inkbluesky

whats attractive

The female ideal pushed by laddie magazines has become as smooth and lifeless as an iPhone

Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth complained that women in the media were “mock-ups of living mannequins, made to contort and grimace, immobilized and uncomfortable under hot lights, professional set-pieces that reveal little about female sexuality.” She was right and she’s still right. But the women in FHM are an equally false representation of male desire. FHM is not a men’s magazine like GQ or Esquire. It’s a magazine for lads – for 15-year-olds. It serves adolescent boys with the fantasy that there is something or someone out there who is the “sexiest,” a comforting norm of male desire which does not exist and has never existed.

Most of us would probably agree with the statement in bold. The odd part is, the writer having said that still rants about how these women look. The women seem “manufactured”? Suppose that you look similar to one of the women that is on one of these attractive lists ( there are ones for men ) does that mean you’re plastic or artificial because by no fault, or credit for that matter of your own your genes made you look a certain way. So only people that wouldn’t win a reader’s poll on looks are real people. Aren’t we back to that saying about don’t hate me because I’m beautiful - while we all know that some attractive people can be incredibly narcissistic it is probably just as wrong to judge someone harshly because of the public adoration of their looks as it is because they’re don’t look like that ideal. There is the concern that these images raise unrealistic expectations in men. They probably do in some teens sometimes. Probably as often as sci-fi stories raise the possibility of being beamed across the galaxy. Most males grow up and realize that they’ll probably meet and have a relationship with a person that is approximately equal in looks to themselves and that they will not be beaming across space. Forget magazines, the movies and look around. Look at all the shapes, sizes, colors, dispositions, religions, height etc of couples. Obviously a lot of people are not sheep, at least when it comes to trying to live according to the rules of the slick paged beauty police. This is one of the few instances where the anecdotal evidence is a pretty good indicator of how people actually behave. Frequently author and teacher Camille Anna Paglia takes water, sugar and some lemons and somehow ends up with cranberry juice, but in her book Sexual Personae she was right about men being very visual in their take on the world. From cave walls to oil paintings to digital images men have liked to create and look at representations of women. Some women have enjoyed all the attention, some not. On the other hand just because men have a history of being so visually oriented doesn’t mean they don’t take other qualities into account.

steam train 1920s

Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds

Yes, he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass. Even his clothing — an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman’s waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery — is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview.

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

To some, “steampunk” is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. “To me, it’s essentially the intersection of technology and romance,” said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys.

My impression of steampunk was that is was mostly about architecture and industrial design from the around the 1890s to 1930 or so. That the NYT has tried to define it makes me feel a little better about maybe not getting it completely. It seems even the people really caught up in steampunk to some degree make it up as they go along.