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Christopher Breward
of Hollywood screen actresses to the role of goddesses. But its effects can also be
seen in the earlier alluring organization of shop windows, the sensual displays of
the public bar which form Bailey’s focus, and the paraphernalia of the popular
theater which concerns us here. Glamour is also read as the visual code of a broader
sexual ideology which Bailey identifies as “parasexuality.” This he defines as “an
inoculation in which a little sexuality is encouraged as an antidote to its subversive
properties.” 68 In other words, a strategy for managing the everyday circulation of
sexualized codes and practices that constituted the exchanges of urban custom,
which otherwise viewed sexuality as a dissonant force. This was a practice that
was particularly pertinent in the “expanding apparatus of the service industries,
and a commercialised popular culture” that typified the late-nineteenth-century
urban scene. As Bailey continues:
The barmaid and the pub were thus part of a larger nexus of people and institutions that
stood athwart the public/private line and provided the social space within which a more
democratised, heterosocial world of sex and sociability was being constituted, a world
that is still inadequately mapped by historians. It is on this distinctive terrain that the
less august branches of capitalism converted sexuality from anathema to resource, from
resource to commodity, in the development of a modern sexualised consumerism.
Parasexuality, with its safely sensational pattern of stimulation and containment, was a
significant mode of cultural management in the construction of this new regime. It is
plain from its operation . . . that it worked primarily to valorise male pleasure. Yet the
making of this world was undertaken not just by a cadre of male managers – but by the
members of this cultural complex at large, in a self-conscious and mutual working out
of new modes of relationship between men and women. 69
Taking into consideration the powerful “sexual” attraction of stereotypes including
the bachelor dandy, the suburban hearty and the working-class masher discussed
so far, I would argue for an application of the notion of parasexuality to the
management of masculine sartorial figures. Where the glamorous fantasy of the
barmaid smoothed the “determination of the informal rules and boundaries of
sexual encounter . . . now pursued in a more fragmented and inchmeal manner, in
the individual transactions of a continuously recomposing leisure crowd,” 70 so the
popular communication of sartorial formulae attached to the varieties of urban
masculinities present in the modern crowd, allowed young men to assess themselves
visually and physically against other men in an increasingly competitive
sexual marketplace. This led to a heightened awareness of their own sense of
glamorous fashionability as well as placing them under the critical gaze of
potential female suitors. Furthermore, the figure of the fashionable young gent,
like that of the barmaid positioned in the public sphere of pleasure by “the
mechanistic formula of parasexuality . . . dissolved in practice into a more popular
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