flesh is literally death, and young female flesh is springy fresh with hormones as clean as Ivory soap. Camille Paglia would say that male sexuality is predatory and the temptation to defile the springy fresh is just way too much. And she would also probably add, “tough, shit, bitches.”

The hard truth is, the way physiology, and even gender is set up, a lot of men are going to want a young babe. They may never act on the desire, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t blaze a fiery trail from their synapses to you know where. I think even more seductive than the “untouched” female flesh, is the adoring and unadorned gaze that a young woman can provide for a man. I think that gaze can feel like baptism. And that gaze is something I can never provide.

Women have the peculiar responsibility of mirroring. And it starts at birth. Mommy’s eyes are the first place we call home. Dorothy Dinnerstein’s book “The Mermaid and the Minotaur” describes brilliantly how destructive female-only parenting is. All the children’s projections, good and bad, end up on mommy, and in the end, on women. But that’s not the point here. I think. The point is that men may be symbols of knowledge, money, talent for some women, but women really are on some levels physical trophies for men in the sense that they signify something about who a man IS.

Here’s a difficult trueism: Older women have lived longer than younger women. They’ve experienced a myriad of contradictions of their own character, sorrow, and delights in their lives. Things are not all shiny black and white to them as they are to younger women. The older I get, the more I understand nuance, and the more I must accept the whole idea of the “grey area”. I can also see bullshit walking from a mile away. Sure, there’s stuff I don’t know, but the idea of being “mentored” at this age is absolutely offensive to me, unless it’s an older woman who’s got all the shit figured out that I haven’t.

But I truly believe that men can feel younger cellularly through a young woman. They can actually believe they’re starting over. Or that they’re impervious to the process of acceptance that keeps life moving along.

So the point is I spose is that I feel a little defeated. And it’s not that I hate the fact that men my age or not always attracted to women my age, it just annoys me. It’s impossible for me to have those ivory snow hormones that make men’s nostrils flare. No one is going to be reborn through my gaze. But my acceptance of such facts is a sign that I’m finally growing up.