“The differences between men and women” is a vast expanse of joke material. And if the comedy staple was a body of water, it’d be the Ganges River: so over-used and polluted with filth and laziness that to claim a fresh joke (cup of water?) from this reservoir would be laughable if not so sickening. With the genre now castigated, I feel it is appropriate to note how one work of entertainment pre-dates even the classic (and, frankly, hilarious) rom-com “Shop Around the Corner” by nearly two hundred years.
Yes, by turning on one’s sarcastic radar—hence forth referred to as ‘sar-dar’—Jonathan Swift’s poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room” becomes less of a searing indictment of female vanity and more of a sly wink and eye-roll to the convoluted dance of courtship that seemingly holds together the very fabric of society.
Content-wise, the poem is about a young man who walks into a lady’s dressing room when she is not around and is disgusted by the mess he finds. For the next hundred, rhyming, lines, Strephon (the man) expresses voyeuristic contempt at the effort his would-be lover goes through to be presentable in public. Rags used to remove make-up, brushes that have dandruff and hair between the bristles, dirty towels, used toothbrushes, tweezers and more are worthy of condemnation to Strephon. Is he disgusted that his previously lovely companion is revealed to be a blank (or ugly) canvass? Does he feel lied to? Deceived by a woman’s fabricated beauty? Seems unlikely, as he is at least able to identify the tools of beauty this woman uses—oppose to some prehistoric monkey baffled by an imposing monolith. Perhaps it is just enough to be disgusted that women can be disgusting. The content of the poem is essentially that of pulling back a translucent curtain.
It is a long-winded description that yields so few actual revelations that the whole effort smacks of cruelty, and indeed has been condemned as misogynist. For whatever reason, men are allowed a certain degree of physical imperfections—and usually even defended as either 'character' (ex. wrinkles) or necessary practicality (ex. peeing in public). Moreover, the male body is riddled with mystery--I’m talking about nipples and armpit hair, mostly--and so any effort to be anything more than utilitarian in public is decried as “feminine” or “metro-sexual.” Regardless, the poem’s critique of women’s vanity and apparent self-obsession with looks is as culturally striking today as it was in Swift’s time or when the church compiled The Bible or years before that.
However, all previously articulated understandings of Jonathan Swift’s poem need to be thrown out with the bath water when one remembers the poem’s author is Jonathan Swift. Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is to “The Lady’s Dressing Room” what Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” is to “Sunshine.” A popular work, while commendable, overshadowing a lesser-known, more densely layered, production. The point being that Swift’s scathingly sarcastic critique on the poverty and oppression facing the Irish has since catapulted him into the title of “his day’s Stephen Colbert.” Perhaps some people still believe Colbert is a conservative commentator--as that is why he was asked to perform at the, painfully awkward, 2006 Correspondences' Dinner. And those same people are allowed to believe Swift was sincerely lambasting women.
In the last decade --a post-Alanis Morissette era-- Internet-users have twisted and corrupted the word “ironic” to such a degree that the word is barely used for its original intention—which, in fact, might be ironic. It’s confusing, so simply just trust me when I say Swift is being ironic in “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” as in his other works.
Fortunately, with our ‘sar-dar’ on, it is possible to detect Swift was satirizing men at least as much as women in “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” The earnest shock Strephon undergoes is as ridiculous as anything he finds. Anatomically speaking, men and women are humans; failing that, at least living beings. And anything living can be gross. Even puppies. That we understand the unspoken aspects of privacy is what makes the aforementioned curtain translucent. We know it exists, but to maintain civility we don't talk about it...just like Brendan Fraser's career (BOOM!).
As written, “Thus finishing his grand survey/The swain disgusted slunk away/Repeating in his amorous fits/ “Oh Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” (lines 115-118). The appropriate reader response: no shit, you idiot. Strephon, for pulling back the curtain, examining and detailing everything he sees, is the more vulgar of the romantic couple. He is the one that has spoken about the unspeakable—made unspeakable only by common knowledge. Few secrets are kept by any two people and so any secret kept individually by half of the world’s population (ex. women poop) would be less likely than everybody standing on one another’s shoulders until we reached the moon.
"Houston, forget about the Space Shuttle program, I've got an idea!"
Ultimately then, the poem is satirizing the tenets of traditional courtship—tenets broken by every generation of young people immediately after the origins of any societal guideline. That there are normal relationships or normal people is the allusion romantic comedies feed and feed for the sake of fabricating conflict in their story. Celia is weird for presenting herself unnaturally and engaged in such faux-privacy. And Strephon is weird for be disgusted by the effort he puts on Celia to be unnatural, not to mention the disrespect for her faux-privacy. And both of them are weird for thinking they are weirder than anybody else.
Everybody is weird but every so often, two people have compatible weirdness and, well, that's just what we call "love." Or so I was told by a friend who once claimed to be in love. But this allusion of normalcy is as necessary as the allusion of privacy. As then as now, all we have to do is not talk about it and both will be true.
So thanks a lot, Swift, you ruined society.
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