Glamour

In the USA it is spelled "glamor" 12 % of the time. In England, they spell it "glamour" 97% of the time. My daughter uses the word "jazzy" which means "bright, colorful, showy." Dictionaries define glamor as pleasing, attractive, appealing, alluring, often entailing good looks and charm. That misses the mark.

The many synonyms for "beauty" all have distinct connotations: cute, pretty, lovely, elegant, glamorous, gorgeous and so many more.

Beauty is the most generic term and is normally defined in our subjectivist culture as pleasing to the observer. But a realistic philosophy will see it as objective, even as received by the subject: it is a perfection of the form, the thing or being, a radiance and harmony from an interior, mysterious integrity. So, in boundless analogy, we know the beauty of a poem, woman, rose, symphony, mathematical equation, or baseball double play. They are beautiful in entirely different ways but all are perfect expressions of their kind, in a distinctive, indeed miraculous radiance, harmony and integrity. It is this objective reality that pleases the observer.

Cute is beauty as petite, precious, endearing, fragile, vulnerable, non-intimidating. It evokes delight as tender, protective and nurturing.

Pretty implies beautiful and therefore pleasing in a moderate degree, without intensity, depth or exaggeration. It resembles "cute" in its modesty, temperance, and lack of pretense. We speak of a pretty girl and a cute child.

Lovely is "beauty" but with more emphasis upon the interior, spiritual aspects. A "lovely" woman is beautiful especially in dimensions of modesty, simplicity, generosity, dignity, graciousness. 

Elegance is very similar to "lovely" in the sense of quality, style, dignity. It suggests again simplicity and modesty with a sense of  culture and artistic worth; again free from ostentation and pretense. It can be defined as "artful enhancement of beauty."

Gorgeous is an intensification of the subjective delight, similar to words like "spectacular," "striking, "splendid" or "marvelous;" but not indicative of any specific objective reality.

Glory or Splendor is beauty as absolute, infinite, transcendent, supernatural. It describes God. Yet the Divine Absolute Beauty is manifest in created loveliness at its highest.  

Glamour I will define as:  artificial exaggeration of feminine attractiveness.

Glamour can be contrasted with elegance.  The first is artificial, the second artful; the first an exaggeration, the second an enhancement; the first is overstated, the second is understated; the first ostentatious and pretentious, the second modest and simple.

Is glamour bad, of its nature? In baptism, we renounce the "glamor of evil." So is glamor itself evil? Not necessarily. At its best, it is a form of play: ironic, purposefully overstated, tongue-in-cheek. For example, little girls play at being glamorous using their mother's makeup, high heels and so forth. It is innocent and harmless. Something similar happens when adult women go glamourous, on an occasional and celebrative event:  prom, weddings, and girls night. They intentionally accentuate their feminine attractiveness, in a protected and wholesome setting, with bright red lipstick, heavy makeup, striking hair styling, tight-colorful-revealing dresses and so forth. This is fun, celebration and play...in itself wholesome and good.

Can men be glamorous? No, glamour is inherently feminine. If a red-blooded male is looking at the magazine Glamour, he is not seeing the styles but the female models. Glamour involves an essential element of vanity, of awareness of one's own beauty. A modest degree of vanity is proper for the woman but contradictory of virility. True, men dress up for the Kentucky derby in a play/ceremonial manner with color, hats, bowties and such. It is playful, costume-like,  lighthearted. Note that in weddings men traditionally all wear the same thing: tuxedo or suit. There is a monotony here. The male identity and vocation is to direct his strength, gently, for the protection, provision and affirmation of women, children and all that is good-true-beautiful in the community. So narcissistic self-regard is unmanly. We see this in traditional expressions like fop, dandy, glamour boy. With the deconstruction of gender and amnesia about the form of masculinity, we have new terms which redefine such anti-masculinity as a mere question of taste. So, we have had the metrosexual, the urban, sophisticated hetero-male concerned with style, fashion, and appearance. More recently we have the spornosexual who combines "sport" with "porn" in a narcissistic obsession with his own body as muscled, sculpted and tanned: "Do you lift, Bro?" 

Drag Queen is, of course, the epitome of male glamour. Here we have a male costumed in a caricature of feminine glamour in cartoonish exaggeration. Previously, in traditional gender-normal society, the sight of a man dressed and acting like a woman was entirely ridiculous and therefore hilarious: Some Like it Hot, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire. Here again we have comedy, play, irony, dissonance. The drag queen phenomenon is not so light and comical: it is more serious and therefore tragic, toxic and disordered. The real drag queen is renouncing his own virility and doing so by a contemptuous display of faux-femininity. It is an insult to the man and the woman .It is neither fun nor innocent. It is inappropriate for library story hour.

Feminine Vocation involves beauty, inherently. In her own person, appearance, style, demeanor the woman manifests beauty as comforting, encouraging, inspiring, iconic, nurturing, healing, delightful and sanctifying. Beyond her person she attends to the immediate environment: home, garden, grooming and dressing of the family especially the young, elderly, and the males. She is endowed, by nature and culture, with a sensitivity, an intuition, a spontaneous taste for what is good, true, beautiful, proper, delicate, and vulnerable. It is entirely coherent with this vocation and identity for the woman to be aware of her own appearance, to groom herself properly, as she does the same for those around her and her world. 

One of my daughters spent a good portion of her 13th summer monitoring, before our full-length mirror, the development of her physique. I found it to be delightful and wholesome as she was developing into a beautiful woman and properly aware of it. Were my son to do the same in spornosexual fashion, I would have disapproved. Yes...there is a double standard here. 

Another daughter, beautiful in a statuesque, athletic fashion came home late from a softball game with 12 minutes to prepare for the prom. She did her shower, hair, makeup, jewelry, and dress within 12 minutes. She was stunning; but not glamorous. 

My 99-year old mother still went to daily mass and groomed herself elegantly: dress, makeup, hair and so forth. A good touch of glamour. Not overdone. Age did not diminish her sense for beauty.

Women Dress for Women.  As a male, I assumed for many years that women dress to be attractive to men. As a son, husband, brother to six sisters and father to five daughters, I finally got it: women dress for women. They are not thinking about men. For girls night out, they all dress up; get silly; drink and eat freely; dance; joke and laugh. It is true: girls just want to have fun! It can be wholesome, innocent, playful, mutually delightful. But it can be competitive and demeaning. Women compare themselves to each other; they rate themselves against each other. In this they can inflate themselves in vanity but much more frequently (I observe) demean themselves as inferior.

Trophy Wife. Here, as in many things, exhibit A is former President Donald Trump. If men are not really glamorous, their machismo, celebrity and status can be enhanced by the trophy or glamorous wife. Melania is the most glamorous woman I can think of off the top of my head. She is naturally gorgeous with more than a touch of elegance and taste. In contrast to other former presidents (Clinton, Kennedy) her glamor-beauty seems not to arouse desire, much less affection, reverence or gratitude in her mate. Rather, she seems to function for him (like the horses in the patriarchy of Barbie's  Ken) as a "male enhancer," to increase his prestige as a powerful, admired man.

Glamour as Distance, Illusion, Frustration. My argument here is largely, but not entirely, anti-glamour because of how I experience feminine glamour. For most of my adult life, I experienced a normal degree of masculine insecurity, but more than average attraction to women. And so I encountered the glamourous woman as fascinating, attractive, alluring, but also as unavailable, distant, goddess-like and therefore frustrating and saddening. For those like myself, the glamor girl (as with romantic and erotic longing in general) seems to be a painful rehearsal of the oedipal loss: the desired, the pleasurable is denied, is distant and out of touch, is unavailable. This is saddening, discouraging, and dark. I am not suggesting that the glamor girl intends this (although that is a possibility), but that is simply the common experience of some of us men. It contrasts with the engagement with woman as close, sisterly, friend, partner, comforter, healer, nurturer. It contrasts, negatively,  with masculine experience of the feminine as filial, spousal, sororal, maternal, convivial, companionable. 

Glamour Magazine embodies the ideal of progressive femininity in the post-cultural-revolution utopia: beautiful, glamorous, affluent, bourgeois, educated, anti-patriarchal, independent of men, liberal, accomplished, sexually-romantically unrestrained by traditions and faith, contraception-addicted, divorce-and- abortion-friendly. It is woman as NOT innocent, childlike, spousal, maternal, Marian, religious, poor-chaste-obedient, sacrificial, modest, humble.

Barbie the doll is a glamorous toy for girls. As such it is arguably innocent and childlike. Barbie the movie is a brilliant, hilarious, ironic spoof of the doll, feminism, glamour, and the weakening of masculinity into timidity and toxic, macho patriarchy. It is humor and irony at its best. It is itself...writing, jokes, acting, music, color, playful glamor...a thing of beauty!

Illusion and fantasy is a dimension of glamor. It intends a surreal, quasi godlike grandeur that is fascinating, mesmerizing, and intoxicating. It is used, therefore, by evil to seduce and deceive. But in the correct context it is not necessarily evil. 

Taylor Swift is "girl-power-glamor." She is a new kind of diva. "Diva" (from the Italian for goddess) describes the stereotypical opera star: dramatic, gorgeous, exaggerated, fascinating, larger than life. Taylor is clearly not a pin-up; not a fantasy of male lust. She has about her an aura of girlish energy, innocence and wholesomeness. She operates, as in the Barbie movie, in a girl-only world. Tons of girls, all in pink, (including my unabashedly "swifty" granddaughters) happily, vicariously participating in the joyous, uninhibited spontaneity of being a girl.

This brings to mind the father-daughter dances I would attend when my daughters were in high school. The girls were all dressed to the nines:  gorgeous! The only men there: us fathers. It was a moderately boring night; we would sit at the tables and talk. But the girls were running around the place in small groups, dancing together, singing, laughing. Entirely oblivious of the fathers and of men in general. Girls really do want to have fun!

To Conclude:  Glamor is the artful, artificial enhancement and exaggeration of feminine beauty. It is in part fantasy, illusion, fascination. It can be used to seduce and deceive for evil intents. However as play, irony, comedy, art, celebration it can be delightful and wholesome. At its best and in the right order it can be a glimmer, however distant and faint, of the Glory of Heaven.