Another image: What are they selling?

Here are two wine labels for your consideration.

You can do your own analysis on this one. Have a great weekend all.

A little light culture: be a middlebrow!

A long time ago now I was drawn into an effort to promote a minority ethnic culture. I say "drawn in" because I didn't want to do it but I felt like I couldn't refuse because that might come across as racist. It was no accident that I felt that. The woman who drew me into the thing, not herself a member of the minority ethnic group, spent a lot of time driving home the notion that it would be racist to refuse.

As I went along I noticed two things. The first was that the members of the ethnic minority in question didn't live their culture. They were like hypocritical Christians who are fully Christian for the duration of Sunday services and then maybe an hour or so afterwards and then purely secular the rest of the week. They showed up for events but tuned right back out the second the events were over. The second thing I notices was that they were quite right to do so. For their culture was boring.

And it's not just their culture, all ethnic minority cultures are boring. If it was all you had, it would do but it's not all we have.

Most of us live with the culture we pretend to hate, which is to say commercial culture. It's not nearly as bad as it is made out to be. With all its faults,  commercial culture beats any ethnic minority culture in the world. Any ethnic minority given the chance to vote with their feet will rapidly abandon their traditional culture in favour of commercial culture.

We may think we like some minority cultures but that is because we only have to visit them. The subculture of black Americans, for example, has a huge appeal to those of us who are not black Americans but only as a source of variety. Having only it would be like being forced to eat Thai food three meals a day, 365 days a year; no matter how much you like Thai food, you'd hate having it all the time.

And yet commercial culture not enough. It's not that we want to reject commercial culture, although, as I say, we all pretend we want to, but we want something better. If you trust the culture mavens, we have only two choices. One is authenticity, which is to say some sort of ethnic culture, and the other is high culture.

I don't buy that. I think middlebrow is just fine.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Holding doors for women?

The movie I was planning to write about today arrived this morning so I'll put it off. Now that summer is over, I may go to one film a month.

A while ago Dr. Helen had a piece up about a guy who got laughed at for holding the door open for a woman. He sent her this account:

This morning we happened to be on the elevator together as we arrived at work. When arrived at our floor, I pushed the button to hold the elevator doors open as she walked out. She walked to the card reader that unlocks the entrance and swiped her card. I opened the door when I heard it unlock and held it for her as she stepped through. She actually laughed at me. And not in a good way.

I have to tell you, I am skeptical about the whole story. Not that it happened, I am quite sure it did happen. What I have doubts about is the writer's interpretation of his own motives and of why the woman responded the way she did.

I always hold doors for women. I also step back to let them get on the bus first. I have done this for decades now and I could count the number of times it was not well received on the fingers of one hand.

What makes me suspicious of the account above is the introductory paragraph:

I work for a small software company in Austin, Texas. I am 58. We have a young intern, perhaps 25, from Germany. I was introduced to her once two weeks ago, but we have not worked together and so I have not really spoken with her since.

Maybe the guy really was just being chivalrous but you can see how a twenty-five year old woman surrounded by mostly older geeks just might become just a  little wary of guys doing nice things for her. I don't know this guy or what specifically happened but anything at all about a chivalrous act that suggests that part of your intention in doing it is create an opportunity to begin talking to the woman you do it for will put her off and quite rightly so. 

In any case, there is an easy-to-find charitable explanation of the young woman's admittedly poor behaviour and any gentleman should have been able to find it; that is that she is surrounded by and outnumbered by the sort of nerdy guys who work at small software companies and a few weeks' exposure to them has made her cynical about older guys paying her attention.

Context matters. If I let a woman I have never seen before get on the bus before me and then leave her alone that is one thing. If I start doing favours for a woman I am in a professional relationship with that is another thing. If the woman in question is a hot young German babe of 25 years who is doing an internship, then it is really something else altogether. Interns are only one step above janitor in terms of power relations at the office so they are going to be very insecure in how they respond to you.

And you have to look the part to play the part. The woman you open a door for has only a second to interpret your intentions as whether they are benevolent or not. If you are wearing a jacket and tie and make eye contact only long enough to signal your intention that she go first, you will get a better response than if you are dressed casually and keep looking at her face as if you expect her to want to be your friend now. And don't take this opportunity to check out her breasts!

It's also a very bad idea to give her the impression that you think that big mean old door is too much for her to handle.  And I've seen guys leave elderly men and women to struggle with a big heavy door only to lunge across the room to yank it open for some young woman who obviously hits the gym six days a week.

And don't be rigid about how you do it. If a building has an air lock with two sets of doors you can only get the first one gracefully. Don't even try to get the second and if she responds to your getting the first for her by getting the second for you, give her a warm smile, say, "Thank you", and then just keep walking.

I do it because I like women and for no other reason. When we both arrive at the same place at the same time I give her precedence because she is a woman and I am grateful to her for just being there. I practice it. I work at making the gesture seem natural and effortless as if I didn't have to think about it, as if it was instinctual on my part. I make it a point of honour to treat the middle aged woman exactly the same way I treat the twenty-five year old. I never treat the incident as an opportunity to begin a conversation with a woman I've never met before. And that has paid off. I get a lot of smiles and thank yous.

It helps that I know my intentions are erotic. I'm not trying to pick anyone up but I do want to signal to women that I think they are special and beautiful and that they bring joy to my life simply by being women. 
 
By the way, the last few years I've noticed that younger women, which is to say between the ages of 19 to 25,  have started reacting very positively to minor chivalrous acts. It's pretty plain they have never had anyone do anything like this before and they can't help but be pleased.

This month's uncool quote

I'll repeat it first because it will be gone next month from the side of the page and this post would no longer make sense:

There is no fashion without panties. Christian Dior

I think some context is necessary here. Dior died the year before I was born. When I found the reference to what he had said, at the Chantelle website, my first thought was that maybe I am he reincarnated. An insane thought since I don't believe in reincarnation.  I felt a real sense of kindred spirit.

More important than my vanities, however, is this: Dior said it at a time when panties were an intimate secret. No one knew what a woman had chosen. Her panties did not show through her clothes or above the waistband of her skirt or pants. And the women whom Dior designed clothes for dressed in separate rooms so that their husbands would not know which panties their wife chose to wear most days. (That said, then as now, men do a lot of detective work to try and figure these things out and sometimes succeed far beyond what women realize. There was a time just recently when ....)

To come back to the point, and there is one, we could easily make a mistake and think that Christian Dior meant that women should pick their panties with an eye to pleasing others; that every woman should dress as if she was going to have sex later that day and that some man would undress her and see her lingerie choice.

He didn't mean that. He meant that fashion consists of what is seen and unseen. Fashion runs all the way down.

We might dismiss that as narcissism but it is the exact opposite of narcissism. The narcissist is motivated by shame and shame only comes from what is seen. The narcissist having no guilt worries not if her panties are ugly or boring so long as what can be seen passes muster. She may anticipate shame if she has a wardrobe malfunction but that isn't guilt but is only anticipatory shame.

The non-narcissist, on the other hand, feels guilty because, while her outward appearance passes muster, she knows it is just for show. For her the problem is not that today's unseen items disappoint a man she might have sex with but that they reveal, if only to her who chose them, that the outward dress is just vanity. She feels guilt because her actions prove that she is vain and concerned only with the public impression she might make even if no one else ever finds out.

There are, of course, two directions out of this. One is to stop caring about even the outward appearance and choose her clothes with only the three Cs in mind: Comfort, Convenience and Conformity. And it's a free country, any woman can do that if she so wishes. An awful lot of women do although they are rarely noticed, another consequence of living in a free country.

But, and this is Dior's rather profound point, if a woman chooses to be beautiful, she has to do it all the way to the very center of her being for the sort of fashion the greats like Dior sought is a way of being, it is about becoming something and not just about doing something. The kind of fashion Dior cared about—which has almost nothing to do with the crass thing fashion is today—was about virtue.

Two paintings

I have been thinking about these two paintings a lot lately.

The Beloved by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The Virgin by Gustav Klimt

Sorta political: Charity and poverty

Back when I was in my early twenties I spent several years coaching in kids in the projects. One of supervisors enraged me by saying one day, "Poverty is not caused by lack of money." I thought, as I have said before, it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. What else could cause poverty? It took me a decade to realize that he knew what he was talking about and I didn't.

But that presents us with a huge problem. For we should love and care for the disadvantaged but the easiest, and therefore our favourite, response, which is to say giving them money, doesn't actually do much good. In a lot of cases, giving money makes things worse.

So what do you do? Rather, What should I do? I'll be honest, I don't know.

Here is an image of poverty.

The people responsible for that mess might not strike you as poor if you met. And they aren't in the conventional sense of the word. They are among the most privileged and pampered class of people in the history of the world. They are university students.

That is the third pile of crap that has shown up in front of that house in the last three days. This load originally featured  another gas barbecue besides the one you can see. The first, with partially full propane tank attached, still worked. They also threw out a working cooler in the shape of a Red Bull can, a whole lot of Ikea furniture, including a chair that was brand new and another child's pool (that green thing on the top is the second such pool). It was a much bigger pile yesterday but scavengers have picked off the stuff with obvious resale value such as the working gas barbecue and propane tank.

The pools were used to put beer on ice during the parties they hosted. They didn't host a lot of parties but when they did the whole neighbourhood knew about it, as did the police who were inevitably called to break them up.

The first two piles were created by the students themselves as they dumped stuff it was too much trouble to move by the curbside as they headed out.  Those piles were also picked over by scavengers as much of the stuff still had monetary value. This third pile was the work of the crew the landlord had to hire to clean up the mess after they had gone.

There are, by the way, two charities that regularly swing through the neighbourhood with trucks who will pick up stuff like this. It never seems to occur to the university students who rent here to call them. Some students make a lot of noise about community and caring for the poor but you see very little evidence of concern for others in their actions. University students give less money to charities and do less volunteer work than just about any other group in our society even though they have more discretionary income and more free time than just about any other group in our society.

Students also still make a lot of noise about how poor and disadvantaged they are if you can believe it.

They all had cars. One of the kids was given a luxury SUV to go to school with. They drove too fast even though they were lousy drivers; one of them couldn't back out of the driveway without hitting another car and ended up having to park on the street all the time as a consequence..

Their parents looked very unhappy when they came to pick them up. Some of the students left quite early in the summer because they had not done well at school. The remaining students had to move at the end of summer because their landlord refused to renew the lease. The last few, to their credit, looked quite chastened as they left.

I find it particularly interesting because my church is sponsoring a refugee family who left a warn-torn country with nothing but what they could put in a suitcase. By any conventional definition of poverty, they should be poor. And yet they are not. They have hit the ground running and are well on their way. The students responsible for the mess above, on the other hand, strike me as very poor indeed. They don't need money, they need direction. They need adults with authority to step in and impose order and rules on them. Bot their parents and the universities have abrogated their responsibilities in that regard.

Nothing is ever women's fault, Part ?

Catch this teaser:

With the rise of procedures like vaginoplasty and labiaplasty to enhance the appearance of their genitalia or achieve some sort of sexual ideal, women are being "misled or confused about what is 'normal'," experts have revealed.

Well, it's a good thing this has been revealed by "experts" otherwise we might become skeptical.
If you read the article that comes from, you may want to take notice how utterly passive women seem to be. Notice for example, this paragraph:

She said that Internet pornography and removing pubic hair through Brazilian waxing or shaving give women unrealistic expectations about their bodies or what they believe men like and goes as far as to compare vaginal rejuvenation procedures to "new age female circumcision".

"She" in this case is Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia. She says that "Internet pornography" and "removing pubic hair" give women unrealistic expectations. They give women a false impression. Women don't "take" this onto themselves, they don't "reach" the wrong conclusions, they haven't "make a mistake" about the relative importance of some minor issue of personal appearance, or anything else that suggests intentionality or active participation on their part. No, once again, every stupid thing that some group of women do somewhere is something that has happened to them and, therefore, not their fault.

 Iglesia believes women have been "duped" by an entire culture that is oversexualized.

"Everyone sees 'Sex in the City' and are getting their public hair removed and looking down there," she said.

"They are watching Internet porn and looking at Playboy and Penthouse with a lot of touched up and airbrushed pictures," she said.

She said that with pubic waxing and grooming, younger women are "comparing".

"They feel like they are abnormal," she added.

Read that critically and you just might start thinking that there is something about women that is really at work here. Iglesia starts off blaming the culture but pretty soon she reveals something she, and everyone else, knows about the situation that isn't polite to talk about in our post-feminist culture. With all the waxing and grooming, "women are comparing". Here at last we get some confirmation that women are capable of active thought, although the active thought seems like something men are supposed to grow out of before leaving high school. Why can't women be held to the same standard?

How shocking it is to find that women are assessing the appearance of their genitals in comparison to other women. Because women never do that about anything else? It's not like there isn't a billion dollar industry that has grown up in response to women's desire to compare their faces, their hair, their clothes, their bodies, their speech patterns and the way they move to other women? It's not like there aren't websites where women can go and cheerfully dissect ever detail of any female public figure's appearance and self presentation?

And given that this stuff all exists, is anyone surprised that now that the pubic has become public, some women are obsessing about competing with other women on the basis of the appearance of their genitals? This isn't a man-driven issue. Guys aren't thinking, "Of all the women I might have a relationship with, I think I'll pick Lucy because she has a better looking Za Za."Rather, women are comparing with other women and, as they often do, putting far too much emphasis on sexual status.

Final question, wouldn't a society that is "oversexualized" be more concerned with actually having sex than with concerns about sexual appearance? Yes, sexual appearance would matter in such a society but don't you sometimes think that women are far more concerned with their sexual status than with actually having sex? Yes, those are rhetorical questions. But why do we forget this? Why say it's an overly sexual culture in the first place? Isn't that a distraction from the real issue which is the extraordinary lengths women will go to to get sexual status.

Is there any comparable male tendency that could pass by and attract so little critical attention?