But What a Choice

Marvin “Gaye is a special case, of course. But the same forces that propelled this troubled artist into the ooze made ‘love men’ out of many other talented musicians . . . The assumption was that any woman in her right mind would prefer the love man’s smooth-talking, satin-sheets-on-the-waterbed approach to the ear-blistering screeching of white boys with roadkill hair. But what a choice . . . Was love really the point? From a woman’s point of view, there is something unconvincing about the sound of a man so enamoured of his own powers of seduction that his partner is reduced to a faint chorus of orgasmic chirps” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 271).