When I was a little girl, I became infatuated with Grace Kelly, especially in the three films she made with Alfred Hitchcock. I was enchanted by her beauty, yes, and her silvery voice, but also the way that you could always tell she was performing: her enunciation, her gestures, the tilt of her head, the way she would clench her jaw (I tried clenching my own jaw in the mirror, but I just looked angry). She was not a “natural” or “realistic” actress, but an intentional and elegant performer. Within each role, she played a particular feminine ideal that was transparently acted—no one walks like that, no one talks like that, swans her neck like that without a camera—and yet, the performance seemed to be her. Before I had the vocabulary to articulate this, I believed that she had collapsed her performance with her real self. The message I understood at ten years old, wide-eyed and buck-toothed, was that it you could become that woman, if you pulled off the performance.
I watched Rear Window about a dozen times between the ages of ten and thirteen. All of it seeped deep into my consciousness because Grace Kelly did. I’m from Kentucky, and Grace Kelly’s “ladylike” performances seemed to be in sync with the way many girls in the American South are brought up in the culture and communities that surround them—myself included. We were meant to be charming and determined, gracious and decorative, to smile for everyone. Strangeness should come in the form of a “mischievous streak”—a highlight, if you will. We were meant to cultivate lovability within ourselves.
I was nearing the end of my Grace Kelly phase when I understood that I was never going to be one these ideal girls. I was too passionate, too prickly, too worried, too bookish, too ill at ease around those girls themselves, the ones who had either succeeded in collapsing the “ideal feminine” and their natural selves, or the ones for whom there was never any division.
I remember running into one of them at the mall when I was fourteen. She was a cheerleader and beauty pageant queen who lived in a huge white house, and all the cars in the driveway were white too. “Why are you so weird?” she asked me in complete earnestness, as though I might have had an answer.
“I don’t know,” I said.
If some boys where I grew up were “smart,” girls were more often “bright”—like Grace Kelly, who seemed lit gold from within. Her poise—that word was a high compliment from adults—was intoxicating. And yet it was Grace Kelly’s radical confidence that most excited me, as uncertain and insufficient and wrong as I felt most of the time. That kind of confidence in a girl? That was not allowed. But at thirteen, the worst age for many girls, I wanted to breathe it in like magic dust. I was charmed.
***
Where do girls learn about charm? Maybe from our mothers and aunts and their friends, but more profoundly, I think, from screens: movies and TV tell us it is possible to sparkle as if you were made of colored glass. To be charmed by someone is to like her, even if you don’t really know her; to charm is to make people like you before they know you. Of course I connect my ideas about this particular charm to actors and actresses: stars are mirrors of our own desires, and they exist on screen to please us.
Where I grew up, to be charming meant to give pleasure without (showing that you were) trying. Then and now, to be charming means to navigate the adult world with ease, because the goal of charm is to glide past gatekeepers. As a child, these were my teachers, my parents’ friends, the adults who ran everything. As an adult, these gatekeepers are authorities, real or perceived: my bosses, sure, but also anyone in a position to judge me, including my students. Then and now, I sought rewards for poise and grace, even as I rejoiced in my secret gracelessness, obnoxiousness, in the absence of these judges.
I tell myself that the use of charm is a skill, not a crutch: I am charming in the classroom so that my students will be more open to ideas they have not heard before; I try to be charming in my workplace because to be well-liked is to be employed; I am charming with strangers because it’s tiring not to be. That’s how you know you were raised in a “charming” family.
When I began talking with my friends about charm, I was surprised by how many hadn’t felt beholden to it: the women in their lives had dismissed the idea of charm, either explicitly or by example, as artificial, backward, manipulative. I am jealous of them.
“Charm is about other people’s pleasure,” my friend Rachel said. “I was lucky to escape its pressures.” Instead she worshipped her Aunt Roxanne, a Washington Post style reporter who wore only black and silver and made lasagna with her hands.
But my friend Abi was, like me, raised with/among/to charm. She lives in France now, where she is often called une fille charmante as “a kind of nod of approval, given that charm in this country feels like prerequisite to being a woman.” Abi said:
What once seemed like a prize–being charming which meant being acceptable which meant maybe not being lonely–now seems like signing a contract into behaving a certain way, into continuing to fulfill or appease expectations. I don’t say thank you anymore when someone tells me I speak French well, I raise my eyebrows and say ‘yes, so do you.’ But sometimes all of that is tiring too, because charm is this soft and smooth weapon that says ‘I come in peace.’ And when you’re trying to stake out your ground, whether that’s in a foreign land or in the general patriarchy … sometimes it feels like any weapon will do, even the ones that cut you a little bit, too.
My own relationship with charm is equally fraught. In any new situation—a new job, a new town, a new group of people—I default to charm, even when I want to “just be myself.” As soon as either I am secure or I have the sense that this charm is expected or required, I want to rid myself of it. I become Cartman on Maury: “Whatever, I do what I want.” To reject charm is to reject self-control, but only after you have achieved it.
With those I am close to, I am charmless. Charm won’t survive intimacy, or intimacy can’t survive charm. On the occasions that I am out with a friend and we encounter someone new to just one of us, either I or she will have the opportunity to watch the other be charming as she introduces herself. If I am the observer, I see my friend almost as a stranger; I am going to back in time to meeting her myself, before intimacy.
I spent much of the last five years writing a novel about a girl whose charm is a weapon. I know I was trying to negotiate my own ideas about charm, from Grace Kelly to the archetypal femme fatale, and my anti-heroine is a charming criminal who is never the least bit charmed by herself. Unsurprisingly, she is not all that “likeable.” That was the point. And yet, now that the novel is published, I find myself careening wildly between modes: the rebellion of defiant charmlessness—writing essays like this; refusing to smile in my picture—and the desire to be liked, which I can only achieve by reassuring people that I am not my character. Writing fiction, for me, is a private disobedience, and to make those parts of my brain public is confusing. The part of me that wrote the book wants to destabilize, wants to make people uneasy; the part me who will talk about the book with strangers badly wants to put people at ease. Charm got me into this book, and I need charm to get me out.
***
Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, Dorothy Dandridge, Samantha Stevens from Bewitched, Marian the Librarian, Jessica Wakefield, Claudia Kishi, Brad and Melody from Hey, Dude!, Cher Horowitz and Dionne, Clarissa Darling, Tammy, Gidget, Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, Scarlett O’Hara, Julie Andrews, Mitzi Gaynor, Jessica Rabbit, Crystal and Alexis from Dynasty, Salt n’ Pepa, Doris Day, Clair and Denise Huxtable, Princess Leia, Dianna Barry and Anne Shirley, Topanga, Daphne from Scooby Doo, Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, Blondie, Isabella Rosselini. These are the people my friends found “charming” as young girls, people they hoped or wished to become. Some are more irrepressible than others. Those from fiction were written by women, but those appearing onscreen were mostly written and directed by men: these are the ones who live as images in our memories.
My friend Francine said she never thought about charm in any “feminine” way; she wanted to be Wonder Woman because “she got it done, and that was charming.” I wish I could say the same. Though I, too, wished to be Wonder Woman, to me the Lasso of Truth represented a starkly unrealistic alternative to charm.
Samantha Stevens’s charm, on the other hand, seemed instructional to me. By the late ’90s, my mother and I had hand-taped every single black and white episode of Bewitched screened on Nick at Nite. I was crazy about it. What did I learn from all those hours of Bewitched? That the goal, always, is to please. Sam witches when she’s worried she has failed to please Darren by burning the roast, getting hit on by one of his clients, etc. You can please by being good, but if you do screw up, you can fix it with charm: an a-line dress, a martini, a plaintive protest followed by a dazzling smile. Even if you must constantly rescue your husband from foibles he doesn’t even recognize, prevent him from realizing this. To succeed in pleasing him is to succeed in pleasing yourself.
I remember, at about the same age, wanting to be charming for my father, whom I saw two or three weekends a year. If he was having a good time, so was I.
We learn to perceive ourselves through the eyes of others, and for many girls, watching TV and watching movies means, necessarily, learning to perceive each other through the eyes of men. We love the heroine, we adore her charm, we see others love her too, and we do the math; we solve for the variable of how to be loved.
***
Last September, I was at a booksellers’ tradeshow in a hotel reception room, sitting at a card table piled high with galleys of my book, when I made accidental eye contact with a man standing a couple yards away. I smiled reflexively, and I guess that made him feel obligated to speak to me.
“I’m waiting to talk to him,” he explained, gesturing toward the man sitting next to me behind his own pile of galleys. “I saw your book, saw it was a woman author, thought ‘probably fluff.’”
This is not a new or newsworthy kind of interaction, but it was my first of its kind. Instead of saying “No, it’s probably not for you,” as I later wished I had, I smiled even harder. In a strange place, wanting to please, I made myself as charming as possible and tried to convince this human breadstick that my dark and prickly novel was not “fluff.”
He shrugged and stuck a copy in his bag.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, beaming as he walked away. It is an old habit, and I backslid. Next time, I won’t.
Tags: charm, personal history, rebecca scherm, writing
This articulated so many things that I have felt or experienced without being able to put them into words at all, let alone as eloquently as you did. Thank you so much for this.
I just want to run around my house screaming “SOMEONE PUT IT INTO WORDS!” This fully encapsulates something I’ve been trying to articulate without success for years. This is also the first time I’ve ever read an article and thought to myself, “holy shit, I HAVE to read this person’s book.” Thank you for writing stuff for us, I can’t WAIT to read something that deals with this very intentionally, written by a woman.
*applause* People talk about baby boomers and their children, but my mother was a product of the Silent Generation (a pre-boomer). Her expectations for behavior and manners were different than my friends’ parents’, including this idea of charm. She modeled her behavior after the Grace Kelly standard and expected me to do so as well. I used to watch my friends and their give-no-fucks attitudes and felt so detached that it was almost as though they were from a different world. Thank you for this, for putting it into words.
This is wonderful; it probably speaks to a lot of us who were raised in the South. My mother used to tell me to “act like a lady” all the time. (In the 90s, by the way. It was the 1990s.)
Grace Kelly is not only charm, but steel and class. I remember watching To Catch a Thief as a kid; my grandfather had such a crush on her. Or, in his words: “what a gal.” He said she had “a marvelous profile,” which is to my mind is one of the lovelier observations you can make about a woman’s physical attributes.
I guess I feel like charm is more than good etiquette and smiling at people all the time. A witty comeback for that sexist at the trade show could have been charming in a way. Those old-school movie stars knew how to follow the rules, true, but they also knew when to break them.
But here’s the thing: a witty, charming comeback is still designed to make the sexist like you. It’s designed to make him think “Oh, she’s sharp, what a firecracker, how intriguing.” It’s not designed to tell him off or make him feel bad about his slight. Any response designed to do that would not, by definition, be considered charming.
I don’t particularly care how he feels, but I wouldn’t mind if he found me charming. Now I’ve avoided an argument with a stranger, which makes my day more pleasant.
(And of course he should feel bad, but to put this in social justice terms, it’s not my job to educate him.)
I came from a mixed legacy…a grandma for whom charm was a tool or weapon, depending on the situation, a mother who treats it much the same, and a grandma for whom charm was never that high on the agenda because survival was more important.
Charm is mercenary for me. I aim mostly for kind, but I am rough around the edges, and the older I get, the more ragged the edges seem to be. You can get away with rough edges a little more often in a working class city.
Anyway, enough about me. I think this piece is great, and really captures the complexity and gendered expectations of charm for women.
Gnurgl…so many conflicting feelings…
a) Great article, that’s for sure. And great SUBJECT as well.
b) I can understand how charm, in the sense of the ‘always keep sweet’ reflex, like with that a-hole at the book show, can seem like an undesireable trait, like something wrong that needs to be shed and/or overcome. and
c) PLEASING is a big theme in my life, and feeling that you exist to please, or even more, that your (safe) existence depends on your ability to please (and not only pleasing men), which leads to (d)
d) Sidenote: I live in Very Socialist And Much More Equal Western European Country, but let me tell you, once the worst of the patriarchy is overcome, it’s simply replaced by some other -archy, and you still find yourself having to please/feeling that you have to please some sort of group more powerful than you. #inescapablehierachy
e) When you use your charm like a puppy, saying: OMG-please-like-and-accept-me, then it can be a dangerous thing, which might lead others to abuse it. BUT
f) When like me, you don’t have many immediately visible feminine traits (though you wish you had them), or maybe qualifications, or what have you, then having CHARM can be a lifesaver, a way to still get the guys, a way to still get the job, a way to still be accepted/safe in places & spaces full of people who find you Weird & Other.
e) conclusion: YES to the good of charm, BOO to charm gone wrong.
What a great piece! The difference between charm and charisma is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. As an executive in marketing communications – charisma is a tool of my trade. I used to be much more focused on charm – trying to please others and gain their approval. Charisma seems more authentic, less gendered and more about being magnetic, regardless what other people think of you. There are some skills and valuable assets in all that charm that can be turned into seriously powerful charisma juju.
Your “probably fluff” is 100% checked out at the large-ish library system where I work, with 9 reserves on it – make that 10, I just put my own name on the list. Fuck that guy.
Yes! This is a piece that resonates with me. I, too, just checked out your book.
Charm amongst the women in my family ranged from my mum’s BBC english `telephone voice’ that was nothing like how she usually spoke, to my aunt and cousins who, when you know them, you know when to look for the caricaturish faces and gestures that emerge when the person they’re trying to charm isn’t looking, before resetting to `welcoming’ and `compliant’. My grandmother would never admit that a harm had been done to her, and this is the school I grew up following, to my detriment.
Charm always felt like a lie that I should use to protect the world from abominable me, which always, always became a branch from which other lies about the self would emerge. Yes, I enjoy watching while you play video games. Oh yes, Guns N Roses are a great band. No please, you finish, I couldn’t eat another bite.
I love this article, and can relate so strongly. Thank you for sharing it!
Oh my god, oh my god. Similarly southern, though definitely what Patsy Yaeger (rest in power) described so cheerfully in Dirt and Desire as a genuine southern grotesque —
(with love and affection; it was aimed at herself, for being too tall and gawky to be a “real” “Southern” “lady”)
— and it’s so fucking true. I didn’t think of doing it at all until I moved to Mississippi for grad school, and it’s EXHAUSTING, and I still do it — but I thought of it as putting on my public mask. And that’s not it at all. It’s charm. Oh my god, I am the thing I disdained because it’s inaccessible for grotesques. I can’t decide whether I’m horrified or overjoyed. Horrorjoyed? I’m horrorjoyed.
…so, uh, YES. Bang-up article. THANK YOU.
This piece is fantastic, and your experiences really resonated with me. My earliest girl primer in femininity was Cinderella à la Disney. I loved her. I was so awed and inspired. The way she just glided through everything, was effortlessly so much better than any of the other women in the film, how she just took every hit like it didn’t phase her because she was selfless and had a brilliant smile and perfect hair without trying. I picked less extreme examples over time, but, that was the first.
As I got older, I realized how thick my veneer of politeness and charm could be, and how inflexible. There are good aspects to being able to tap into that charm well. I am very good at “schmoozing” and I am wonderful at office parties/dinner parties/classroom teaching/site tour leading. Half my job, half of all the jobs I’ve had so far, has been pouring oil on troubled waters, sometimes with not a tool in my bag but sheer force of charm alone. I am very very good at this.
BUT as I hit my own middle school years I started to realize that very few people knew my actual opinions on things, that when people were petty or stupid or rude and I wanted to call them out that I actually did not have the words. At home I was a sarcastic smartass, but at school I was tightlaced into myself/this set of rules/this mode of being.
I still have a hard time navigating the between point, and either end can be exhausting, but at least I’m aware…and I am no longer aiming toward a flickering film cell of perfection.
Honestly, I’ve been thinking about this since yesterday, and this probably also explains why I fell so hard in love with Ever After and Danielle de Barbarac as a tween. I needed some flexibility and she was a kind of perfect bridgepoint.
God fiction does weird things to us.
I love the way this acknowledges that it is often ‘easier’ to be charming. Being charming avoids conflict and it also means you don’t actually have to think about your own opinions on things — you just need to say whatever will make the other person happy. I sometimes find myself wistfully thinking how much easier it would be if I could be charming to my boyfriend rather than get into frequent, heated socio-political debates and discussions. (Of course, even if I could, the relationship wouldn’t last if I did that because we’d both get bored.)
I think ‘putting on the charm’ can get quite addictive, because for that moment you can sometimes believe that you really are this poised, wonderful, likeable being. For the same reason I sometimes find that being with acquaintances rather than close friends can be quite soothing if I’m feeling depressed because I put on a facade of being fine, and for a limited amount of time, I can believe it myself and feel okay. Obviously, it doesn’t last though.
Wow, this point –> “I think ‘putting on the charm’ can get quite addictive, because for that moment you can sometimes believe that you really are this poised, wonderful, likeable being.”
really hit home for me. I start playing up the charm whenever I feel unsafe (socially/emotionally, not in any tangible terms), and the feeling of security it gives me makes it seem so falsely sustainable. I’ve only just realized that I’ve been doing it for so long (more and more for a couple of years straight) that I’ve sort of lost touch with who I am underneath the charm, because it seemed so convenient to believe that the charm _was_ me, that I really wanted nothing but to be super polite and tactful and to have the answer that pleases everyone, and to do it while dressed in a very feminine business-casual dresses with a very feminine business-casual haircut.
Anyway, turns out none of that is right, and it also turns out that the smaller pockets of approval I get for my forays into my real self are way more satisfying than the broader, more vague ones I got for being generically approvable, so. More swearing and opinions for me, I guess, at least where I can afford them. :p Sounds like you have pretty good people in your life who like your opinions (swearing optional, according to your tastes), too.
And yet, and yet (sorry this comment is going on forever), I totally get what you’re saying about it feeling convenient to be half-understood by people who sort of know you. Because the risk of being honest isn’t _only_ that the other person might reject you on a surface level, but that they might understand, and reject something deeper, or understand and accept you _and then_ use what they know about you in a way you don’t want them to (e.g., if a friend knows something has upset you, they might be extra sensitive on that point in the future, and then you might have to explain that that feels coddling and ridiculous, or whatever). Like, it’s really hard to be just a little bit genuine. Once you’ve let a person past your safety-facade, you have to start communicating pretty clearly with them and with yourself in order not to have everything end in disaster (or at least mild frustration and disappointment at being misunderstood), and jeez Louise, that sounds like an awful lot of work. Rewarding work, probably, I imagine, but so hard.
Yay for more opinions! And I completely agree re the risks of being honest and how it’s difficult and not really possible to be ‘a bit genuine’. Also, being charming is obviously something that is generally regarded as a good trait and it did take me a while to decide that it was probably on balance a good thing to have become (as I have) less charming as I’ve got older, because it also means I’ve become less afraid of voicing my opinion among people who might disapprove of it and less willing to put up with rudeness. For me it wasn’t a conscious decision — I just found that I’d become less and less inclined to (or capable of) being charming.
PS – Don’t apologise for a long comment — I always feel quite flattered when I get a reply!
I don’t know, though. Women writers have it tough as it is and I’m glad at the end you sold another copy of your book.
oh, Southern charm and her double-edged cheese knife. Thank you for this.
I didn’t grow up in the South but I strongly remember moments in my pre-teen years when my mother–always to my surprise and suddenly–would coax me into some ‘charming’ performative act. “Today when your grandfather comes, you will pour the tea and serve lunch.”/ “Go up to the counter and ask for a student discount.” She intended these to be lessons in social confidence and assertiveness I think but the social ease I was being taught to cultivate was never an easiness in myself but an impression of ease to project for others.
I’m not expressing myself very well but what I mean to say is that this article really touched on something I’ve never been able to put into words about the way girls are conditioned to be charming in a way that is decorative rather than sincere. (Is there even such a thing as sincere charm?) Anyway, rambling aside, what a wonderful read. Now I am going to go on a hunt for your book!
I was *just* struggling with this today. When I’m around people I don’t know well, I tend to get chipper: my voice gets a bit higher, my eyes open a bit more, I’m ready to laugh at any joke that comes my way, etc.. And while I may not be charming like Grace Kelly, I can feel myself sliding into a sort of caricature of me: I’m not necessarily telling you things that are out and out the opposite of my feelings on the matter, but I’m taking a tiny bit of truth and wrapping it in layers of light conversation and conviviality so that you get the easily digested version. My real opinions might be harder to stomach, so I don’t share them with just anyone. In the moment of my ‘charm’ I’m all butterflies in my stomach, I hope they like me! After the moment ends, I’m deflated and a little bit disappointed in myself for making things easier on my audience.
The comments are great. I would add two things: If you have internalized this behavior to the extent you can’t tell it from the real you, chances are it is the real you. It is only bad to be charming when you are suppressing your true opinion to be it AND regret that afterward. Also, some of us don’t do it entirely to people-please, but to satisfy our sense of the dramatic, of a life well lived, or of our own idea of heroism or gallantry in the face of adversity. And it is possible to be charming-snarky: see Bogart and Bacall or Powell and Loy. That sort of sexual banter can also be a way for a grotesque to simultaneously embrace and fend off the world at large. In those cases, who really believes that character armor goes deeper than armor? It replaces instant intimacy with later intimacy, intimacy as a gift.
Exactly this.
“Charm is like love, like ice is like water . . .” — William Matthews, Charming
“A beautiful woman is the one I notice; the charming woman is the one who notices me.” (unknown)
Good article. I think you were one step away from the magical meaning of charm (talisman, spell), or its cousin charisma. If you’ve ever seen someone with true charisma work a room, it is truly magical. And scary.
I’ve had the sense for years that when people are being charming to me, I’m inflicting something on them. Ditto what everyone’s saying that this essay is amazing.
For me the most beneficial part is thinking of charm as gendered! I am an idiot and had not really processed this before. I remember in junior high being in awe of the people (oddly, all guys) who could make everyone feel good in a conversation, but never really going “I’ll bet that’s a learned skill’ until years later. Even then I only thought of it in term of ambition, because all those people were aspiring politicians (and that Foster Wallace account of McCain’s magnetism).
So anyway, I am definitely not charming and have comforted myself not by trying to improve but by nurturing a suspicion that there’s something superficial about it, and I fucking love the part about intimacy and charm not surviving each other. I have a couple of charming friends now and its so so so extraordinarily kind of painfully true because I know the first thing I liked about them was the charm – I love them as we are now, too.
I did start trying to be charming (I never got very far or good) a few years ago after reading the line in Infinite Jest about how caring for other people doesn’t depend on how you feel, it depends on how they feel – if you think you’re doing a great job of being nice to someone but they don’t think so, then guess what, you’re not (This had never occurred to me. Male privilege? Idiocy? You tell me). I got nothing else! This piece was wonderful and I want to think about it for years.
I’m currently in the middle of your book, and loving this essay even more now than when it inspired me to add “Unbecoming” to my to-read list in the first place.
I was into ballet when I was a kid, and one day at a restaurant a professional dancer approached me to say she could tell I was a ballet dancer by the way I held myself. No one would think that now; life got more complicated, ballet faded away, I lost that poise. Maybe I can regain it, maybe you can find it, or maybe we're better off without it.
(I'm late to this discussion because someone mentioned Unbecoming and this link was shared. And Unbecoming is now on the top of my reading list).