Pearls Before Swine

All the sacrifices we make for beauty, I thought this weekend as I was carefully repainting a chipped pedicure that had never seen the light of day, that men don't even notice. What ungrateful bastards!

Pedicures being a case in point. We do realize that a man, casting his gaze lingeringly downward along our body, usually doesn't make it quite all the way to the toes. Yet a perfect pedicure is vitally important. If our polish is chipped, our nails are uneven, or our skin is callused, we can't radiate the kind of confident sexiness that tells a guy we fancy, in no uncertain terms, that he needs to be ogling whatever part of us he happens to like better than toes. Pretty toenails help us stand up straight and tilt our hips and throw back our shoulders and smile, you see? You do notice a pedicure, realize it or not.

Date-shaved legs are another detail that usually goes unnoticed by the intended beneficiary. A little very, very, very short stubble doesn't show up under a skirt unless someone is examining terribly closely; and again, the legs, from the knee down, don't generally capture that kind of attention from any but the most, um, discriminating* guy. But if we have a big date, we're shaving immediately before - not that morning, and certainly not a day or two earlier. The razor is barely hung up to dry before we're out the door.

Exciting underthings are very important, whether or not you are ever granted the privilege of seeing them. If God forbid I should ever put on granny panties - and not even Bill Gates can induce me to do so - I wouldn't be able to look an attractive man in the eye. We do not wear cotton, and are confounded as to why there appears to be so much of it on the market these days. We wear little frilly things made of satin and lace, stockings instead of pantyhose, and we always match. Don't you?

Guys do notice, usually without being consciously aware of it, such details as makeup and hair. Makeup should be subtle, even though a lot of guys don't realize if it isn't. The transportational stalker guy who once went after my old cube neighbor told her - with no apparent sense of irony - that he didn't care for women who wore makeup because he considered it deceitful; one can only assume he honestly believed that nature had given her bright blue, sparkly eyelids. Granted, he was batshit insane. Hair should be full and long, if possible, and shouldn't look like you might put an eye out on it, so it's a mercy that the 80s have passed.

Look at us: goddesses, or geishas, beautifying ourselves to the most painstaking detail just to please you. And all you have to do in return, to win our admiration, adoration and respect, to command our undying devotion, to make us see you as Casanova and Don Juan and Rudolph Valentino and David Bowie all rolled into one worshipful object, is not fart.

So quit complaining.

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*Not to say fetishist