inkbluesky

Why do women wear high heels and why did the kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

The short answer seems to be that women in heels are more likely to attract favourable notice.

In Sense And Sensibility, Jane Austen describes the character Elinor Dashwood as having a “delicate complexion, regular features, and… remarkably pretty figure”.

But Austen describes Elinor’s sister, Marianne, as “still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of height, was more striking”.

Heels bestow an artificial tallness and thus an advantage over those who are shorter by nature or lack of heel money. As the writer notes now that most women have the same access to height enhancement and the advantages are thus canceled out why wear them. She suggests that it is because heels are something of a cultural arms race where everyone has to agree all at once to wear sensible shoes. There is probably something to that. On the other hand high heels are part of coming of age, not all that different then getting to wear lip stick. They’re a kind of declaration, the male equivalent might be starting to shave or the opposite, growing a goatee. Much simpler to think about the kamikaze pilots, in tales of yore the equivalent of “suicide pilots”. While their planes were loaded with explosives with orders to take disparate measures to sink enemy ships their commanders also wanted them to survive if possible. Then who knows what problems the pilot might find between take off and the target - so a little head protection to survive and try again another day.

dreary day fun

“If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

Yahoo targets women with new ‘Shine’ site

The front page of Yahoo’s Shine is clean and, at least right now, light on ads.

Yahoo aims to be the top destination site in the lifestyles category, said Amy Iorio, general manager of Lifestyles at Yahoo. Women as a demographic is a good target, particularly given the number of women who use Yahoo (40 million women between the ages of 25 and 54 every month) and the fact that females tend to blog more than males.

“This is really a key audience for Yahoo,” she said. “We’ve been calling them ‘chief household officers’ internally.”

Yahoo’s efforts at doing original content haven’t all panned out, but this site is more of a hybrid. Articles and original blogs will come from a range of sources, including keeping Glamour, Epicurious.com, Style.com, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Health, and Good Housekeeping.

My eyes rolled a little when I saw Cosmo and Good Housekeeping, but then I clicked over and Tina Fey was on the front page so it can’t be all bad. They do have blogging/article tools so you can damn or praise high heels or pilots that don’t wear their helmets. There weren’t enough blogging/wiki/journal tools out there apparently.