Skin Deep

I just watched "Are you hot? The search for America's Sexiest People" and after trying to second guess the judges and laughing at the behind the scenes' footage of people crying because they were judged too harshly, my brain started working and ruined the fun.

Just as I was really getting into Lorenzo Lamas' frame of mind when he points a laser at barely conceivable flaws in a pretty girls skin, I remembered one of those statistical studies; Judith Langlois and Lori Roggman, 'Attractive faces are only average', in Psychological Science (1990), p.115-121.

The set-up in their test was to grab a random set of fifteen black and white pictures of either men or women and show them to test-subjects of the opposite sex. The subjects would rate the pictures on how attractive the people in them were.

One of the pictures was a grayscale composite of the others, i.e. if you put all the pictures in a raster and assigned a value between white and black for every pixel, you'd only have to take the average of all the values to come up with the 'average' picture. This picture was consistently ranked the most attractive.As John Erler explains in this bit about Roman beauty standards, this might well be how we perceive beauty as human beings anyway.

But the herd of homogenous himbo's and the gaggle of garrulous guttersnipes that manage to claw themselves to the top of the celebrity pile manage a neat bit of regression to the average in more fields than one. Scientology triumphs there for a reason.

Juvenal's satires gave us 'Mens sana in corpore sano.' A useful phrase for sadistic gym teachers to torture their hapless students with. What it actually says is;'Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.' ,which means something like: 'Wouldn't it be great if there was a healthy mind in a healthy body'. Juvenal's snipe at the vogue for physical exercise in first century Rome.

I've always equated the average with intense boredom and I know I'm not alone in this. The most beautiful thing I saw this week were two hideous people on the train kissing messily and without the slightest hint of shame in the seat opposite mine. It was at least as endearing as it was nauseating. I hope they have intelligent children.

Hindsight

I was reading this article on the onion av club and suddenly became tired with the whole business of critiquing popular culture. It's a kind of melancholy that afflicts the coveted 18 to 40 demographic these days. A clever friend of mine (I can't find any of his papers online, but maybe somebody knows what this entailed.) once said that we were living in an age of instant nostalgia.

It makes a lot of sense to keep cannibalising previous decades rather than define this one. They did it in previous decades as well. It's no coincidence that Blue Velvet looks like it was made in the fifties. Nor was the reappearance of the Woodstock festival in the nineties a charming cosmic accident. It's not like culture moves in a half a Kondratieff cycle though. The mundane and much more likely explanation is thirty years is a decent amount of time for a teenager to grow up into a captain of entertainment industry and write a love letter to his favourite fad.

But all these information age tools have turned all of us into critics. We're living in an increasingly self reflexive world, constantly looking back. A classical metaphor like Orpheus looking back at Eurydice springs to mind. We can't help but look back even though we know she'd just behind us, and we kill her with preemptive nostalgia. If we'd only waited a few more years, she would have come out of the underworld unscathed.

This isn't doing me much good. Nor is it working for anybody else really. I'm only 25, which means I'm far too young to not recognise any of the bands on MTV. I doubt most 18-year olds have any idea either. A band is launched, make a video and seem to disappear immediately. Only to be remembered a few weeks later. I'm guessing that hurts the record industry more than illegal downloads.

I'm worried I'm helping create a barren, featureless pop culture landscape. Me and everyone else trying to sprout opinions, but finding no footholds, no purchase, while we try to claw our way to the top of the irony mountain, unaware that it's already falling over, ready to crush us under the weight of our own opinions.

Goldilocks

The classical feminist viewpoint about veils is that they are by definition an alienating identity-erasing scourge. They signify these women as some man's property and all that this implies.

When the whole French debate broke loose last year, the brand new idea (for me at least) that veils were in some way empowering to wear, reared it's ugly head. That, like so many other feminist core issues this was essentially about a woman's right to choose. Apparently, it's just as bad to deny women the right to wear the veil as it is to force them. Cue exploding heads.

This year, there's a whole new feminist wave starting to swell. Ariel Levy just wrote female chauvinist pigs, in which she expounds the view that some women have gone too far in their quest for self-empowerment.

Specifically, she argues that they've mistaken sexual power for the be-all and end-all of liberation, only leaving themselves open to consumer culture's faux-empowerment. It does seem likely that after justice, truth, beauty and the concept of revolution, empowerment can now be sold as a commodity. So that's why it always looks like so much fun.

So, to sum up; Women acting like whores is not cool, neither is women acting like nuns.
As a man, I can't say either side is appealing to me, so this time I am going for a compromise. I want my porridge just hot enough.