Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Throwing in Towel

I have decided quite simply to exercise my right to not know shit and withdraw from opining on the womens movement, feminism... see, I literally not even sure what I'm talking about.

But before I shut up, yo grama was shocked in the late 80's to discover, her daughter, yo mama was giving blowjobs to the boys in the bikeshed, and now yo mama is shocked to discover you are taking photos of yourself naked and sending them to the boys iphones.

And then the boy now hits up tumblr, and surely, surely it is then tumbled all over the internet. And wedged between these generations, I feel old. Terribly old.

Well not that old, it's a relieving kind of old.

It's easy for me to get with the times because I'm not in that youthful exuberent stage of life where the women I know might feel the need to share with me nude photographs that could first and foremostly lead to my arrest depending on respective age categories, and secondly provoke some strange temptation to share with everybody all over the internet.

Will the new 21st speech staple at a lady's age of majority be to project up that iconic sext message that was reblogged all over the net. Made anonymous by the sheer popularity of the practice, are we entering a new era where the structure of any girl's lhabia is common knowledge. A full circle from the popularity of male nakedness in Greek Antiquity?

Greer wrote 'No man desires a woman whose beauty is apparant only to him' or some shit in the female Eunuch, a sweeping generalisation, but it must have some basis when Timmy's first reaction to recieving a candid and intimate photo from his loved one is to fwd it on to his dickhead mates.

I'm a pervert, it's true, but to me 'sneaky hot' is the best kind of hot and personally detract from Greer's generalisation. But some Okcupid statistical analysis on what girls get the most messages through their services suggest that this viewpoint of mine isn't unique and 'sneaky hot' may in fact be a paradox.

It turns out men jump on women who have some devisive physical feature in the same way pensioners look for dented soup cans in the supermarket isle in the hope of getting a bargain price.

But I digress, has 'Female Chauvinist Pigs' been updated to some new addition to deal with sexting? I recall it discussed a girl who mimed felatio on a broom stick and posted a video to some boy who published it on the internet and the following increase in her popularity...

But the one passage that still sticks is the interview with a boy who said 'I'm pretty sure guys have always been into girls' and I guess that's the triumph or defeat of these trends, from dances with chaperones to blowjobs in bikesheds and toilets, to g-bangers and brazillians and DIY playboy spreads on tumblr, to vajazzling and anal bleaching... guys were into you just because you didn't have a Y-chromosome.

Is any of it necessary? Not in an absolute sense, because the average person evidently knows as much about being in a relationship as they do about being rich. I have always felt that there's some kind of pareto principal in effect as far as the energy expended on things that we think will secure a mate and things that actually secure a mate, regardless of gender.

But it's also kind of like that depressing business maxim 'if you aren't moving your shrinking.' which means you have to always grow your revenue just to be in the same position you were in yesterday. In the same sense I dare say it would be hard for a girl to make it (with guys) these days with a 'map of the ussr' rooted on their pubic bone, and having lived through the adoption of both mobile phones as necessity and g-strings as the non-menstrual underwear of choice, to the innovation of pads that can be worn with g-strings, to everybody being bored with g-strings and other cuts making a comeback... let's say that while I can't understand, I can certainly imagine a world in the next decade where anal-bleaching is considered as mandatory as brazillian waxes seem to be.

Maybe feminists call this oppression, economists would certainly describe it as inflation. Because the trends are always something that anybody can do. Furthermore they are trends that anybody can do easily. None of these regard 'natural beauty' they are all purchasable (Or in the case of giving out blowjobs, require something that more people are in possession of than disposable income). All the trends are adopted early by people wanting to use them as competitive advantages - 'I'm not as pretty as Jane, but I'm wearing a g-string.' which works until Jane buys some g-strings, Jane and Suzy, and Mary, Tracy, Sharon, Karen, Lisa, Adelle, Erica, Rebecca, Pam, Haley, Trish, Sarah, Claire and Steve have them too.

And suddenly these discretionary expenses go from discretionary to mandatory and the boys are all brought to the yard by the same milkshakes as yesteryear. Everyone just has to spend up to stand still.

That's where women have lost out, it's sort of a prisoners dilemma. Biological drivers would probably ensure a man would still court a woman even if she had thick hairs protruding from her nipples, unless of course she is the only one with hairy nipples.

In the past I have railed against the decline of male privelege with marketers attempting to sell ugliness to men and by that get the same inflation going on expensive beauty regimes, but over the years I would say that any progress made has been negligable if not laughable. Men don't pull tubes of moisturiser out of their pockets and suggest their buddies try it. The ratio of men sporting 'ironic beards' to men who regularly wear foundation is very, very, very lopsided. Even the billions of dollars spent on trying to get men to buy underwear from anywhere but Target has largely fallen on deaf ears.

I may be ignorant of what is going on in gender politics, and particularly what it is like to be a woman, or why the gender role of 'woman' is so underpriveledged, but before I retreat from the arena I observe that in our society a man following a beauty regime is probably a great predictor of anxiety, depression, narcissistic personality disorder or some kind of psychological adversity, what then does it say about us if a beauty regime that extends to the coloration of the arsehole is the status quo for women?

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