It's a familiar scene, worn with overuse, but one that nevertheless tugs on the heart each time anew: The high-school heroine, the funny girl, it doesn't matter, meets the hero. They go out, they go back to his place, they come to a decision to test the advanced support systems of the modern mattress.

The next morning the hero is not around - he's gone to work or gone jogging or whatever - as the heroine, soft and satisfied, opens her eyes, remembers where she is and realizes that she doesn't have a change of clothes. Woe is her! But have no fear. In the next scene, when she goes to make coffee and sniff around the place, she wears the pristine look of the morning after: her little panties and his big shirt.

During severe periods of loneliness I was capable of watching such a scene alone in the darkened hall of the matinee and spilling the popcorn over my head. The girl who will not melt souls with that look has not been born yet, even if she's the sour Jennifer Aniston type.

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Spilling salt in the eyes between the puffed corn, and wishing, wishing, wishing ...

A woman in a man's robe that's too big for her. Indeed, a stock cinematic image, but the fact that it continues to recur in movies without losing its allure is because with its simplicity, its minimal means - body and shirt, woman and cotton - it exposes a fundamental law of form, an aesthetic truth: The way women dress, the way women look in their clothes, bears not the slightest resemblance to the way men look in their clothes. A woman who's dressed is a transcendent creation, natural, cogent, concise. The dressed man is her pale shadow, the faded draft of the bold original. There's no comparison. The woman is Xanadu. The man is Afula.

I wouldn't construct the thesis based on a Hollywood cliche. The alchemic transformation that occurs when a woman dresses, its authenticity and intuitiveness, is a magic that is unique to clothing: It doesn't happen to someone in the nude. This bears the seal of truth in every sphere. "People were always giving her shirts. Their own in most cases," writes Don DeLillo, the greatest living writer, about the heroine of his novel "The Names." "She looked good in everything; everything fit. If a shirt was too loose, too big, the context would widen with the material and this became the point, this was the fit. The shirt would sag fetchingly, showing the girl, the sunny tomboy buried in hand-me-down gear."

There are many reasons for the unbridgeable gap between the woman who dresses and the man who dresses. The practical reason: Women's attire is more diverse and challenging than men's, so that, thanks to both quantity and quality, it's simply easier for women to dress. Or, there's the historic reason: From the inception of mankind till the present day, women have been more engaged with clothes than men, so that women, thanks to knowledge and experience, know far better than men what to do with their clothes. Not only is their freedom of action greater, but so is the symbolic credit they get - the assumption that underlying the woman's look is an idea, that every look embodies a greater concept than the symbolic context reserved for men.

But there is also another reason for the gap, one less obvious but no less concrete: the mythic reason. Clothes are congruent with femininity because they are an integral element of the feminine myth. In the annals of history femininity has been defined as a secret, a mystery, almost as mystical; even though clothes do not necessarily correspond to those definitions, they share their elusiveness. Clothes share with femininity the aura of concealment, the quality of being layered and the sense of the enigmatic. Clothes, like women, play a game of disguise and revelation, of shadow and light and seduction.

When a woman dresses she thus takes part in the myth of herself; the body that covers an enigma wrapped in another shell. The enigma widens, the mystery deepens. Ho, pantyhose! When a man dresses, in contrast, he is outside his mythological element. Man the hunter, the warrior, the provider deepens his self-myth when he sets out on a voyage, say, or captures some dump. The act of dressing is part of his preparation, a prosaic link in the construction of his image, and therefore it usually ends in a uniform. Look at how our businessmen all dress alike - how they are drawn to the school uniform.

Myths, it should be remembered, are rife with vested interests. Talking about them in the 21st century, we adopt a tone of bemused skepticism. It goes without saying that the myth of woman-as-enigma is one that was forged by a man, obviously in reaction to his difficulty in understanding what her problem is in achieving orgasm, when it comes so easily to him.

But with all the chauvinistic evils that the myth of woman-as-enigma has spawned, it's clear that at this point in time, when the feminist thrust is still far from having exhausted itself, this myth continues to exist in men's minds, continues to dictate the way they observe women. It must be fought fiercely when it's used in a thuggish way, but in terms of its literary brilliance, it's one hell of a myth. Radiance stained with nuances.

I don't hold with the archetype of the Mysterious Woman - in fact, I suspect that it came into the world as a sublimation of impotence. However, in the dressing department, it seems to me not only cool, but correct. In its absence it would be hard to understand the secret charm of the woman who dresses.

Recognizing the superiority of the woman who dresses will only be beneficial to men. Just like that. Not necessarily because it will teach them a lesson in humility - that's a lost cause - but precisely because more and more men want to learn how to dress, and more and more of them seem to be nagging for tips. Hey, don't you have anything better to do? It's just clothes. Who cares? Wimps.

Instead of practical advice, it's better to spell out the whole doctrine in one succinct phrase: The art of dressing is a feminine art. Men who want to dress have to see women, understand them. More than that: For a moment, in their consciousness, they have to be women. Madame Bovary - c'est nous. It doesn't matter if afterward they will only want to undress them; between the closet and the mirror they have to remember that the world of ideas of clothes is a feminine world. It is there, in the lacy heavens, that all the materials and all the good ideas lie.

Naturally, men will have to understand how these ideas are implemented, how they are applied to the male body. To copy them as they are is impossible, otherwise the opening scene above would have been Brad Pitt making coffee in a chemise. But before the act must come recognition of the theory. The god of clothes is Venus in fur. To dress beautifully means to be a woman. Not as drag, not as androgyny, not as a queer. As a hairy ideal: a man in full.