Women Chasing Men and Dressing for What's Important

A few years ago, Gay Talese, one of the pioneers of literary or “new” journalism, gave an interview to the then online presence of GQ and Details, Men.Style.com:


Two points in Talese's discussion bear attention.

First is his account of the Italian passeggiata in his parents' village:

At night, the men of the town would parade around the fountain….It was a fashion show unreported, uncovered, unphotographed...a tradition of men walking around and the women looking at them -– and maybe picking a man they would like to know. And then they’d tell the brother, the father, and something was arranged.

The role-reversal here is striking. Although the idea of the peacock is nothing new, we in the U.S. at least tend to think of romance as happening along the opposite lines: Women dress up and men (wearing just about anything, really) chase them.

We probably think this way because of the movies we watch, but the funny thing is, regardless of who chases, women ultimately do the choosing, right? The actuality of the American situation is not, therefore, all that different from what's described here. The passeggiata custom is just more honest about it than the typical Hollywood narrative. So why not change our perspective?

In my view, men should focus their energy on refining themselves -- dressing up their characters as well as their bodies, everyday, indoors and out -- and see who shows up to choose them. Likely, men who go this route will have far more options than they would chasing individual woman after individual woman until one said "yes." The irony, in other words, is that with this approach, men actually do more choosing than they do with the current method.

The second point that bears attention is Talese's assertion that he "always dressed up for the story," meaning, his work as a journalist itself merited the respect inherent to dressing up, regardless of the company he kept:

It wasn't who I was with....no matter who I'm talking to, I'm dressing up, not for the people but for the story. It's ceremonious, it's celebratory, it's important.

A friend of mine and I used to dress up for exams in grad school and our reasons were the same as Talese's. Imagine, though, if we as a society dressed up for everything we thought was important and refused to do unimportant things. What would the world -- and our lives -- be like?