Plato is Boring

He had a thing for finery, Nietzsche did, and for women who wore a lot of make-up. To Nietzsche, woman does not embody Goethe’s idealized “feminine eternal.” She is rather made-up, boldly promiscuous, prone to flight, and prompts men to keep her, like small animals, in chains and cages. She cares not for meaningful and deep relationships; for her love, like beauty, is skin-deep. She is, in a word, superficial. She appeals to Nietzshe’s anti-rationalist philosophy and his disdain for Platonic forms and essences, because she embodies the proliferation of refracted images and the play of surfaces. Ever wary of Truth, Nietzsche found solace in the face of uncertainty — we are at sea in eternal states of becoming, not Being. We have no origins, we will never arrive: we transition, shift, slide, and transition again. The made-up woman gets this: she doesn’t bother with being “natural.” She need not “find herself.” She fashions deception, manipulation, a certain look that might or might not become her the next day! Rigorously opposed to Enlightenment or neo-classical Platonic Ideals, Nietzshche was likely bored by the virtuous woman, yearning instead for the woman in red, the one who most frightens men by never being quite what she seems. “I’m not bad,” says one of our more animated femme fatales, “I was just drawn that way.”