Whores,
& the Male Appetite
Written by Mae Liu
“We don’t want to think about the individual lives of the animals; it messes with our appetite. Men are shown to prefer faceless pornography; perhaps a drop of sweat or patch of hair triggers a humanisation that fouls their sexual appetite.”
“These thoughtless, one-dimensional caricatures of femininity were sold in literature, then film and popular media culture—and podcasts are just one more tumour to a male-gaze metastasis moving across mediums and generations.”
To string the sound bites of male podcasters alongside the lofty names of 18th & 19th century British writers seems unorthodox at best—yet when my friend gave a dramatic re-telling of Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” I found myself making the joke.
“‘Repeating in his amorous Fits—” she crowed dramatically— “‘Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia, shits!’”
“Things that’ll send Victorian men into comas,” I interjected, “finding out women have physiological processes. It’s giving alpha male podcaster, appalled that we’re not all sunshine and flowers.”
Still, the half-baked comparison is rooted in a gut feeling endured by women for generations—one of being gaslit about our own bodily functions, or the alienating dichotomy between male rhetoric on the female form and women’s own lived experience. So the voices of Myron Gaines, Brian Atlas, and Andrew Tate are just as timeless as they are grating—heralded by British writers from centuries earlier.
From the onset, Swift’s poem is rampant with the motif of disguise—namely, the contempt for and denunciation of a woman’s cosmetic routine as a way of hiding her natural, “uglier” form. The speaker introduces imagery cluttered with “Pomatums, Paints…[and] Ointments,” overpowered by visceral descriptions of tooth scrapings, scabs, dirt, sweat, earwax, and excrements from sexual disease—lending an oversaturated, odorous atmosphere to the scene (ll. 35-36). The hyperfixation on normal bodily functions—loaded with repugnant word choice, like “greasy Coifs, “Pinners reeking,” “Snuff and Snot,” or “Moisture of her Toes” —implies that the array of cosmetics aim primarily to conceal and deceive for male attention and profit (ll.50-54). This idea has emerged unscathed in contemporary society: see Brian Atlas calling makeup the “most accepted lie in today’s society,” or the slew of men who insist they prefer women who “don’t wear makeup” (i.e. appear flawless without seeming like we’re trying).
It’s a pervasive double standard—to appear desirable without appearing tainted, self-aware of our beauty, or otherwise autonomous—most evident in lines 99-114. Women are likened, through extended similes, to cuts of meat: “Mutton-Cutlets, prime of Meat,” which one can then “salt and beat.” First, the appalling motif of meat consumption is used to parallel the consumption of the female form (think “eye candy,” the pornography industry, and predatorial language in cis-heteronormative relationships). More interesting, however, is the hypocritical absurdity of the speaker being repulsed the moment the meat begins to produce an odour due to “The Fat” dropping “upon a Cinder,” turning to “stinking Smoke” and “Pois’ning the Flesh from whence it came.” I think of how we prefer not to think too much about where our animal-based products come from: my friends who “get the ick” when the egg is a little too runny, or when a chicken head or whole rabbits in Chinese supermarkets elicit dropped jaws. We don’t want to think about the individual lives of the animals; it messes with our appetite. Men are shown to prefer faceless pornography; perhaps a drop of sweat or patch of hair triggers a humanisation that fouls their sexual appetite. You can also appeal to the Madonna-Whore complex here, which denotes that men often see women as saints (objects of love but not desire) or prostitutes (objects of desire but never love). Caelia’s image in Strephon’s mind precisely depreciates from the former to the latter.
The reduction of women to categorical ideals is neither a scarce concept in this poem nor society today. The speaker first compares Caelia to Pandora—a figure often scapegoated for releasing sin and turmoil upon the world. Near the end, he attempts to resolve the poem through the mention of Venus— “Queen of Love” —who notably rose from the bloody seafoam of Uranus’ severed genitals. Though one figure is ostracised and the other is idolised, both are caricatures of female archetypes —and thus, Caelia’s true nature and character are never explored. Even as the speaker tries to justify her filthy living conditions, he does so by calling her “gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung,” flowers being yet another cliché, non-sentient symbol of the female form. This dismissive literary technique displays its legacy centuries later with femme fatales, girls-next-door, and other Campbellian archetypes perpetuated by generation after generation of male authorial voices. Women are temptresses or lovers, mothers or healers, plot devices and accessories, but seldom more complex than that.
Life imitates art—and in a similar vein, we see the compartmentalisation of aesthetics among our youth as girls strain to fit themselves into moodboards and prepackaged ideals. Some magazine leads, TikToks and Instagram carousels I’ve seen this summer alone: how to smell like a Roman goddess, glow-up tips to channel your dark feminine energy, how to dress like a rockstar’s girlfriend, lifestyle habits to look like a trophy wife… the doom scroll goes on. These thoughtless, one-dimensional caricatures of femininity were sold in literature, then film and popular media culture—and podcasts are just one more tumour to a male-gaze metastasis moving across mediums and generations.
Perhaps we should give Swift some grace—the “scatalogical” nature of his poem signals its satirical intentions, after all. Yet the intentions of the artist pale in comparison to the effect their work produces, and more importantly, the ideologies it can fuel. The hyperbolic descriptions of Caelia’s excrement, room, and body hardly paint these features in a flattering or sympathetic light, and most are left unconvinced by the ending’s lukewarm efforts to redeem the prostitute. Personally, the fervour behind his words are instead reminiscent of fetish and body horror—the glorification of taboo, and ultimately, the use of women’s bodies as a vessel for entertainment and voyeuristic pleasure.
At its core, Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” plays with the shattered expectations of a man after his experience with a prostitute — the cognitive dissonance of the male gaze as it reckons with a discordant female reality. Placed in its historical literary context — and the heated rebuttals from Swift’s contemporary female poets—it signals an enduring, irreconcilable chasm between men and women in romantic relationships, pointing to expectations set up for both sides that will inevitably be broken. In Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to write a Poem called ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room,’” she reimagines him as an impotent doctor in his unsuccessful pursuit of a prostitute. The poem, mirroring Swift’s in four-foot couplets, takes a moralistic turn starting line 31: using an ox who “thinks he’s for saddle fit,” a beau who “affects the politician,” and even the Pope’s ventures into philosophy to evoke the concept of people blindly chasing ideals out of desire/egoisms rather than competence and practicality.
All this to say: have men become better informed in their opinions on the female body since the 18th and 19th century? Or have the same ideologies simply latched onto new mediums, donning new disguises and more compelling voices? I’m more compelled to back the latter—and in a media landscape that likes to cling onto an illusory progressiveness, it seems all the more pertinent to continue questioning whose opinions on the female experience are amplified and allowed to take hold.