The Set of the Shoulders

Do you strut, or do you slink? Do you smirk, or slump? Do you occupy the sidewalk, or hide in the trees?

How you present yourself in public - how you carry yourself: this, to me, is a fascinating question, capable of telling you a lot about yourself just as easily leading you into making terribly wrong assumptions about others. In this area, my primary pondering has been about men (since I'm pathologically homosexual, you know); but there's a definite corollary between the way some man hold themselves and the female gait and self-representation - and I'm not specifically talking about effeminacy here.

(That WeHo pose. Although I must confess I actually took this photo in San Francisco recently.)

Living and working in Hollywood, and its western sister (otherwise known as "WeHo"), I'm accustomed to count to possibly the highest possible average score (outside of Brazil) on the hotmeter when rating the men I see around me. Spend a half afternoon at WeHo Starbucks Central, and you'll see up to 50 model-quality young (mostly gay) men stream in or past. The thing is, though: a large percentage of them are not only streaming, they're also strutting or smirking (with a tiny minority merely steaming.) And it's a real turn-off.

In my (admittedly tiny) research of Cosmopolitan Magazine surveys, women seem to like their men self-confident and even borderline cocky. (However, it's possible that only the women who read Cosmo feel this way.) Is it only me, though, or is cockiness mostly obnoxious, self-involved, and, ultimately, a harbinger of insecurity? If a man is truly confident in who he is, then why would he have the need to demonstrate it by his posture, affect, and stance? If a man is very goodlooking, then surely his nobler response is to be grateful, rather than to exist to be looked at?

I may be being unfair, but this is what I see: very goodlooking young men carrying themselves in such a way that projects "I'm constantly aware of how goodlooking I am and I just know that everybody is staring at me." It can get even worse: I know several such men by site, from the gym and elsewhere, that are never seen without a self-satisfied smirk. And I kid you not: there are even a few who actually, physically walk along with their nose in the air. It's absolutely true.

Apart from this being not sexy, it makes me wonder many things. I've often been tempted to plan a blog based on interviewing men that I see behaving this way. The thing is, I'm not quite sure how to couch the questions in such a way that they'll get honest responses, and won't cause offense. "Are you constantly aware of how goodlooking you are?" "Are you really as self-confident as you look?" "Gosh, what's it like being you?"

Amongst all men, I believe, there's something else going on which makes it almost impossible to walk past another man, along on the street, without feeling some sort of discomfort, and finding it almost impossible to know what to do with your eyes. I know it's not just me. I've recently begun to steel myself into not doing this. But it's difficult. It seems a little rude and invasive to make eye contact with everybody, and you run the risk - at my age at least - of being thought of as a pervert, at least in WeHo.

I do believe that there are people who measure low on the consciousness scale and don't worry about these sort of things, because there's precious little introspection going on in there. Perhaps they're lucky souls.

Inevitably, I'm going to bring this back to myself. As a preface, let me say I'm just finishing David Deutsch's impressive recent book, The Beginning of Infinity,  about the nature, meaning and purpose of knowledge, and I've found it heavily influencing my thought processes. One thing that took easy root was his condemnation of taboo, and his explanation for this attitude, through incredibly lucid prose based on innovative thinking. Here's the sequence of ideas, greatly simplified:

• Knowledge cannot help but be infinite, since humans are inherently creative. Knowledge growth is therefore limitless, bound only by the laws of physics.
• This will lead to an ever more perfect society (that will never be perfect, obviously.) You can see this in the inevitable stretching of what a full human being is. Gays are beginning to be included; in the future (or so I believe), those with serious mental illness will be drawn in too.
• Knowledge advances in the same way as science: an explanation for something is posed, and that explanation is exposed to critique; eventually one explanation wins out (e.g. gay relationships are every bit as valid as straight ones.)
• There are obstacles to knowledge growth, however, and these include taboos. A taboo is effectively a constraint upon what is exposed to critical thinking. This is most obvious in religion, where, for instance, some Fundamentalist Christians believe the earth is 6,000 years old not because this explanation has survived critique, but, instead, because they were told so by an inviolable source: the supposed word of God. This is exactly the same as a parent telling a child to do something because "I say so."

A bit of a diversion, granted, but it's all leading up to justifying what I'm about to say: there's a taboo about honestly appraising your virtues and physical attributes. This taboo is crouched in the form of a virtue: modesty. But it's nevertheless a limit on what can be discussed, and therefore explained. So I'm going to temporarily move past this taboo. (This is all a very long-winded way of saying "... leaving modesty aside ...")

I'm goodlooking. There is such a taboo about saying that. You may think that it instantly ranks me amongst those I was criticising earlier: good-looking gay guys in WeHo with their nose in the air. Now, I don't normally see this "goodlookingness" with my own eyes. I look in the mirror and I see the blue rings under my eyes, the deep clefts beside my mouth; a somber face, an incipient double-chin. But I've been told it so frequently, and continue to be told, and have had so much independent evidence that didn't require speech, that I've accepted it, grudgingly. I am, or was at least, even striking. I'm 6'6, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, muscular with full head of non-greying hair. People notice me as I walk into a room.

So how do I carry myself, and why? I wouldn't be able to add this bit of knowledge to this essay if I hadn't just broken the taboo. I think that I carry myself with modesty, mostly a lack of sense that people are finding me attractive, and I think that I fall into projecting so effectively the exact opposite of feeling full of yourself, that it works against me. I see this in clubs. When I'm feeling great; self-confident, uninhibited, and full of bonhomie, I get a lot of attention, even now, three years short of being 50. It continues to baffle me, but there it is. Yet I can be wearing exactly the same clothing, and feel invisible. It's all about what I'm projecting. You see, I'm SO concerned with not assuming I'm goodlooking, and SO concerned with not appearing full-of-myself, that I go out of my way to make myself look diffident. And it doesn't serve. What I most enjoy about being in a public environment where people are having fun, is to have fun myself, and meet interesting and fun people. Moping around with my poker face will not encourage that to happen. So why do I do it?

I turn to David Deutsch again. I place constraints upon my behavior, and this inhibits the full flow of knowledge, creativity and life. And these constraints are voluntary, and are partly associated with my distaste at seeing those WeHo guys smirking their way along Santa Monica Boulevard. But more than anything, this comes from an unshakable self-doubt in my kernel of kernels. I'm still a 155 lb, lanky, skinny, gap-toothed, basin haircutted, shy teenager with huge feet, and ill-fitting clothes.

So this is what I'd really like to ask if I ever did my blog interviews with WeHo guys: don't you have any doubt?