Police my Desire (if you Dare).

Dear Dazed & Confused,

I am delighted to read this essay, which sends my mind in a hundred directions, with a thousand threads to follow.  Is then, the poet the poem?  Because I have heard otherwise.  Is the actress the character?  Is the protagonist the author?  Is the audience the believer? 

Will everything be swept under the rug?  Can desire even be policed?

French women: yes, I love to love them, and probably for the same reason men do, which is to say that they aim to please visually.  I always thought, though, that they somehow didn't care if men weren't pleased.  The French Woman* is, of course, a construct of mine, and yours, and everyone else's, and I wish they all could be California Girls. 

I have been watching a French Female, in an anthropological spirit, on YouTube- she gives rules and advice for being and looking French.  I think she tapes these dubious lectures in Berlin, where I suppose it is easier to separate the distinguishing characteristics of the French Female from the rest of the world.  Watching one of these videos on How to Wear Perfume Like a French Female, I noted that I would never presume to speak for the American Female in such a general, published way (although, you might want at this point, to call my little kettle black).  If the 19 minutes of video is to be believed, there are many proscriptions to be followed in the application of scent on a woman in France. The author/protagonist/actress/poet of these videos talks with her hands mesmerizingly- her long fingers are painted with bright polish that the eye follows back and forth across the screen, like the ball in a tennis match.  So you don't trouble yourself to watch it, let me tell you the thesis of it all: do not apply so much perfume that anyone who isn't French can smell you.  Hmm, actually, maybe I missed the thesis after all?

We may never know what these French women of my imagination and acquaintance think and feel, but I adore the chance/desire/leisure/liberté to put on some lipstick and consider it all, don't you?












* She wears a scarf just so, she is rabidly self-assured, she is never 'too much,' and she always looks as though she knows a secret that you do not.