Its All Topsy Turvey

Yesterday work provided some interesting conversation, it usually does, but it was one of those 'battle of the sexes' conversation that wasn't so much a battle but a demonstration of cognitive dissonance... or whatever the fucking applicable term would be.

Anyway it involved questions like 'how much make up is too much makeup?' to which my honest answer is 'any.' I've met (seen... sort of) women who have birthmarks covering half their face that have managed to overcome the need to cover up their birthmark with foundation and lead fulfilling lives and if they have no excuse then nobody does.

But other topics of debate were the 'footless stockings/leggings as pants' debate to which my stance was that its one of the worst looks ever to become popular and you know what...



That is the beginning and end of a fashion design course. You start with the hourglass figure and try not to fuck it up. End of degree.

It may be a depressing outlook, but it is the one statistically common thread to all great 'fashion' design for women. The clothes wear you.

The good news is that trading on your looks is a hangover from a bygone era where females didn't have any career prospects at all. Now it is much better you can have a career and pick up some attractive deadbeat along the way. There's a money scammer in melbourne that's quite good looking.

If you are trading on your looks your life is pretty much over by 26, that's when you need to get desperate and marry any old arsehole. Furthermore thanks to protective laws you can't really start your career of golddigging till you are 18. That means you effectively hit middle age at 22.

So why fucking bother? For our (mens') sake? why thankyou, but even that is problematic. Best demonstrated by:



And...



When the OC was big (that whole two months), we had a distinct phenomena observable. A girl that women like versus a girl that men like. If you asked a woman to pick the more attractive of the two above portraits they are quite likely to pick Mischa Barton over Rachel Bilson.

Why? Women use terms to describe other women like 'skinny, waif, blond, gorgeous' blah blah blah. I don't even know what terms men use, conversation doesn't usually go that far. Mischa looks (and always has) 'sophisticated' which in my mind is code for 'depressing' while Bilson always looked 'fun'.

The point being that if the major beneficiaries of women trading on looks is men, then you think the industry supporting this worthless ambition would have been capable of figuring out the key competitive advantages.

But no, everything is topsy turvy, all the magazines, books and TV programs that cater to 'beauty' are run by women. Unattractive women. Witness the oh so ironic 'How Do I Look' author that will teach women how to buy the 'right' cosmetics.



The question is presumably rhetorical, but my answer is 'horrible' the gratuitous authors pictograph is evidence that cosmetics have little to do with beauty. If you were kind I guess you could say 'good for your age' but she doesn't look say 'younger' or at least 'like a young woman'.

Then of course there are 'Trinny and Susannah' or whatever:


Who cares? Trinny and Susannah are just going to spawn a bunch of depressingly sophisticated women.

I guess the main point is, that its another fine example of herding or group think. I wouldn't be surprised that if you studied the opinions and verdicts of fashion 'experts' you would find that the opinions are bread and spread rather insestuously.

I would argue you cant be an 'expert' in fashion or beauty because the target is always shifting, the choices increasing and the world getting more complex. Just like finance, by consulting an expert you can easily be worse off, bolstered by the 'expert advice' you feel more confident when you should feel worse?

Why? Now we come full circle. The incidence of women commenting on the attractiveness of other women is far, far higher than the same behaviour in men. Thus it should be easy for anybody to obtain a large anecdotal sample.

The more fashion, style or cosmetic experts a girl (I can't bring myself to describe such a dependant person as a woman) consults, the more off the 'male pulse' they tend to be. They will be far likelier to extol virtues like 'skinny' think Nicole Kidman is attractive, and describe quite unbecoming waifs as 'hot'.

Sure you will find a man somewhere who is into everything. (There are dirty old men that go to Africa to abuse starving sponsor children afterall,) but there's a simple form of selection perpetuating the industry.

A woman with her thumb on the 'male pulse' is likely to find a mate and keep them relatively easily. Thus they will stop consulting experts since they don't need their advice. Just like someone with an intuitive pallet will rarely pull out the cookbook. They will be satisfied with pulling off simple dishes with relatively little effort than trying ever more complex and structured recipes.

Conversely, a girl with her thumb way off the pulse (and perhaps up some 'experts' arse) will more readily adopt the expert advice. The more readily they adopt the advice the more 'into the fashion' world they will be. If the advice is bad based on one shakey premise (eg. 'skinny = hot') then the worse they will do. They will attract only the guys that will exploit their insecurity (in this case the need to be validated by attracting a mate) and get a false sort of validation, trying ever more complex (and misguided) recipes for beauty based on flawed foundations.

It doesn't even matter if the magazines profess the opposite. Every time they choose a Barton over a Bilson they are effectively saying that 'skinny is hot'. The entire industry is the equivalent of asking the writers of FHM, Ralph, Zoo or GQ what women find attractive. (GQ would tragically probably be right). Except these articles are usually syndicated from columns that appeared in womens magazines owned by the same parent company. The reverse doesn't seem to happen for women's magazines though. Women experts will tell a male audience what women want, women experts will also tell a female audience what men want.

Nobody seems to care about credentials.

Furthermore, you just cant be an expert in what is attractive to other people. Take any individual out of the vast pools of 'male' and 'female' and ask them what they are into and you will get literally billions of variations.

In effect it can be compared to trading. The shitty financial advisors will utilise 'modern portfolio theory' analysing the entire pool of shares statistically assuming that normal distribution of errors applies (it doesn't), they then make sweeping generalisations about 'markets', 'sectors' and 'industries' based on the overall analysis and make projections that are generally so inaccurate they bear no meaninngful function at all.

A good investor will be value based. They'll pick an individual company and weigh up the prospects of owning that company, just as if they were buying the company outright, looking at the CEO, Business plan, the financial statements and weighing up the competition, suppliers, customers etc. They will then buy that company (if the price is right) or they wont.

In the same way, the 'experts' will describe generalised aggregate themes, the more scientific and thus useful will be based on hard wired evolutionary preferences (child rearing hips, milk producing breasts) the least scientific just plain misguided (the thinner is the winner). But when applied to any particular guy the only useful advice for getting laid is to announce your vulnerability and insecurity to every predator in the room. Just like the statistical business forecasts - the expert fashion advice is often redundant within 3 months (such is the speed of style change) and nobody really looks at the predictive success of the style experts (faux boho was meant to make a comeback I seem to recall. It didn't.)

By contrast a woman who likes a man will just pay attention to what he seems to like. Conversationally, music wise, style wise etc. And they will take him so long as the price is right (and the feeling is mutual. Sorry there's no helping your personality, not in a blog post at least). Just have to look for that 'click' and exploit it.

Perhaps an easy test you can perform at home/at the office is this. Try to predict what a male collegue is listening to at the moment by looking at the triple-j net 50. And then tell me how often the 'cool' agregate was right.