breasts will be breasts …

… thighs will be thighs (classical reference): How Women See How Male Authors See Them | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, dave Lull.)

[. . .] In “Rabbit, Run,” John Updike makes a gallant attempt to salvage a shimmer of desirability from the pregnant frame of Harry Angstrom’s wife. “Standing there trying to get the waist of the skirt suit to link at her side, the tops of her breasts, swollen with untaken milk, pushing above her bra, she does have a plumpness, a fullness that call to him,” Updike concedes, generously. (And, when a woman’s perceived unattractiveness cannot be transmuted into attractiveness, it is typically met with bafflement and suppressed irritation.)

Lavin’s thread distilled the ridiculousness that ensues when bookish men perform interest in women’s inner lives out of a misbegotten sense of nobility. No one is fooled. No one thinks that Jonathan Franzen has tapped into some deep well of humanist perception when his twentysomething creation declares herself “the little squirrel that loves to fuck.” John Updike, you do not actually empathize with expectant mothers! The compressed brilliance of Lydia Kiesling’s phrase “the quick compensatory mind” contains seventy years of bowing to male sexual appetite as the de-facto measure of all things.