The little girl on the scooter and the feminine aesthetic

by David Benjamin

 

“…  And when she passes, each one she passes, goes “Aah’… ” 

—Vinícius de Moraes & Norman Gimbel. “The Girl from Ipanema”

 

MADISON, Wis.—She was two blocks ahead and I was busy driving. But for a moment I froze, fascinated, drawing a testy honk when the light went green. 

Normally, I wouldn’t have noticed at all. She was a little girl, maybe age nine, waiting with her scooter to cross the street. She was stick-thin and, from a distance, featureless. In profile, she bespoke the blithe androgyny that typifies and protects children before puberty comes along and warps their perceptions forever.

But something in the attitude she struck, standing in upright repose, was essentially, irrepressibly feminine. After I had driven past her, I didn’t look back. But the flash of recognition lingered.

She recalled a summer day in Paris. I was crossing the hill whose peak is the Panthéon, the great domed sepulcher of the Republic’s heroes. I spied a little girl whose weary tourist parents had sunk to the steps for a breather. But she was not tired. She climbed to the broad limestone expanse beneath the columns. She paused, as though in thought. I sensed something about to happen and, hurriedly, I changed the lens on my camera to follow the girl in close-up.

She started by clasping her hands beside her cheek, and then spread her arms wide … and began to dance. Leaps and spins, tiptoes and awkward pirouettes, nothing to suggest a moment’s training, just spontaneous, irrepressible and distinctly girlish. I leaned on my shutter and captured a series of photos that I cherish and a burst of ballerina whimsy that I don’t need photos to remember. 

Together, my Panthéon dancer and the little girl with the scooter tempt me to entertain the conviction (again) that there is an aesthetic that’s innately, immutably feminine. Not that I can explain it.

My scooter girl, unselfconsciously, struck a pose that a boy could easily mimic, but if he did, he would look unnatural. When the little girl at the Panthéon took her first position, her body language roared that she was not a boy.

Another memory, another camera. I was eleven, carrying everywhere my Brownie 127. I stood my brother Bill, with Donny Friedl and my cousin Tom in front of a truck on Saratoga Avenue. They struck attitudes that would have been weird if they were girls. Disdainfully, Bill cocked a hip, bent a knee and stuck a thumb in his belt. Donny lowered his chin, shoved hands in pockets and looked uncooperative. Legs spread, arms limp, t-shirt filthy, Tom projected the persona of a car thief submitting to a mug shot.

If there is a masculine aesthetic, these three ten-year-olds had already learned it and immersed themselves.

Artists, of course, have always pursued and idealized a feminine aesthetic. We see it in ancient fertility icons like the Venus of Willendorf (25,000 BC) and every year on the red carpet at the Oscars. But crusaders of gender neutrality will argue that this historic preference for pin-up pulchritude is the sexually fraught heritage of patriarchal cultures that have always dominated society and subjugated women. 

If we could somehow organize a truly equal milieu, we would see no difference. Boys and girls, unconsciously, would strike the same attitudes. A girl would look perfectly normal scratching her crotch. Nobody would look twice at a boy who loosens up with a quick plié before stepping into the batter’s box. Unfettered by sexist traditions, attractive people would still be noticed, but not disproportionately. They would draw the same appreciation, from men for women, from women for men, from men for other guys, from women for other gals.

Really?

I know it’s risky to suggest that some deep-seated essence separates boys from girls and can never be resolved. Still, stubbornly, my intuition leans that way. 

For instance, I watch a lot of nature shows on TV. In some species, the male clearly rules. Gorillas and lions make their womenfolk do all the work. On the other hand, every wolf pack is ramrodded by an alpha female. Among some insects and arthropods—spiders, bees praying mantids—the male is a dwarf cast aside after one pathetic, two-second orgasm. Traditionally, after coitus, the girl praying mantis bites off her husband’s head and eats it. 

Many species simply can’t resolve the issue. A bull moose gathers a harem of a half-dozen cows and lords over them all year long, almost. But along comes mating season. The cows have their day, teasing and avoiding the bull, expecting him to pee all over himself, waiting for him to wage a series of violent duels with other bulls. And if he loses even once, he don’t get no nookie at all.

Who’s in charge here?

In many bird species, unlike humans, the male lures the eye and appeals to John James Audubon. Your male cardinal is gloriously red, the female drab and brown. The male bower bird flashes a dazzling purple crown, his wife is flashless. Among birds of paradise, plain Jane squats on a twig and watches Dick shuck and jive through a display of neon colors, fans, feathers, shimmies, shakes, bounces, twirls and razzle-dazzle that would render Velma Kelly green with envy. 

So, who’s in charge here?

Nature offers no straight answers. Different species follow different sexual regimes. Some, obviously, trade dominance back and forth according to the season. Beauty can often be a one-way street. Among many bird species, the male has all the looks. But a female mantis is huge and gorgeous, her husband is lunch. The queen bee is immense and magnificent, her worker bees—all girls—are lovely in their own way. But the drone is a shrunken nebbish. 

And then, in some species, any distinction seems negligible. You can’t tell a male from a girl flamingo, or which raccoon is Rocky. Something attracts a boy iguana to a girl iguana, but it can’t be her looks, because they’re the same as his. 

Animals don’t have politics. We do, which makes it hard for us to see beauty isolated from feeling. We can all agree that, for example, that Catherine Zeta Jones (alias Velma Kelly) is beautiful. And so is Brad Pitt. But they’re also sexy as hell, and how do we filter from riveting beauty the taint of desire And should we?

If something is beautiful, attractive, tangible and physical, shouldn’t I feel a physical response—even if I don’t, won’t or can’t do anything about the feeling?

Really, am I gonna walk into the Louvre and feel up the Venus de Milo?

Okay, let’s go back to little girl with the scooter. She was only a fleeting glimpse. But in a few seconds, I saw beauty unequivocally feminine. She was a work of art—although more Rockwell than Renoir—objective and emotionless. I didn’t want her. I just liked her.

Whether humans can evolve an aesthetic standard that deems Audrey Hepburn and Al Pacino as interchangeably lovely is doubtful, nor is it desirable. Just thinking about it seems bizarre. I like how both of them look, but I like even more the vast difference between them. Hepburn’s beauty is both delicate and steely. Pacino’s is craggy and volatile. Both are masks for unfathomable depths. 

In a society that has always favored the male politically and the female both emotionally and aesthetically, we risk too much by striving to bridge the divide and erase the disparity. It’s that pause to contemplate the little girl with the scooter, that involuntary “ah” that follows the girl from Ipanema. Since the ancient sculptor carved the Venus of Willendorf, the human species—in a decidedly masculine world—have cultivated and exalted a profoundly feminine aesthetic perhaps because, without it, we would be barely civilized.

As the man said, “’Twas beauty killed the beast.”