A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

THE MODERN COURTESAN? Is there something intelligent to be said about the life of Anna Nicole Smith? Take a look at this essay from WaPo culture critic Philip Kennicott:

"Courtesan," which in a different age is probably what she would have been labeled even though she was married), is a category we don't have much use for anymore. The woman who makes sexual alliances for money, who was less than a blushing bride but not so fallen as a prostitute, was once a vigorous cultural type, at least through the 19th century. Courtesans were the essential heroines of our greatest operas. They offered up their bodies, in various states of undress, to painters from Caravaggio to Toulouse-Lautrec -- and too many others to mention. It was a courtesan who set in motion many of our greatest novels, not least of them Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" -- which begins with the love of a man named Swann for a "great courtesan." But the idea of the courtesan has all but disappeared, and with it much of the nuance about our analysis of sex and marriage....

For centuries, there have been men who have wondered why women really love them. That the real sexual allure of men may not be their good looks, their masculinity or their charm, but rather their power and position, can make men wonder whether they are loved for themselves or for something external and unrelated. When marriages don't look like they look in storybooks -- love matches between princes and princesses -- intimacy is shadowed with doubt.

And it's the same fear that made poor Anna Nicole Smith gibes an endlessly rich source of material for Leno and Letterman; they were laughing at her, of course, but also at men who were foolish enough to marry women like her. We laugh at what makes us uncomfortable, and Anna Nicole Smith made us very uncomfortable indeed.

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