Letters

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Tuesday
May 1, 2001

Cosmic loneliness

My crappy dictionary defines "womanizer" as "someone who pursues a free-wheeling relationship with women"; but we have no idea if Mr. Music Man is actually successful at "free-wheeling" with women or whether the women in these pictrues have allowed him to hop in bed with them.

What we know about Mr. Man is that he likes pencil sketches, long-haired, long-legged and smiling women, his male friends, Pamela Anderson, and white wine, has gone through a variety of facial hair growths, and has a sort of sentimental notion of what a romantic man is (roses, guitars, vintage Paul McCartney, Wham's "Careless Whispers"). He also has a few friends appear in a smattering of social settings with him.

The numerous women in those pictures can be his work colleagues, family friends, cousins, random women he met at bars and took photographs with... who knows? We always put those photos of ourselves on display that we think narrate our lives in a particular way. Just because Mr. Man is with a lot of women doesn't mean that he *is* a womanizer; it just means that he wants us to think he is.

Actually what I am more curious about is why our intrepid editor thinks that we will know him after viewing fifty-somthing photos of his surrounds. I don't know this man at all. I just assume the aforementioned characteristics, but I still wouldn't be able to tell you how many languages he speaks, what accent he has, whether he has a favorite poet / writer / politician / film / city, where his family lives, if he feels lonely some nights, if he cries during sentimental films, if he loves sunny days or rainy ones, if he loves women because they are sex objects or because they are interesting characters (believe me, even after hundreds of photos taken with women it was hard to judge this!), what his favorite food is, is he a belligerent drunk or a sweet and giggly one, does he like dancing, is his best friend a woman or a man, does he have a close relationship with his siblings, and on and on...

I don't know Mr. Man, I don't know how many beds he has hopped, I only know the narrative he chooses to tell by displaying a whole bunch of photos in his place. And yes, I know one other thing: either he doesn't know how closely the readers of The Iranian with scrutinize him, or he is damn brave for letting those pictures being taken and displayed on the web!

But the collection of photos reveals things not only about the subject of the photos, but about its audience: we clicked through all these photos, waited for the pictures' packets to flow down that cyberstream one by one, almost voyeouristically, peeping into his life, wanting to know more, wanting to be able to tell a complete story about this unknown man. And we can't. So, just to be pretentious, I will say that the fifty-odd photos only prove our cosmic loneliness. Good for a grad student in politics, eh?

Laleh Khalili

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