And God Created Woman: The Ingenue’s Hidden Reign
Contra Walt Bismarck
My dear friend Walt Bismarck recently opened an ancient door with a luminous light. What he found on the other side he calls the Other Realm. His essay was as disorienting as it was true: a dimension of feminine sway, surreptitious codes, and emotional gravity that defies the straightforward ambitions of the rational male mind. He walked in swinging a lantern not unlike old Diogenes. I perhaps foolishly, bring a mirror.
We don’t entirely disagree. I just believe you can dance with the ones who vanish if you blink— if you know the rhythm.
If Walt hands you the rules of the Other Realm like a warning label, mine is more of a love letter-though not a naïve one. His piece was a diagnosis: exacting, unsentimental, a frank cri de cœur to the attractive, influential women who act as global tastemakers and pull the strings of status seemingly untrammeled. Walt is a master of parsing the ultimate from the proximate cause, but in doing so, I think he sometimes forgets that the spell only breaks when you say it out loud.
That I suspect is were we part ways.
Where he sees a psychic architecture to be exposed, I see a choreography to be mastered. Feminine influence doesn’t merely deserve critique; it invites understanding, even a measure of reverence. It reigns not through some unassailable monopoly held by UMC women, but because their younger male counterparts have largely abdicated their role in the dance. Bereft of myth, unmoored from the arts, and illiterate in the language of evocative charm, they’ve left the solar half of the consular throne vacant; allowing the lunar aspect to reign unopposed.
And yet, even the moon tires of shining alone. Women who are by nature, twilight, composed mostly of lunar radiance with a trace of the Helios, now find themselves straining toward the sun, stepping into solar shoes not quite made for them. Men, by contrast, should be of the dawn: predominantly solar, touched lightly by the Selene.
The result is not empowerment, but distortion. A burden. And an ache for balance amidst turbulence.
Which brings us to Juliette.
When Brigitte Bardot stepped barefoot onto the sun-bleached streets of Saint Tropez in And God Created Woman, the world reacted with scandal. Behind the tousled hair & languid gazes was something far more enduring: an entirely modern archetype. Juliette isn’t responding to male attention. No, she’s orchestrating its rhythm. Softly & Silently. Like the moon pulling at tides, her influence moves sub rosa.
She is the lunar principle in its purest form: magnetic, unpredictable, half-veiled. But where the solar note has faded to a slow diminuendo, her movements acquire an eerie autonomy, filling space never meant to be hers alone. It isn’t dominance she wields, but gravity that outmatches its orbiters.
This isn’t a film review — that’s not my style. It’s a study and a celebration of seduction, the aesthetics of sway, and understanding a kind of influence that grows more potent for never naming itself.
