"Once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some unknown existence to which that creature's love for ourselves can win us admission, that is, of all the preliminary conditions which Love exacts, the one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes him generous or indifferent as to the rest. Even those women who pretend that they judge a man by his exterior only, see in that exterior an emanation from some special way of life. And that is why they fall in love with a soldier or a fireman, whose uniform makes them less particular about his face; they kiss and believe that beneath the crushing breastplate there beats a heart different from the rest, more gallant, more adventurous, more tender; and so it is that a young king or a crown prince may travel in foreign countries and make the most gratifying conquests, and yet lack entirely that regular and classic profile which would be indispensable, I dare say, in an outside-broker."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 105
Proust proposes that women "kiss and believe that beneath the crushing breastplate there beats a heart different from the rest, more gallant, more adventurous, more tender." Certainly both sexes are guilty of falling for a mask, an imagined self. As the great Canadian philosopher reminds us in Ambulance Blues, "you're only real with your make-up on." Now, are women more guilty of this than men? And, if so, is this one of those societally enforced phenomena from watching too many Walt Disney movies? The argument would be that when women push to get "inside" they discover that the real person is not actually the mask, when the mask is all that they really wanted in the first place.
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