After listening a lot to a mostly '80s internet radio station for several weeks now, I'm reminded of how good even the filler music used to be. Well, that's what we used to call it anyway. I think the technical name is adult contemporary -- lighter, play-in-the-background tunes that are soothing but still upbeat, a popular music version of Mozart.
Just as nobody listens to Beethoven all day long, or reads Shakespeare all day long, or watches David Lynch all day long, nobody who isn't pretentious would listen to the more powerful, body-moving popular music all day long either. Maybe if you just listen to music for a short time, you could concentrate only or mostly on those more body-possessing songs. Otherwise, though, you'll need some good filler songs that will heighten your appreciation of the more gripping songs, while still being catchy enough to keep your mind switched on to music-absorbing mode in the meantime.
If easy listening were an alternative to great rock or R&B or dance-pop music -- mere "dentist's office music," to dig up another phrase from memory -- then the quality of easy listening and of those other styles should show opposite trends over time. As rock, R&B, and dance-pop fall from greatness, that leaves a niche to be filled by less ambitious styles like adult contemporary.
But looking through the list of AC #1s from 1961 through 2011, the best easy listening songs were made when the best songs in other genres were made, roughly the '60s through the '80s, but mostly the later '70s and the '80s, with the '60s and earlier '70s serving more to pave the way for better creators. This makes sense in light of the view above that the lighter and the more powerful songs are complementary pieces that interlock within a richer flow of music, like male and female, and are not competitors against one another. So, easy listening songs will be best when they are meant to complement great pop music in more toe-tapping genres.
I won't bore anyone with a reminder of how bad it's gotten in the past 20 years -- Celene Dion, Backstreet Boys, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, etc etc etc. Like rock and R&B, the level of passion just isn't there -- pretty pathetic given how low-key easy listening music is supposed to be. This more sedated mood fails to turn the brain on at all, so it can't even function as a place-holder in between more energetic songs.
It looks like the peak years of adult contemporary were 1983 to 1989. Like rock, R&B, and dance-pop, there wasn't a whole lot going on in the very early 1980s. Unlike the other styles, though, it seems to have died for good a couple years earlier. At any rate, here are 15 classics worth padding out the length of your music-listening hours, taken just from the AC #1s:
"All Night Long (All Night)" by Lionel Richie
"Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper
"Drive" by The Cars
"Careless Whisper" by Wham!
"Rhythm of the Night" by DeBarge
"Everytime You Go Away" by Paul Young
"These Dreams" by Heart
"Live to Tell" by Madonna
"In Too Deep" by Genesis
"I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)" by Whitney Houston
"Got My Mind Set on You" by George Harrison
"Shattered Dreams" by Johnny Hates Jazz
"1-2-3" by Miami Sound Machine
"Waiting for a Star to Fall" by Boy Meets Girl
"Eternal Flame" by The Bangles
July 10, 2011
July 9, 2011
The effect of AIDS realism on containment of gay deviance
By now most straight people have either heard, read, or just noticed with their lying eyes that AIDS never was a problem for heterosexuals, and continues to be a non-issue today.
That is a totally different view from the mid-'80s through the early-mid-'90s, when it was new and frightening. Could you catch it from a public toilet seat? What about if some kid with AIDS went to your school and you shook his hand? And what if...? I still recall my schoolmates in fourth grade singing "Let's Talk About Sex" by Salt N Pepa, which tried to shock the straight listeners into taking safe sex seriously -- you don't want to be claimed by the AIDS epidemic, do you?
Over this same time, straight people have come to view AIDS as not a real threat to gays, and have therefore abandoned any duty to contain gay deviance ("oh puh-leeeease, what's the worst that could happen?"). This is just one of the many ways in which people have lost their former awareness of how messed up gay life is.
That seems strange -- shouldn't they have come to see AIDS as a uniquely gay threat? I think what's going on is that straight people are using themselves as a reference point or baseline to which they compare the danger to gays, and react accordingly to contain gay sexual behavior, give it the go-ahead, or shrug in puzzlement.
Here is a table of how straights react based on their beliefs along two key dimensions:
If straights perceive AIDS as a danger to themselves, it doesn't matter whether they think gays are just like us or are more deviant -- AIDS is at least as much of a danger to them, perhaps more. In either case, at least the same level of alarm will be sounded about gay behavior as about straight behavior (and recall that was quite an alarm in the '80s). Obviously the impulse to contain gays will be even greater if they are seen as even more deviant than straights, but that's more a difference of degree.
However, if straights perceive AIDS as not a problem for themselves, and also believe that gays are just like us, then they give the green light to gays to act however they want. If it's not wrecking us, why would it wreck them?
Even if they believe gays are more deviant, they don't have a good intuitive feel for just how much more deviant they are -- a little, somewhat, a lot, a whole big lot? All they sense is that AIDS is a bigger threat to gays than to us. But is that threat enough to warrant a policy of containment? Some will say it is and others that it isn't, squabbling over how dangerous is sufficiently dangerous.
Over the past 15-20 years, our society has moved farther down and to the right in that table. Still, it seems like the main cause of our turning a blind eye to gay self-destruction, and waving it on eagerly from the sidelines, was our more sanguine view of the threat that AIDS posed to us. When we ourselves were freaked out about it, that provided a powerful mental "anchor" that automatically made us see gay behavior as worrisome (if they're just like us) or downright frightening (if they're more deviant).
Unfortunately this suggests that the surest way to get back on track of keeping gays from destroying themselves and polluting the broader society is to send a good scare into straights about AIDS or some other STD, and that arguing over whether gays are just like us or are deviants might not prove very effective. Note that the panic among straights would not have to result from lying about the prevalence of AIDS among straights -- you can imagine two fairly similar groups reading over the same prevalence estimates, and one freaking out while the other shrugged its shoulders. It's the perception of the objective data that matters.
Since straight people have turned off the alarm as they figured out what the prevalence truly was among us, I doubt that we could be scared back to where we were 20-25 years ago. Sadly, I think it will take something like the successor to AIDS to break out among gays, just as the original was new and terrifying even to straights in the 1980s and early '90s. And who knows, we may have more than an unfounded fear the next time around -- no two pathogens are alike, so maybe AIDS v.2.0 really can be caught from public toilet seats or bathroom door handles.
That is a totally different view from the mid-'80s through the early-mid-'90s, when it was new and frightening. Could you catch it from a public toilet seat? What about if some kid with AIDS went to your school and you shook his hand? And what if...? I still recall my schoolmates in fourth grade singing "Let's Talk About Sex" by Salt N Pepa, which tried to shock the straight listeners into taking safe sex seriously -- you don't want to be claimed by the AIDS epidemic, do you?
Over this same time, straight people have come to view AIDS as not a real threat to gays, and have therefore abandoned any duty to contain gay deviance ("oh puh-leeeease, what's the worst that could happen?"). This is just one of the many ways in which people have lost their former awareness of how messed up gay life is.
That seems strange -- shouldn't they have come to see AIDS as a uniquely gay threat? I think what's going on is that straight people are using themselves as a reference point or baseline to which they compare the danger to gays, and react accordingly to contain gay sexual behavior, give it the go-ahead, or shrug in puzzlement.
Here is a table of how straights react based on their beliefs along two key dimensions:
If straights perceive AIDS as a danger to themselves, it doesn't matter whether they think gays are just like us or are more deviant -- AIDS is at least as much of a danger to them, perhaps more. In either case, at least the same level of alarm will be sounded about gay behavior as about straight behavior (and recall that was quite an alarm in the '80s). Obviously the impulse to contain gays will be even greater if they are seen as even more deviant than straights, but that's more a difference of degree.
However, if straights perceive AIDS as not a problem for themselves, and also believe that gays are just like us, then they give the green light to gays to act however they want. If it's not wrecking us, why would it wreck them?
Even if they believe gays are more deviant, they don't have a good intuitive feel for just how much more deviant they are -- a little, somewhat, a lot, a whole big lot? All they sense is that AIDS is a bigger threat to gays than to us. But is that threat enough to warrant a policy of containment? Some will say it is and others that it isn't, squabbling over how dangerous is sufficiently dangerous.
Over the past 15-20 years, our society has moved farther down and to the right in that table. Still, it seems like the main cause of our turning a blind eye to gay self-destruction, and waving it on eagerly from the sidelines, was our more sanguine view of the threat that AIDS posed to us. When we ourselves were freaked out about it, that provided a powerful mental "anchor" that automatically made us see gay behavior as worrisome (if they're just like us) or downright frightening (if they're more deviant).
Unfortunately this suggests that the surest way to get back on track of keeping gays from destroying themselves and polluting the broader society is to send a good scare into straights about AIDS or some other STD, and that arguing over whether gays are just like us or are deviants might not prove very effective. Note that the panic among straights would not have to result from lying about the prevalence of AIDS among straights -- you can imagine two fairly similar groups reading over the same prevalence estimates, and one freaking out while the other shrugged its shoulders. It's the perception of the objective data that matters.
Since straight people have turned off the alarm as they figured out what the prevalence truly was among us, I doubt that we could be scared back to where we were 20-25 years ago. Sadly, I think it will take something like the successor to AIDS to break out among gays, just as the original was new and terrifying even to straights in the 1980s and early '90s. And who knows, we may have more than an unfounded fear the next time around -- no two pathogens are alike, so maybe AIDS v.2.0 really can be caught from public toilet seats or bathroom door handles.
July 8, 2011
Fewer rites of passage, dead field trip edition
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July 7, 2011
Footloose trailer and music video (the re-make)
There's now both a trailer out for the re-make of Footloose and a music video for the song "Fake ID."
God, are they really thinking of re-doing not just the movie but the soundtrack too? Watching the trailer and the video, I heard a cover of the original "Footloose" song, but the rest was entirely new songs -- rap, emo, and fucking country. Probably the least do-you-wanna-dance? genres around. I understand that they want to make it more contemporary, so put in some mid-2000s pop music -- that was OK to dance to: Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out," Madonna's "Hung Up," OutKast's "Hey Ya!"...
It looks like I guessed correctly before about how there would be almost no sustained, close-in dancing or slow-dancing. It's either solo or standing lapdance -- hey-look-at-me stuff all around. Do the makers of this movie even know what "cut footloose" means? It means losing your self-consciousness and melting into a group-vibe, not individual contestants posing and whoring for attention.
Yeah, we know that this is how the dorky and anti-social young people today dance, but this movie would have been a good opportunity to show the audience what they're missing by showing only or mostly face-to-face dancing between people within each other's personal space, just letting go.
I'll probably end up seeing it for sociological research purposes, but for those who can already smell a bad movie approaching, here's a better and condensed version of the action and music (yes, that is totally the chick from Halloween):
God, are they really thinking of re-doing not just the movie but the soundtrack too? Watching the trailer and the video, I heard a cover of the original "Footloose" song, but the rest was entirely new songs -- rap, emo, and fucking country. Probably the least do-you-wanna-dance? genres around. I understand that they want to make it more contemporary, so put in some mid-2000s pop music -- that was OK to dance to: Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out," Madonna's "Hung Up," OutKast's "Hey Ya!"...
It looks like I guessed correctly before about how there would be almost no sustained, close-in dancing or slow-dancing. It's either solo or standing lapdance -- hey-look-at-me stuff all around. Do the makers of this movie even know what "cut footloose" means? It means losing your self-consciousness and melting into a group-vibe, not individual contestants posing and whoring for attention.
Yeah, we know that this is how the dorky and anti-social young people today dance, but this movie would have been a good opportunity to show the audience what they're missing by showing only or mostly face-to-face dancing between people within each other's personal space, just letting go.
I'll probably end up seeing it for sociological research purposes, but for those who can already smell a bad movie approaching, here's a better and condensed version of the action and music (yes, that is totally the chick from Halloween):
July 6, 2011
Why, despite higher average IQs, aren't Jews and Asians world-class social scientists?
Compared to the European average IQ of 100, Ashkenazi Jews are about 1 standard deviation above, at 115, and Northeast Asians are at about 110. If we imagine IQ as a type of "height," and let's say that the average European male was 5'10, it would be as if Jews were on average 6'1 and Asians 6'0. This IQ advantage makes these two groups over-represented in the hard sciences, where braininess makes a big difference in who succeeds vs. who doesn't.
But what about the social sciences? They're not as "hard," but they still require an ability to look at a bunch of stuff and draw patterns out of it, to lock several of these basic patterns into a single more abstract pattern, and so on. So, groups with higher IQ should be over-represented in these fields as well, all else being equal.
And yet there's virtually no major thinker in the social sciences who was insightful, original, broadly visionary and who was also of Northeast Asian background.
Jews are certainly over-represented among major thinkers in the social sciences (see some of the lists of influential Jews in various fields at JINFO). But just about all of the big deals were either nutcases or frauds -- Marx and Freud being the most egregious examples. Slightly lower in overall influence but still joining those two are Boas in anthropology, Derrida in philosophy, and the leaders of neoliberal economic physics-envy.
The only major one who strikes me as insightful, original, and whose vision touched an incredibly broad array of topics was Durkheim in sociology and anthropology. I'm not counting those who did good original work in a limited field, but whose results weren't like a revelation, for example Asch and Milgram in social psychology. Chomsky hits all the marks too, but I don't see that work as part of social science, as he studies properties of an individual's brain or mind without attention to a larger social context. And his linguistics work is more like that of a molecular biologist than a zoologist. I can see how others would include him, though, so that makes one "for-sure" and one "possible" exception to the trend for major Jewish social science thinkers to have come straight from the loony bin.
A major confusion when talking about the disproportionate number of Jews in crazy circles is to think that they're just over-represented everywhere requiring high IQ -- including the sane and brilliant circles. Again I just don't see that when going through the lists at JINFO or thinking off the top of my head. I know there are exceptions at lower levels of accomplishment, but I'm talking really breakthrough figures.
Why do these brainy groups not dominate the social sciences like they do the harder sciences (intellectually, not numerically)? Clearly high IQ is not enough -- you also need a good intuition for how human beings work inside and among each other. I trace the underwhelming performance of these two groups to the ecological niches that they are adapted to, which have relaxed the selection pressures for keen social intelligence and thereby redirected selection to improve other traits.
Asians just seem not to get people at all, not that they have very clear and crazy views about people. For instance, they are poorer than Caucasians at reading faces for basic emotional expressions. They tend to blur "fear" and "disgust," as a result of focusing too much on the eyes and not taking in information from more of the face. This seems like a dialed-down social intelligence, one that sees more noise around the signal, not one that mixes up, say, "fear" and "joy." Since they don't perceive as much about people, they just don't get very interested in social sciences to begin with, or acting, stand-up comedy, rock music, and so on.
What relaxed selection for social intelligence in Asians, and redirected the body's resources into other traits, is the intensive agriculture that they have practiced for nearly 10,000 years. Really intensive agriculture brings hierarchical social structures along with it, to coordinate a highly complex system. For example, you might need to irrigate the land. Small-scale gardeners (horticulturalists), such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa, can just send a woman out with a spade to dig up the ground, plant stuff, and have it grow without needing to divert a river. To thrive in such a top-down society, you shouldn't try to figure out how people work -- you just need to do what you're told so that the whole big machine runs smoothly.
And in your hour-by-hour work, you're engaged mostly with a bunch of stuff that does not have a mind of its own -- your tools, the ground, seeds, plants, and so on. Smaller-scale gardeners, doing less intense work, have plenty of time to socialize. Hunter-gatherers ditto, plus they have to get inside the mind of the animals they're hunting. Pastoralists (animal herders) also have to be able to sympathize with the needs and feelings of their livestock in order to be the best shepherd. As for interactions with people, herders live in far less authoritarian groups, so there's a good deal of buddy-buddy among the in-group members. And even when they encounter someone from the out-group, the interaction takes the form of a showdown in a lawless borderland, where it pays to be able to get inside his head.
All of that is a long way of saying that groups adapted to intensive agriculture will have an impaired social intelligence, such as among Central Americans and East Asians. It's not that their social sense is haywire or biased -- just out-of-focus. Hunter-gatherers would probably make good social scientists if they were smarter, but they tend to have the lowest average IQs, and small-scale gardeners are only somewhat smarter. The key group to have in your population in order to make good social science is pastoralists -- as a rule-of-thumb, you find them wherever at least a good-sized minority can drink milk, from the Northwestern Indian subcontinent through the Middle East and Levant, around the Mediterranean, and into Europe. Although animal herding is a more recent development in East Africa, I'll bet they'd make good social scientists too, compared to other Sub-Saharan Africans.
That's Asians. But what's the deal with Jewish social science? They were restricted to a white-collar occupational niche for close to 1000 years in Europe, serving as tax farmers, money lenders, and other financial and commercial roles. That removes them even further from normal chummy social interaction than does intensive agriculture, but unlike Asians they have produced very clearly articulated, very influential, and very nutty pictures of human nature. Where does this vision that is not fuzzy but clear and almost hallucinatory come from?
Well, if you were a tax farmer or money lender in Medieval Europe, you did not enjoy all the protection of the modern state and market economy. If you made a bad decision, you could have gotten wiped out -- no welfare state to bail you out (in fact, they would have cheered a banker going bankrupt). Some of these bad decisions could be asocial -- like you forget to carry the 1. But a good deal would have been social, for example if you gave the other party the benefit of the doubt and they ended up screwing you. Unlike Asians, then, Jews had fairly frequent interactions with other people, but they were mostly adversarial in nature.
Since even a small miscalculation in that case could prove disastrous, it is more advantageous to set a low threshold for the "nah, that person stinks" detector. In those occupations in those times and places, better to assume that everyone else was stupid, selfish, and treacherous. That way, you'll make sure to do the calculations yourself and to not get taken advantage of by deadbeats.
Imagine if a group of mostly endogamous people were only allowed to work as guards and wardens in the prison system -- would it pay in Darwinian terms for them to have a rosier or darker view of human nature? I would not expect accurate and insightful social science to come from such a group. When your social interactions with your fellow man are mostly adversarial and in the context of a power imbalance that favors you, you aren't going to see human sociality very clearly -- indeed, you will behold a distorted reality, seeing phantom selfishness where there is none, and having a blind spot to the common sense that makes your charges smarter than you think.
Only when you frequently relate to other people on equal terms, experiencing both their good and bad tendencies, will you have a clear basic picture to work with when kicking ideas for social science around your head.
But what about the social sciences? They're not as "hard," but they still require an ability to look at a bunch of stuff and draw patterns out of it, to lock several of these basic patterns into a single more abstract pattern, and so on. So, groups with higher IQ should be over-represented in these fields as well, all else being equal.
And yet there's virtually no major thinker in the social sciences who was insightful, original, broadly visionary and who was also of Northeast Asian background.
Jews are certainly over-represented among major thinkers in the social sciences (see some of the lists of influential Jews in various fields at JINFO). But just about all of the big deals were either nutcases or frauds -- Marx and Freud being the most egregious examples. Slightly lower in overall influence but still joining those two are Boas in anthropology, Derrida in philosophy, and the leaders of neoliberal economic physics-envy.
The only major one who strikes me as insightful, original, and whose vision touched an incredibly broad array of topics was Durkheim in sociology and anthropology. I'm not counting those who did good original work in a limited field, but whose results weren't like a revelation, for example Asch and Milgram in social psychology. Chomsky hits all the marks too, but I don't see that work as part of social science, as he studies properties of an individual's brain or mind without attention to a larger social context. And his linguistics work is more like that of a molecular biologist than a zoologist. I can see how others would include him, though, so that makes one "for-sure" and one "possible" exception to the trend for major Jewish social science thinkers to have come straight from the loony bin.
A major confusion when talking about the disproportionate number of Jews in crazy circles is to think that they're just over-represented everywhere requiring high IQ -- including the sane and brilliant circles. Again I just don't see that when going through the lists at JINFO or thinking off the top of my head. I know there are exceptions at lower levels of accomplishment, but I'm talking really breakthrough figures.
Why do these brainy groups not dominate the social sciences like they do the harder sciences (intellectually, not numerically)? Clearly high IQ is not enough -- you also need a good intuition for how human beings work inside and among each other. I trace the underwhelming performance of these two groups to the ecological niches that they are adapted to, which have relaxed the selection pressures for keen social intelligence and thereby redirected selection to improve other traits.
Asians just seem not to get people at all, not that they have very clear and crazy views about people. For instance, they are poorer than Caucasians at reading faces for basic emotional expressions. They tend to blur "fear" and "disgust," as a result of focusing too much on the eyes and not taking in information from more of the face. This seems like a dialed-down social intelligence, one that sees more noise around the signal, not one that mixes up, say, "fear" and "joy." Since they don't perceive as much about people, they just don't get very interested in social sciences to begin with, or acting, stand-up comedy, rock music, and so on.
What relaxed selection for social intelligence in Asians, and redirected the body's resources into other traits, is the intensive agriculture that they have practiced for nearly 10,000 years. Really intensive agriculture brings hierarchical social structures along with it, to coordinate a highly complex system. For example, you might need to irrigate the land. Small-scale gardeners (horticulturalists), such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa, can just send a woman out with a spade to dig up the ground, plant stuff, and have it grow without needing to divert a river. To thrive in such a top-down society, you shouldn't try to figure out how people work -- you just need to do what you're told so that the whole big machine runs smoothly.
And in your hour-by-hour work, you're engaged mostly with a bunch of stuff that does not have a mind of its own -- your tools, the ground, seeds, plants, and so on. Smaller-scale gardeners, doing less intense work, have plenty of time to socialize. Hunter-gatherers ditto, plus they have to get inside the mind of the animals they're hunting. Pastoralists (animal herders) also have to be able to sympathize with the needs and feelings of their livestock in order to be the best shepherd. As for interactions with people, herders live in far less authoritarian groups, so there's a good deal of buddy-buddy among the in-group members. And even when they encounter someone from the out-group, the interaction takes the form of a showdown in a lawless borderland, where it pays to be able to get inside his head.
All of that is a long way of saying that groups adapted to intensive agriculture will have an impaired social intelligence, such as among Central Americans and East Asians. It's not that their social sense is haywire or biased -- just out-of-focus. Hunter-gatherers would probably make good social scientists if they were smarter, but they tend to have the lowest average IQs, and small-scale gardeners are only somewhat smarter. The key group to have in your population in order to make good social science is pastoralists -- as a rule-of-thumb, you find them wherever at least a good-sized minority can drink milk, from the Northwestern Indian subcontinent through the Middle East and Levant, around the Mediterranean, and into Europe. Although animal herding is a more recent development in East Africa, I'll bet they'd make good social scientists too, compared to other Sub-Saharan Africans.
That's Asians. But what's the deal with Jewish social science? They were restricted to a white-collar occupational niche for close to 1000 years in Europe, serving as tax farmers, money lenders, and other financial and commercial roles. That removes them even further from normal chummy social interaction than does intensive agriculture, but unlike Asians they have produced very clearly articulated, very influential, and very nutty pictures of human nature. Where does this vision that is not fuzzy but clear and almost hallucinatory come from?
Well, if you were a tax farmer or money lender in Medieval Europe, you did not enjoy all the protection of the modern state and market economy. If you made a bad decision, you could have gotten wiped out -- no welfare state to bail you out (in fact, they would have cheered a banker going bankrupt). Some of these bad decisions could be asocial -- like you forget to carry the 1. But a good deal would have been social, for example if you gave the other party the benefit of the doubt and they ended up screwing you. Unlike Asians, then, Jews had fairly frequent interactions with other people, but they were mostly adversarial in nature.
Since even a small miscalculation in that case could prove disastrous, it is more advantageous to set a low threshold for the "nah, that person stinks" detector. In those occupations in those times and places, better to assume that everyone else was stupid, selfish, and treacherous. That way, you'll make sure to do the calculations yourself and to not get taken advantage of by deadbeats.
Imagine if a group of mostly endogamous people were only allowed to work as guards and wardens in the prison system -- would it pay in Darwinian terms for them to have a rosier or darker view of human nature? I would not expect accurate and insightful social science to come from such a group. When your social interactions with your fellow man are mostly adversarial and in the context of a power imbalance that favors you, you aren't going to see human sociality very clearly -- indeed, you will behold a distorted reality, seeing phantom selfishness where there is none, and having a blind spot to the common sense that makes your charges smarter than you think.
Only when you frequently relate to other people on equal terms, experiencing both their good and bad tendencies, will you have a clear basic picture to work with when kicking ideas for social science around your head.
July 5, 2011
The waning interest in extreme types: height and looks
The post below on the disappearance of midgets from pop culture walked through the basic links from rising violence rates to a greater interest in the unusual. The other side of the no-more-midgets pattern is of course the disappearance of giants. Chewbacca, Jaws (the James Bond character), the Predator, Andre the Giant's character in The Princess Bride, Sloth from The Goonies, Bigfoot (where did he run off to anyway?), the giant in Twin Peaks ... we haven't seen much of a fascination with freakishly large people during the past 20 years -- CGI, etc., do not count because only a real-life human that big is a cause for wonder.
What about attractiveness? Here too you don't see the same attention to the farther-away-from-average folks. At the far ugly end, there was Screech from Saved by the Bell and Martha Dumptruck from Heathers. And at least until she starts to get made over, Sissy Spacek in Carrie is one of the few characters whose mere sight turned my stomach during a movie. She's not fat, doesn't have a horribly asymmetrical face, but there's something about her skin that just gave me the willies. The one who takes the cake, though, is that ranting crone from The Princess Bride. ("Rubbish, filth, slime, muck -- BOO! BOO! BOOOO!")
These are characters whose physical repulsiveness is necessary for the role, not who just happened to be played by ugly people. Aside from that girl in Precious, no one seems interested in studying what life's like at that extreme. It's not a real exception since it was never very popular, but the indie Welcome to the Dollhouse from 1995 also had an ugly girl in the lead role of awkward teenage misfit Dawn Wiener, unlike the cute chick who played Juno.
At the opposite end, the drop-dead gorgeous babes have all gone extinct as culturally visible types. Here is a somewhat recent Joel Stein article on the fall of the supermodel from the early-mid '90s through today. Women chosen only for their beauty no longer appear in ad campaigns, on the covers of magazines, and all the other places that people used to assume models would dominate forever. They've been replaced by actresses, TV show hosts, singers, etc. Even their most attractive members won't be the best-looking because they must also be able to act or sing decently, whereas models (used loosely) are free of that constraint, although they do have to be able to express a range of emotions.
Just like the characters whose ugliness is integral to their role, others require a mega-babe for the part. In both Vacation and Christmas Vacation, how are they supposed to tempt a gung-ho family man away from his wife, who is already attractive, unless they introduce a woman so stunning that we understand what made him give in? He's so committed to his wife that nothing less than a rock video vixen type could make him seriously consider stepping out. A woman like Cameron Diaz, Katy Perry, or Megan Fox does not have looks overpowering enough to fry the rational circuits of Clark Griswold's brain when she asks, "Well, are you gonna go for it?" ("This is crazy, this is crazy....")
In the past 15 to 20 years, we have gone back to the previous era of falling crime, the mid-'30s through the late '50s, when the popular sex symbols had already made a name for themselves in acting, singing, or something else. Bettie Page was an exception; most of those pin-ups were of established actresses, including the most iconic pin-up of Betty Grable.
Similarly, the last peak period of model visibility, the '60s through the '80s, was like the earlier era of rising crime, circa 1900 to 1933. It's true that the sex symbols of the Jazz Age like Clara Bow and Louise Brooks were actresses, but they didn't really act, being silent film stars. I'm sure that required more beauty-irrelevant skills than a model's job, but they were still seen and not heard. They were not known primarily for their competent or excellent acting skills -- meaning those that involve verbal communication -- and incidentally for their good looks. If she was a knockout and could express a range of emotions, that's what counted for her to become a sex symbol or style icon, not unlike the requirements for a supermodel.
And it's not as though the Jazz Age wanted for a supply of real actresses and singers from whom to draw sex symbols. Mass-market popular music had taken off, and so had radio dramas and comedies, not to mention live acting. It's just that, when the goal is to produce a sex symbol, why require them to be skilled at acting, singing, etc.?
Hopefully by the next time the crime rate starts climbing again, the whole country won't be bloated with obesity, and we'll get to enjoy another Jean Shrimpton, Cheryl Tiegs, or Cindy Crawford.
What about attractiveness? Here too you don't see the same attention to the farther-away-from-average folks. At the far ugly end, there was Screech from Saved by the Bell and Martha Dumptruck from Heathers. And at least until she starts to get made over, Sissy Spacek in Carrie is one of the few characters whose mere sight turned my stomach during a movie. She's not fat, doesn't have a horribly asymmetrical face, but there's something about her skin that just gave me the willies. The one who takes the cake, though, is that ranting crone from The Princess Bride. ("Rubbish, filth, slime, muck -- BOO! BOO! BOOOO!")
These are characters whose physical repulsiveness is necessary for the role, not who just happened to be played by ugly people. Aside from that girl in Precious, no one seems interested in studying what life's like at that extreme. It's not a real exception since it was never very popular, but the indie Welcome to the Dollhouse from 1995 also had an ugly girl in the lead role of awkward teenage misfit Dawn Wiener, unlike the cute chick who played Juno.
At the opposite end, the drop-dead gorgeous babes have all gone extinct as culturally visible types. Here is a somewhat recent Joel Stein article on the fall of the supermodel from the early-mid '90s through today. Women chosen only for their beauty no longer appear in ad campaigns, on the covers of magazines, and all the other places that people used to assume models would dominate forever. They've been replaced by actresses, TV show hosts, singers, etc. Even their most attractive members won't be the best-looking because they must also be able to act or sing decently, whereas models (used loosely) are free of that constraint, although they do have to be able to express a range of emotions.
Just like the characters whose ugliness is integral to their role, others require a mega-babe for the part. In both Vacation and Christmas Vacation, how are they supposed to tempt a gung-ho family man away from his wife, who is already attractive, unless they introduce a woman so stunning that we understand what made him give in? He's so committed to his wife that nothing less than a rock video vixen type could make him seriously consider stepping out. A woman like Cameron Diaz, Katy Perry, or Megan Fox does not have looks overpowering enough to fry the rational circuits of Clark Griswold's brain when she asks, "Well, are you gonna go for it?" ("This is crazy, this is crazy....")
In the past 15 to 20 years, we have gone back to the previous era of falling crime, the mid-'30s through the late '50s, when the popular sex symbols had already made a name for themselves in acting, singing, or something else. Bettie Page was an exception; most of those pin-ups were of established actresses, including the most iconic pin-up of Betty Grable.
Similarly, the last peak period of model visibility, the '60s through the '80s, was like the earlier era of rising crime, circa 1900 to 1933. It's true that the sex symbols of the Jazz Age like Clara Bow and Louise Brooks were actresses, but they didn't really act, being silent film stars. I'm sure that required more beauty-irrelevant skills than a model's job, but they were still seen and not heard. They were not known primarily for their competent or excellent acting skills -- meaning those that involve verbal communication -- and incidentally for their good looks. If she was a knockout and could express a range of emotions, that's what counted for her to become a sex symbol or style icon, not unlike the requirements for a supermodel.
And it's not as though the Jazz Age wanted for a supply of real actresses and singers from whom to draw sex symbols. Mass-market popular music had taken off, and so had radio dramas and comedies, not to mention live acting. It's just that, when the goal is to produce a sex symbol, why require them to be skilled at acting, singing, etc.?
Hopefully by the next time the crime rate starts climbing again, the whole country won't be bloated with obesity, and we'll get to enjoy another Jean Shrimpton, Cheryl Tiegs, or Cindy Crawford.
July 4, 2011
Swimsuits that gave girls legs for days
Sometime later I'll write up a proper analysis of how underwear and swimsuit shapes have responded to changes in the violence rate, as part of the larger project on how appearances respond to societal changes. For now I'll just note that progress in how attractively girls make themselves up can easily be lost -- and thankfully recovered -- because of the cyclical nature of fashion. However, it is not due to the "wheel of fashion" that drags along even unwilling individuals, that changes only in order to change. Rather, fashion changes in response to broader changes in society and shifts in people's mindsets, worldviews, behavioral strategies, and so on, the primary driver of which is the trend up or down in the level of violence.
One unfortunate casualty of the past 20 years of falling crime has been super-high-rise underwear, which, as the model from Christmas Vacation is pointing out, shows the full line of the leg from the thigh through the hips and all the way up to the waist. An artificially straight-across line breaks up the natural flow of the curves in the hip area, especially the diagonal line of the pelvic bones that get interrupted by horizontal waistlines but that are there in all their natural beauty when the waistline is cut very high.
Of course this change is much more visible in swimsuits, which follow underwear in fashion but are more public. Whether you were at the beach or just browsing the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, you couldn't have helped but notice how dead the leggy look has been. In fact, the only famous image of a recent celebrity posing in a hip-bearing swimsuit -- and a neon green one, no less -- is of Borat. (Here he is with several girls, all of whose swimsuits are cut straight across.)
It seems only fitting on Independence Day to honor the multicultural and immigrant origins of those who have improved our native culture as sex symbols. So here to revive the "she's got legs" look are a Czech, an American with Greek and Turkish ancestry, and an Australian. God Bless America. (Click to enlarge -- oh just go ahead!)
One unfortunate casualty of the past 20 years of falling crime has been super-high-rise underwear, which, as the model from Christmas Vacation is pointing out, shows the full line of the leg from the thigh through the hips and all the way up to the waist. An artificially straight-across line breaks up the natural flow of the curves in the hip area, especially the diagonal line of the pelvic bones that get interrupted by horizontal waistlines but that are there in all their natural beauty when the waistline is cut very high.Of course this change is much more visible in swimsuits, which follow underwear in fashion but are more public. Whether you were at the beach or just browsing the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, you couldn't have helped but notice how dead the leggy look has been. In fact, the only famous image of a recent celebrity posing in a hip-bearing swimsuit -- and a neon green one, no less -- is of Borat. (Here he is with several girls, all of whose swimsuits are cut straight across.)
It seems only fitting on Independence Day to honor the multicultural and immigrant origins of those who have improved our native culture as sex symbols. So here to revive the "she's got legs" look are a Czech, an American with Greek and Turkish ancestry, and an Australian. God Bless America. (Click to enlarge -- oh just go ahead!)
July 2, 2011
And now for something more refreshing
I can't leave a post about attention whores at the top of the page for long -- it'll just feed them. So how about a musical interlude from a low-point in the attention whoring cycle.
July 1, 2011
How does the girls-gone-wild culture reflect the prudification of society?
From Time Magazine:
That's from the original 1951 article on the Silent Generation, although it sounds remarkably familiar. Unlike the femme fatale of film noir, or the "Whatever Lola Wants" type, young girls from the '60s through the '80s were definitely not "aggressive, coarse, dominant" -- that was the era of the high school sweetheart type, from Marcia Brady to Mallory Keaton to Kelly Kapowski.
Also familiar is the semi-public striptease and the general atmosphere of girls gone wild. Sex is a private affair, so when young people are truly more sexual, they play Seven Minutes in Heaven, where the maker-outers enjoy the privacy of a dark closet, or they pair off into unoccupied rooms in the house, the back seat of someone's car, or other place where they can slip out of public view. Spin the Bottle involves public sexuality, but hardly -- just a kiss.
Aside from the streaking fad -- and I think a good deal of them were males anyway -- there was not a whole lot of attention whoring based on sex appeal during more sexual times. Here we have to distinguish sluts, teases, and attention whores. Sluts make themselves up to signal an easy sexuality, and they follow through on that promise. Teases also sexualize their appearance, and although they won't just give everything away up front like a slut will, they will still give something back to the guys who approach them, even if only a little. They are also flirty and social, and they have a boy-crazy sort of mind.
Attention whores, though, use their appearance and behavior to draw in the looks of a large male audience, but they don't give anything back to the clueless dorks who follow them around like it's the first girl they've ever seen. They don't get a rush from the playful back-and-forth like teases do, as they are not very interested in interacting with boys in the first place. They're only out to get lots of easy attention and validation without having to put out for the boys, flirt with them, or even be physically near them -- just within eyesight. The majority of girls dancing around on YouTube or in night clubs (these days anyway) are attention whores, for example.
This also explains the whole girl-on-girl fad at parties during the housing bubble euphoria. Most of us, me included, looked at that and thought, "How slutty is our society becoming?" But now that we know that young people have become steadily less sexual since a peak sometime in the late '80s or early '90s, it makes better sense -- what easier way to get maximal male attention while not having to interact with them at all? Just kiss your bff, or maybe have her grind her ass in your lap, in front of a large crowd.
Back when kids were still sexual, a girl at a party wanted to talk to, make out with, or sleep with a boy -- and what would making out with another girl in public do to achieve that goal? So instead, they sought out boys to flirt with or sent them a signal to come over and make the first move.
The tendency for boys and girls to move apart from each other during times of falling crime therefore shifts the distribution of female sexuality away from the slut-and-tease direction and toward the attention whore. The tease is the ideal for society -- young girls are going to crave attention no matter what, so it's best that they be somewhat choosy and cautious while still being flirtatious and social. When the distribution has more teases, its extreme will include more sluts, but a handful of sluts is far more preferable to a mass of attention whores. Sluts more or less keep their business to themselves, whereas attention whores give off public pollution by the ton. And those handful of sluts aren't going to destroy society, whereas the off-putting behavior of attention whores just grates away further at the falling trust levels during safer times.
And while a girl who sleeps around is somewhat of a sexual deviant, she still seems mostly recognizable as a human being, just one with poor impulse control or something. The complete anti-sociality of the attention whore, though, not to mention the public displays of omg look at those two chicks in thongs making out!!!! that they use to get their attention, make them even more bizarre specimens and harder to sympathize with.
When falling violence levels push the sexes apart, probably because females feel less of a need for males then, the civilizing effect that we have on each other degrades. Look at men who have withdrawn from interacting with girls -- their whole lives just break down, as they hide away in their man-cave all day. The counterpart to the extreme male tendency of "just leave me alone with my stuff" is the extreme female tendency to pose and prance around just to soak up attention without giving anything back, like some parasite.
If you're not already, it's time to get comfortable with a higher level of violence than we currently have, unless you prefer a world peopled with coarse and pushy attention whores.
Says a Minneapolis priest: "The young American male is increasingly bewildered and confused by the aggressive, coarse, dominant attitudes and behavior of his women. I believe it is one of the most serious social traits of our time-and one that is certain to have most serious social consequences."
The shrieking blonde ripped the big tackle's shirt from his shoulder and Charlestoned off through the crowded room, fan-dancing with a ragged sleeve. In her wake, shirts fell in shreds on the floor, until half the male guests roared around bare to the waist. Shouts and laughs rose above the full-volume records from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The party, celebrating the departure of a University of Texas coed who had flunked out, had begun in midafternoon some three hours earlier. In one corner, four tipsily serious coeds tried to revive a passed-out couple with more salty dog (a mixture of gin, grapefruit juice and salt). About 10 p.m., a brunette bounded on to the coffee table, in a limited striptease. At 2 a.m., when the party broke up, one carload of youngsters decided to take off on a two-day drive into Mexico (they got there all right, and sent back picture postcards to the folks).
That's from the original 1951 article on the Silent Generation, although it sounds remarkably familiar. Unlike the femme fatale of film noir, or the "Whatever Lola Wants" type, young girls from the '60s through the '80s were definitely not "aggressive, coarse, dominant" -- that was the era of the high school sweetheart type, from Marcia Brady to Mallory Keaton to Kelly Kapowski.
Also familiar is the semi-public striptease and the general atmosphere of girls gone wild. Sex is a private affair, so when young people are truly more sexual, they play Seven Minutes in Heaven, where the maker-outers enjoy the privacy of a dark closet, or they pair off into unoccupied rooms in the house, the back seat of someone's car, or other place where they can slip out of public view. Spin the Bottle involves public sexuality, but hardly -- just a kiss.
Aside from the streaking fad -- and I think a good deal of them were males anyway -- there was not a whole lot of attention whoring based on sex appeal during more sexual times. Here we have to distinguish sluts, teases, and attention whores. Sluts make themselves up to signal an easy sexuality, and they follow through on that promise. Teases also sexualize their appearance, and although they won't just give everything away up front like a slut will, they will still give something back to the guys who approach them, even if only a little. They are also flirty and social, and they have a boy-crazy sort of mind.
Attention whores, though, use their appearance and behavior to draw in the looks of a large male audience, but they don't give anything back to the clueless dorks who follow them around like it's the first girl they've ever seen. They don't get a rush from the playful back-and-forth like teases do, as they are not very interested in interacting with boys in the first place. They're only out to get lots of easy attention and validation without having to put out for the boys, flirt with them, or even be physically near them -- just within eyesight. The majority of girls dancing around on YouTube or in night clubs (these days anyway) are attention whores, for example.
This also explains the whole girl-on-girl fad at parties during the housing bubble euphoria. Most of us, me included, looked at that and thought, "How slutty is our society becoming?" But now that we know that young people have become steadily less sexual since a peak sometime in the late '80s or early '90s, it makes better sense -- what easier way to get maximal male attention while not having to interact with them at all? Just kiss your bff, or maybe have her grind her ass in your lap, in front of a large crowd.
Back when kids were still sexual, a girl at a party wanted to talk to, make out with, or sleep with a boy -- and what would making out with another girl in public do to achieve that goal? So instead, they sought out boys to flirt with or sent them a signal to come over and make the first move.
The tendency for boys and girls to move apart from each other during times of falling crime therefore shifts the distribution of female sexuality away from the slut-and-tease direction and toward the attention whore. The tease is the ideal for society -- young girls are going to crave attention no matter what, so it's best that they be somewhat choosy and cautious while still being flirtatious and social. When the distribution has more teases, its extreme will include more sluts, but a handful of sluts is far more preferable to a mass of attention whores. Sluts more or less keep their business to themselves, whereas attention whores give off public pollution by the ton. And those handful of sluts aren't going to destroy society, whereas the off-putting behavior of attention whores just grates away further at the falling trust levels during safer times.
And while a girl who sleeps around is somewhat of a sexual deviant, she still seems mostly recognizable as a human being, just one with poor impulse control or something. The complete anti-sociality of the attention whore, though, not to mention the public displays of omg look at those two chicks in thongs making out!!!! that they use to get their attention, make them even more bizarre specimens and harder to sympathize with.
When falling violence levels push the sexes apart, probably because females feel less of a need for males then, the civilizing effect that we have on each other degrades. Look at men who have withdrawn from interacting with girls -- their whole lives just break down, as they hide away in their man-cave all day. The counterpart to the extreme male tendency of "just leave me alone with my stuff" is the extreme female tendency to pose and prance around just to soak up attention without giving anything back, like some parasite.
If you're not already, it's time to get comfortable with a higher level of violence than we currently have, unless you prefer a world peopled with coarse and pushy attention whores.
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