mimetic desire

I posted previously about the possibilities of disarticulating the production of "femininity" (conceived of as performative) from its ostensible raison d'etre, the male gaze.  Naomi Wolff, in "The Beauty Myth," broached one possibility of such a disconnect between femininity and the male gaze, when she argues that women's magazines say that such-and-such is the "look" that men are going for, when the truth of the matter (says Wolff) is that it is the advertisers who want to sell their products who are promoting that particular "look."

In "Clueless," the idea of a disconnect between what advertisers promote and what "the guys" are looking for, is broached when Tai says that Josh reports that guys prefer college girls to girls in high school because the former wear less make-up.

In "Hamlet," there is much misogynistic talk about women and their make-up, constructing a false face to hide the one that nature gave them.

What exactly is the heterosexual male *stake* in the production of femininity-with-all-the-trimmings, if it is so often talked about (in male circles) in a rhetoric that deplores it, a rhetoric of dishonesty, duplicity, and declension from the "natural"?

Well, you know the idea from Rene Girard (or is it Sedgwick) about the triangular structure of male heterosexual desire, wherein male desire is mimetic: a man desiring a woman is in fact looking out of the corner of his eye at another man who is desiring that same woman: the focus is not on the woman so much as it is on the male rivalry, which is so intense as to libidinally overshadow any professed interest in the woman, who is indeed just a pretext or pawn in the male homosocial game.

It seems that the production of femininity-with-all-the-trimmings, insofar as it does desire to reach a male target audience (and isn't all about aesthetic/tactile/self-expressive play), alludes to or activates such an intensely homosocial context, in which the important thing is not that "I" [hypothetical male] have found a companion or lover, but that the other guys *see* that I have annexed a woman--I make sure that they see me walking around with a woman on my arm, whose femininity should be coded *loudly* so that they don't miss her.