The Human Touch: Pretty Woman Grows Up

I recently wrote in passing about a romantic comedy from the very final days of the previous millennium, which reunited director Garry Marshall with his very successful old leads Julia Roberts and Richard Gere.

Even more recently, I was watching the original flagship movie, Pretty Woman, and a lot of things sprang to mind.

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Focusing mainly on Vivian’s point of view, the story of Pretty Woman morphs early on into a stylized, granted, PG, version of An American Pillow Book for the lady into the intricacies of the art of subtle, understated seduction of a man.

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Instead of bringing the hammer down about such notions as the story’s implicit go-ahead for buying people and treating others like merchandise, and the shallow presentation of values and what is considered the good life, I think interpreting Pretty Woman as a story of the transformative power of the human touch and finding sexual freedom at any age, and through it, individual freedom, a clearer sense of identity, and continuous happiness, is much more interesting.

Around the same time as I was watching the classic romantic comedy, I was discussing sex and sexuality with some friends of mine, people a lot younger than me, and after a lengthy chat, concluded the following:

If my reference group is to be believed, where love is concerned, the human race is not in any trouble. I repeat, cancel backup.

Sex, it’s a tricky subject. I guess where today’s kids are regarding it has been painted as the Black No. 1, as Type O Negative eloquently puts it, in the media, with constant news reports on, say, our national hockey teams, one after another, gaining dark reputation as bands of rapists and name-calling lowlifes, Onlyfans accounts exploding as a younger and younger demographic is being introduced and initiated into “erotica” via payperview and learning how to use Pornhub and other free online porn, politicians and members of the entertainment industry gaining notoriety in and out of the papers and courtrooms because they, incredibly, still assume higher social rank and money gives them power to render consent optional, and Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards, and general ownership of other people, especially towards those much younger than they, to act and say what they please, and it wasn’t a long ago since I read how the very advanced kink of asphyxiation during sex has become a wildly popular thing among the underaged, those guys who are just getting started in sex and I should argue are really not in the advanced state of knowing how to use the technique as a means to bring pleasure to another in a safe way at all, but instead are rallying to their friends during school rides how they are doing it and are now in the know. 

According to HBO’s Euphoria, everyone who reaches high school age needs to get on with it, (to catch a dick is what the lady says, specifically) and the sex lives of sixteen-seventeen-year-olds depicted in the series do not resemble what was considered the norm in my day in any shape or form. The article on sexual asphyxiation as the latest It thing among adolescents made a case of the hit series originating as the grandpappy of the new sex fashion, and it is true that there are a number of sexually very parental-guidance, one could argue R, things going on there, including a scene where a girl is being choked without consent during a couple’s first time together at a party.

What I discovered in my discussions on the topic of sex with my friends was that what is written about and what actually is differs a lot from each other, still, in a happy, happy way. Sure, everyone knows someone who does this or that. That is exactly the way it was when I was young, too. But regardless whether my sampling was the one percent who can handle things according to their age group or not, everyone had the same opinion on the subject. I found it utterly refreshing that it should be considered as outrageous that a punch of eleven-year-olds would consume smut by the plentiful online or physical volume and then proceed to parade their taste for it around town, or in this case, school yard; the whole idea of doing things of sexual nature just to be able to flex to peers seemed as idiotic to my friends as it does to me. Why so many consider doing stuff they are obviously too young to A) handle; B) understand fully, as a means to cool is frightening, and in the eyes of a forty-something, bordering on pathetic - but hardly original. Those who mature early were always the most popular, and the aforementioned being in the know is and has always been one of the key elements of the teenage experience.

What I found lovely while also astonishing was that everyone I talked to seemed to universally agree that the physical act of love is so far beneath the pure form of idealistic love it feels unnecessary to even discuss it, and everyone who feels otherwise is in the wrong. Plato would have adored these kids, as did I.

Secretly, though, I disagreed the hell out of with what they were saying, but I was so in awe of their notion of how one should love in a higher way for it to be real – thus exposing themselves as sex-neophytes, but even this made me appreciate their youthful, anti-Wertherian attitude even more – that I decided I will not be the one to spoil sex for them, or love, for that matter, with some random musings on the joys of physical love, and since almost everyone I know, myself included, has started having sex too young and before they were ready, I had no objection whatsoever on their handling of the topic. Life will come in hurricanes and tornadoes for each and everyone, and the later one can wait to begin with the extreme weather conditions, the better. One has their entire life to have the sex. Also, one is never too old to learn new things.

Thinking one needs to have it all down before getting out of high school is both what makes a teenager, and mind-numbingly stupid. It is so far from the truth that the only thing further from it that comes to mind is when, years ago, someone I used to know well tried to argue that a woman can never be a genius, that the entire concept of “being a genius” is inherently male – this during a discussion on Regina Spektor’s, well, genius, album Soviet Kitch, and to add insult to injury, the woman-decrowning conversationalist was herself a she/her female.

Remember how Edward orders champagne and strawberries to – one might argue quite unnecessarily, as she indeed does at one point - woo Vivian at the very beginning of Pretty Woman? Then Vivian drains her glass in one continuous scarfing, never touching the strawberries until Edward motions her towards the fruit, telling her they enhance the flavor and make it more interesting?

That is pretty much a freeze frame on how I have considered sex my whole life, and it wasn’t until a relatively short time ago when it was brought to my attention that my aversity to being touched, and my haste to get it over with so I can be alone again, has truly left something to be desired. Only I was never one to desire it, having guarded both my privacy and my sensuality my whole life less like a benevolent goddess, and more in the fashion of an enraged Medusa siccing her rabid seven-headed puppy on possible attackers.

I was never one to cuddle. I cringe when someone tries to stop me long enough to kiss me if I’m in the middle of, say, writing. I still cannot have another body touch mine when I am sleeping. I am a separate body, holy as such, do not come near me to contaminate me with your sex. Okay that is a bit dramatic, but basically the idea was not far off.

Watching Pretty Woman, though, a lot of what has been going on in the past few years began to simmer and mix with the talk I had had, very extemporaneously, with the kids, and a lot of what I had once considered irrelevant or coincidental, random or overwritten, began to come to a boil.

Deconstructing Vivian and Edward’s affair and their slow falling into love made me suddenly feel like missing Barthes and wanting to tell Derrida to shove it.

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Lust and carnal want vs. an idealized concept of smutfree love.

Onlyfans working as an anti-sensualist device against the love principle, or for it?

The bodily, tactile love as remarkable evidence of the feeling, a representation of emotion, sexual connection as a true love condition, and how many recognize this, if it is ever really recognized at all as it happens; or, was I the only late bloomer only getting it now? 

Living outside the sphere of touch, or even feeling it as reverberations from another body, and how it can seclude one into a universe of nothingness – seemingly by choice, but is it really, if the kind of touch one needs comes along once every hundred years and one should consider herself damn lucky should that touch occur in her lifetime?

Conscious touch, to show love with senses other than what is expected – love language and how the Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton would describe it.

Becoming one’s own universe within love, discovering Thoreau’s Walden at the heart of it. Being a transcendentalist, this thought made me especially happy and combined in a fun way New England’s School of Civil Disobedience with tantric notions of inner pools of delight and calm and sensualist pleasure during a yoni massage.

Plato admitted that he didn’t really assume everything on Earth had its undiluted idea, for instance dirt, since dirt wasn’t a noble concept, whereas beauty, justice, and, yes, love, most definitely had one. And if one was never able to come close to seeing love for what it really is, did this mean one saw it more like one saw dirt, and was it really necessary to ponder upon it so much? Living inside the cave one’s whole life this would seem like such a rude awakening, though. Furthermore, isn’t it realistically so that for consenting adults, the down-and-dirty expression of love is the most potent and all-encompassing way, at least if one is not asexual or averse to sexual conduct by nature? Is learning how to see the grit of it as as powerful an affirmation of love as any so-called higher, or less pronounced and coherent, declaration, actually maturing into the practicality of loving someone in a way that is the most urgent, hell-bent and in the end, the most sacred, way?

If my own changed circumstance had made me see true connectedness in touch the way I hadn’t before, how was that to be translated into words about it, and how much did it matter that I would never be able to communicate to others, or even to the person touching me right down to my for want of a better word soul, what that touch made me feel, and how it had changed me?

Was I seeing for myself the trumping of the indescribable for the first time ever, as opposed to always being able to transcribe any experience into words, an inclination that has defined my entire existence up until now?

And if I lost the touch, was it true that I would degenerate back into my old self, gradually, without really noticing it, but slowly losing sight of my improved, softened self and the release and comfort the touch had brought me, and begin running backwards, yearning for self-reliance and emotionless, hollowed out existence, where no one could harm me since they could not touch me? Were they handing out prizes for tough guys, or those who gave up tough for vulnerability?

Vivian and Edward kiss for the first time on their last night together, and that is the only time the viewer is shown a bit of their lovemaking.

Theirs is a storybook kind of love, and why should anybody react badly to Vivian at the end of the movie accepting the fairytale ending she herself had projected for Edward to see, her john for the week who is an emotionally clumsy and withdrawn person struggling to negotiate the kind of man he is and who he wants to become, seeing himself in a different light because of her, wanting to be a better man because knowing her, touching her, has changed him? 

Vivian is the most powerful person in the film, worshipped for her beauty and good-naturedness and command of space by men and women alike, working her surroundings in honesty, pureness of the heart, extemporaneous joy and vibrant taking charge, and this may be enhanced by her physical loveliness, but it is really to a truthfulness and transparency of the human condition present in her to what people around her respond.

Her story unfolds as she is shown coming into her own during the week with Edward, and it is her story, not Edward’s – he may walk into the store hand in hand with Vivian for the first time to ensure she gets the kind of treatment she deserves and throws money around to make his message clear; but it doesn’t really matter where the chance comes from, one can either take it, or let pride snatch the chance away. Though, getting her modest payback to the ladies who were mean to her, the gatekeepers of high society of the still-blossoming Reagan-era consumeristic highlife, the retail employees who consider the offbeat and anarchistic Vivian as beneath them,  is marked by the same behavioralist means she was outcast in the first place: by withholding recognition of power inherent within money she takes away all their power. And yet, in a necessary conclusion without which the whole story would fall flat and Vivian would lose all her credibility, in the end, she shows her true anti-capitalist colors by refusing Edward’s offer to make her his high-paid courtesan with a condo and spending money. 

(An interesting viewpoint: would a postmodern, sexually avant-garde, or, at this point, sexually post-apocalyptic someone, fresh off the killing fields of the gender wars of the 2020’s, the prodigal son or daughter of Samantha Jones, the evangelist of the legacy of Grace and Frankie, a radical reinterpreter of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, or Jules, the Euphoria character of Hunter Schafer, arguably the most ravishing woman in the world right now second to none, except perhaps Zendaya herself, scold Vivian for passing on this very practical offer without even thinking about it? I am at least half of those people I just reduced to cultural stereotypes, and even I sometimes think half the world’s marriages are in fact that exact arrangement. I am such a believer in the power of love and all the restoration that comes with it it's ridiculous, but still, I think it would be beyond arrogant not to see the outrageous offer for a second from Edward’s side. He is a money guy. Up until this moment money is the ultimate thing in his life that defines him. He doesn’t know how else to say how he feels. He doesn’t want to lose Vivian. He thinks of the situation the way he has tackled every other thing in life, and looking at losing someone, the suggestions may sometimes be horribly short-sighted and desperate. Be my professional girlfriend, someone might say in the modern version of the suggestion.)

For the hard-ass feminist/anthropologist deconstructive analyst, the themes and attitudes and underlying framework of Pretty Woman would have been considered obsolete and embarrassing years ago already: the white ruling class opposed to bellhops and most servers and even the hotel manager as non-white, the obvious and still obnoxious superficial structuralist narrative of men being the ones who make or break Vivian – and her roommate Kit, who has her own problems with her drug dealer Carlo. One doesn’t need to look very closely to find a ton of what is wrong with this picture.

And yet, the ladies turn their tricks pimp-free, they say who, they say when, they say how much, and this self-reliance and street attitude shows up most prominently when Stuckey, Edward’s sleazebag lawyer, tries to take his turn at Vivian, treating her like a commodity and trash, and Vivian fighting back with all her might – had Edward not come along in the nick of time, who knows which one would have been the losing party – my Monopoly money for the winner is on Long Tall Vivian: she could easily take the short and soft upper-class batter-boy in the end; spunk is as spunk does.

Vivian’s seeming acquiescence to Edward can also be construed as grace under pressure, because she never shows any fear or regret for taking him up on his proposition, she throws herself in her live roleplay as a society lady, and finds an ally in Hector Elizondo’s kind hotel manager. She dives into any task Edward throws at her head on, and she shows him one can be tough and resourceful and unyielding without losing their tender soul.

So, is it still necessary to tear Pretty Woman apart because of its archaic gender roles and structural racism and even more blatant sexism, its assurance and reliance on the idea that money and having a standing in the community – in this case, the hotel, where most of the story takes place, where it is clearly verboten to bring along unannounced guests, but since Mr. Lewis is such a special, read: wealthy, customer, they are willing to overlook the indiscretion, thus confirming the secret-handshake-all-boys-club menace that is luckily starting to feel so obsolete it rings a bell of a completely different era – are what everyone secretly wants, the epitome of having one’s ship come in, and the premise around which the majority of the movie revolves?

More thoughts as the end credits roll:

To fall in love in the repetition of making love:

The second time they have sex is in the emptied bar room on top of the grand piano, and it is the most sexual scene of the movie. While Vivian is not too impressed with how everyone leaves when Edward asks them to so they can be alone, and the feminist viewer would tear Garry Marshall a new one for making all the men in commandory or authoritative places of power and all the women either lower class workers or, the lowest ladder possible, in the sex racket, I found Vivian in charge of the whole scene: she comes downstairs in nothing but a bathrobe over her flimsy teddy, her hair in a seductive mess, looking for Edward. She, not him, is the instigator, the source of power, the mover and shaker; the wild card of the entire scene.

During it I had an epiphany of having never realized as a young woman how strong the power of the touch can be, if the touch is not pressed upon one but suggested in the lightest of ways, waiting to be welcomed and then given with love, how very beyond the physical the physical touch can reach, how touching one’s soul becomes meaningful instead of mere word salad, and how deprivation of touch can drive us, simply, mad.

How one can easily forget the enormity of touch, and reduce into thinking it will never happen like that to me, I will need to remain without and orbit just outside of necessary or otherwise touching, and when I go on without touch for a while, the connection becomes frail and almost breaks, and I begin finding it ludicrous anyone would need someone to touch them. We work, it is hard, we stand alone, we die, and that is all. The universe of defenses and sublimations layers once again around me, including all of my favorite things, writing and cinema, my favorite foods and alcohol and pink rose soda and licorice, the thickly woven landscape of my stories that recreate my entire being as a narrator inside my wilder mind, books and music and art, the army of thinkers whom I like to think about, and my shoes and dresses and jewelry and pencils and stationary, favorite plants and animals and flowers and trees and furniture and objects. I mean an endtable, or a vintage set of pearls, will never hurt me or leave me; our bond may be one-sided but it is guaranteed forever, and if I need somebody to touch me, it will be me myself. 

Undoing this is a repeat effort and will never be completely done: we may need shelter, sleep, food, comfort, sex, but isn’t this already obsolete in how we can take care of ourselves and run our sex lives scheduled and domesticated and without really touching each other at all? My entire life, I never really understood what the hassle was. 

Until I did. 

I will remain silent and listen to my friends proclaim sex as unnecessary form of what remotely calls itself love and nod, because everyone needs to experience the change for themselves and not have someone else tell them how it will change how they see colors when it becomes as good as it can be – it would be doing them a disservice, and I know now one can keep on explaining what is so damn fine about touching another person, but until that person one needs to be touched by comes along, there is no real power in words for another person who is only just learning how to use that language.

For me, it has taken most of my life to try and learn things and unlearn others, but it has finally come to make sense to me.

Now that I understand it, I’d like to think I will never again be too peeved about the obvious things that are problematic with Pretty Woman; it also shows in a very delicate and beautiful way how change can occur through touch, if one lets it.

Okay you got me, I will reserve some peeve for when Vivian with her yellow headset on sings along the same verse from Prince’s Kiss twice while taking a bath, and when she and Edward argue midway into the film and he acts so superior one feels like jamming his head right into the toilet, Richard Gere’s distinguished grey head of hair be damned, and when Jason Alexander says the word hooker every time in such a way one wants to shove him down the stairs, and when Hank Azaria as the homicide detective has about ten seconds of screen time, and when Vivian thinks the blond wig is the way to go, and the quite unnecessary shaming of sex workers in general throughout the film, and when I can’t seem to find the brown polkadot dress she wears to the polo match anywhere no matter how hard I look in my closet.

That is all I swear.