Bain's letter: the pose of poselessness

The anthology's irony-critique in epigram. Bain names Orin's seduction gambit — the opening "Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I'll affect the demeanor of that man" — as "sincerity with a motive," and then anatomizes the recursion behind it: the move looks "almost pathologically open and sincere," but its whole content is Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open, a hipster transcendence-of-posing that is itself the most calculated pose of all. "It is a pose of poselessness." This is postmodern irony's deepest self-defense laid bare — the maneuver by which apparent sincerity becomes the ultimate manipulation precisely by advertising its own freedom from manipulation. Against it Bain sets the one man of "genuine pathological openness," Tavis, whose real unmediated candor is "about as seductive as Tourette's syndrome" — the tell that actual poselessness repels, while the pose of it seduces. Orin, the man of maximal performed openness, is "the least open man I know."