The Vespans Are Coming! The Vespans Are Coming!
From the Encyclopedia Galacticana entry on Earth's decline and fall: "...a species whose sexual preferences had been shifted to embrace exaggerated physical deformity..."
One of the more amusing outcomes of the "Mary-Jane LOOOVES Doing Spidey's Laundry" Sideshow collectible has been the ease of playing Feminist Bingo with the comments. You can pretty much guarantee a BINGO by the first half of the thread, often getting two or three squares in a single comment. Which all goes to show how on-target the Bingo Card satirical exercise was, how trite and hackneyed, how stunningly unoriginal and above all, predictable the established male chauvinist dialectic is. Whether reciting from the general antifeminist list, or the specifically-fandom related lists, there is a reflexive, kneejerk, and seriously-devoid of any critical thought quality to the way they're trotted out so instantly and patly - I've only elsewhere met it among defenders of conservativism, both the academic First Things readership and the Rush Limbaugh listeners. The pattern of having a huge stash of stock phrases and tropes to pop out ("Tax and Spend!" "Contracepting Old Europe!" "Selfish Hedonism!") is very, very familiar.
But then, they're not actually intended as serious arguments in any philosophical sense - they're exercises in pure rhetoric, with the intention being to make us shut up and go away and stop making the guys feel uncomfortable about their unexamined lives and privileges. Which is why a satirical exercise like the Feminist Bingo Cards is so very much to the point - since the truth is not in them, nor they caring to be in it, trying to address them and their arguments respectfully and seriously is like fighting ghosts: they may be using words and the semblance of logic to create an appearance of rationality, but in actuality they're doing nothing but barking and growling, fangbaring and shoving to keep their position as Top Monkeys. You have to pull down the curtain and show the pitiful little man hiding behind it, instead.
But I've talked enough about rhetoric vs dialectic as martial arts in the past - this time I want to look at it from a visual arts background , and point out the serious strangeness of this phenomenon of finding women depicted as Mary-Jane is sculpted there, to be sexually attractive. Because one thing which keeps happening in the threads is, some guy comes along and says "I don't care, I think she's HOT!" as if that were the final word - he likes it, ipse dixit, that settles it. It occurs to me that the next time this happens, we should respond, "Thank you for sharing your kink with us! It's really fascinating that you are drawn to freakishly-deformed humanoid females in subservient postures! You know, personally, I'm really fond of androgynous, ambigously-oriented, impossibly-slender and willowy (yet strong!) males with long flowing hair, and seeing them in danger is a real turn-on. You want to see my bishonen collection?" Thereby undercutting the "I'm A Guy and so I have the final word on The Beautiful!" tone, and possibly sending them away twitching.
Only even that isn't a really good parallel, when it comes to the surreality of preferring women who are shaped like the statuette - that is to say, with starved waists and stick-thin legs and arms but enormous gravity-defying breasts and backbones that don't work like any actual human array of bones and muscles--
Imagine, if you will, that for some reason American women decided that hunchbacks were TEH SEXAYYY - say that, oh, George Clooney plays a dashing and sympathetic character suffering from untreated scolios in a surprise blockbuster, or Tom Hanks stars in the next live-action remake of Hugo's Bellringer -- and began openly preferring spinal assymetry in a man. Never mind that it was only prosthetic on screen - never mind that it's not healthy to have your back going off in ways that our genes weren't designed to - it becomes taken as a token of A Beautiful Soul Inside, and symmetry denigrated. So, in response, men start affecting hunches, even purchasing very expensive prosthetics to wear under their clothes, men with natural spine problems leave them untreated, and some extreme trend-followers go out and have their spines put out of whack by unscrupulous chiropracters at great expense, so as to get more female admiration and, ultimately, pussy. Believable? No? That's what we've been doing for millennia with rib-overlapping corsets, foot-binding, neck-stretching, poisonous cosmetics and now plastic surgery accomplishing the same deformities of wasp-waists, dainty feet, and taut facial skin - all with the goal of pleasing and attracting high-status male mates.
Now, to be sure, nobody's perfectly symmetrical, and a good deal of spinal variation is normal, and I'm certainly not saying that people with scoliosis etc are themselves defective and ought to be taken out of the gene pool. But having a number of relatives with chronic, congenital spine problems, some requiring surgery, I can say that none of them thinks it's a good thing to be stuck with, or something they would have chosen for the character-improving experience, or something that has any good trade-offs, the way I feel about my extreme myopia (hey, I can read 2-point type with my glasses off, this comes in handy sometimes.) It's not something that they are happy has been passed on to their children, and if people started going out and doing it to themselves for the sake of fashion, they'd think it was insane. Being out of pain and able to function freely is what they strive for, and sometimes attain.
And yet, induced physical deformity to the point of incapacity and unhealth - which all has deleterious effects on fertility and thriving offspring in ours like any species - has become a sign of sexual desirability in females, among high-status and upwardly-striving humans. There is something quite perverse in this, with no overtones of "kink" at all - as if the symptoms of jaundice or dropsy or wart-causing viruses were to become sexually attractive in a society, with natural jaundice/dropsy/papillomas being the most desired, but the synthesized appearance also acceptable as a substitute. (Think this is impossible? Think again - we already do this with foliage and flower plants, many of whom are only variegated because of deliberately cultivated viral infection...)
I am, of course, not the first to describe the surreality and dark humor of this phenomenon - there is a good address of it in The Screwtape Letters which deals with the fact that this creates two parallel problems: firstly, no human woman can attain the standards of skinny/smooth "perfection" in the media imagery, and so women are put on an endless cycle of stress and effort and dissatisfaction with themselves; and secondly, since no real female body can look like the pinups and airbrushed ads, men become increasingly turned-off by real women and real sex. And this is so, so true - I thought of this again as I hear how HDTV is actually bad for porn as voyeurs are forced to realize that women have OMGpores and are not actually as smooth as bone china even when waxed to oblivion (Myopic's NB: even perfectly-smooth glazed ceramic is not really smooth, up close.) And there is sweat coming out of them! Egads! And so this is causing them revulsion and distress, because when they get in up close in perfect detail to these supposedly "perfect", "ideal" (waxed, liposuctioned, silicone-stuffed) female bodies, their fantasies are shattered.
It isn't just the problem of wanting mute, compliant, undemanding, unthreatening sexual objects that makes all-too-many guys prefer porn (at least as long as it isn't too hi-res), it would appear. Real women just aren't desirable enough - we have bones and muscles, tendons and guts and textures to our bodies - for men raised to sexual maturity on a diet of unreality.
This really is a very recent phenomenon, too - at least, the skeletally-thin part of it; a swift traipse through any mid-sized art museum will quickly show that until the 20th century, "stick-insect" was not considered an aspect of female beauty, not even in the High Gothic era, and from the Venus de Milo to Ingres, despite corsets, women who were supposed to be beautiful and healthy were drawn with enough flesh to cover their bones completely. No nude goddess in the Western art tradition shows up looking like a pair of lollipops, and "skinny" was a negative with low-class social implications (just like "suntanned"), before our great-grandparents' generation, and the combination of the rise of cheap, subsidized food and most work moving indoors.
And so we come to the deformed figure of Mary-Jane as rendered by the Sideshow artists, and not only her impossibly-thin abdomen and gravity-defying musculature, but also her bizarrely-large feet. Several of us noticed the freakishly-thick insteps on the statuette and concluded that the sculptor doesn't actually know what our feet look like, when not wearing high heels, and thus carved MJ with feet that are both too short, front-to-back, and too thick, top-to-bottom, like Barbie feet with extra clay underneath them - and thus quite possibly hasn't actually ever looked at any real human women, buxom or not, clothed or unclothed, but only caricatures of us -- but I have a better and more plausible idea.
See, look at the bodily structure of the MJ sculpture - clothes and hair, as any art student knows, can hide a multitude of sins, so I've traced over the photo to eliminate the distracting lines of her garments - and at the forensic reconstruction of what the being in the statue must look like when erect with arms at sides.
This goes way beyond any amount of mere stylization. The Venus of Willendorf is a more realistically depicted woman, and Barbie looks positively normally proportioned, by comparison.
It's pretty obvious where all "her" internal organs must be, now, right? And why she needs such ginormous clodhoppers. It's really pointless to argue that the pose is physically impossible, that the human head alone is too heavy for that, and that even a reasonably fit and flexible woman would not be able to stand bent unsupported at a right angle with her heels together, and not fall over on her..nose - this simply is not a human being, and not supposed to be one, either. There must be very dense bones and muscles in those astonishingly-thin and overlong hind-limbs, to balance the upper thorax, which may have a large air cavity inside as well, making it less insupportable.
There are only two possible explanations:
1) This is supposed to be an alien which is taking on the appearance of MJ as far as it is able, in order to attack Spidey from within his own home, and the sinister grin is its gloating over having him at its mercy, symbolized by its fondling of his attire, representing his superpowers. What has happened to the real MJ? Oh noes! There will have to be an Unmasking of the monster, at a dramatic and possibly risque moment, and a rescue, of course.
2) I think, alas, this is the more likely scenario: over the past few decades, an alien species, probably insectile (chitin could stand up to the lordotic build without snapping in half at the waist), has been slowly reprogramming American males with a new sexual orientation, so as to make their invasion and assimilation of us easier. (When the Borg Queens arrive, their breasts will be bigger than their heads, and a significant majority of US leaders will be utterly incapable of resistance.) The adaptability of humanity has counterbalanced this somehow, as American females have recognized this changing attraction away from what is normal for our species and tried to compensate with artifice, which has always worked for us in the past. But the BEMs have upped the ante so far that we can't possibly keep up with them - no human can possibly be more wasp-like, with bony thin legs and bulbous body, than a wasp. The Bodysnatchers have invaded, and they look like RealDolls--
--C'mon, isn't that more likely, than that Sideshow's sculptors not only don't know how to represent the human form, didn't learn the basics in high school drawing I class, but can't even find a single real live woman to pose for them in order to get it right? Theory 2 also explains why it was an instant sell-out, despite the obvious deformity...
* I also can't figure out, speaking as someone with a lot of experience wearing, mending, and even making denim jeans, for myself and for a gaggle of small children who spent their free time climbing trees, sliding down dirt hills, roller skating, and falling down - how on earth her pants got ripped that way. The frayed cuffs on overlong pants is normal, and even the knee holes aren't too implausible, but that perfect huge slice on the rump and upper thigh - looks like someone took a razor blade to them. I've never seen that sort of damage in normal wear, not even on the pants I caught embarrassingly on a chain-link fence during a short-cut...
One of the more amusing outcomes of the "Mary-Jane LOOOVES Doing Spidey's Laundry" Sideshow collectible has been the ease of playing Feminist Bingo with the comments. You can pretty much guarantee a BINGO by the first half of the thread, often getting two or three squares in a single comment. Which all goes to show how on-target the Bingo Card satirical exercise was, how trite and hackneyed, how stunningly unoriginal and above all, predictable the established male chauvinist dialectic is. Whether reciting from the general antifeminist list, or the specifically-fandom related lists, there is a reflexive, kneejerk, and seriously-devoid of any critical thought quality to the way they're trotted out so instantly and patly - I've only elsewhere met it among defenders of conservativism, both the academic First Things readership and the Rush Limbaugh listeners. The pattern of having a huge stash of stock phrases and tropes to pop out ("Tax and Spend!" "Contracepting Old Europe!" "Selfish Hedonism!") is very, very familiar.
But then, they're not actually intended as serious arguments in any philosophical sense - they're exercises in pure rhetoric, with the intention being to make us shut up and go away and stop making the guys feel uncomfortable about their unexamined lives and privileges. Which is why a satirical exercise like the Feminist Bingo Cards is so very much to the point - since the truth is not in them, nor they caring to be in it, trying to address them and their arguments respectfully and seriously is like fighting ghosts: they may be using words and the semblance of logic to create an appearance of rationality, but in actuality they're doing nothing but barking and growling, fangbaring and shoving to keep their position as Top Monkeys. You have to pull down the curtain and show the pitiful little man hiding behind it, instead.
But I've talked enough about rhetoric vs dialectic as martial arts in the past - this time I want to look at it from a visual arts background , and point out the serious strangeness of this phenomenon of finding women depicted as Mary-Jane is sculpted there, to be sexually attractive. Because one thing which keeps happening in the threads is, some guy comes along and says "I don't care, I think she's HOT!" as if that were the final word - he likes it, ipse dixit, that settles it. It occurs to me that the next time this happens, we should respond, "Thank you for sharing your kink with us! It's really fascinating that you are drawn to freakishly-deformed humanoid females in subservient postures! You know, personally, I'm really fond of androgynous, ambigously-oriented, impossibly-slender and willowy (yet strong!) males with long flowing hair, and seeing them in danger is a real turn-on. You want to see my bishonen collection?" Thereby undercutting the "I'm A Guy and so I have the final word on The Beautiful!" tone, and possibly sending them away twitching.
Only even that isn't a really good parallel, when it comes to the surreality of preferring women who are shaped like the statuette - that is to say, with starved waists and stick-thin legs and arms but enormous gravity-defying breasts and backbones that don't work like any actual human array of bones and muscles--
Imagine, if you will, that for some reason American women decided that hunchbacks were TEH SEXAYYY - say that, oh, George Clooney plays a dashing and sympathetic character suffering from untreated scolios in a surprise blockbuster, or Tom Hanks stars in the next live-action remake of Hugo's Bellringer -- and began openly preferring spinal assymetry in a man. Never mind that it was only prosthetic on screen - never mind that it's not healthy to have your back going off in ways that our genes weren't designed to - it becomes taken as a token of A Beautiful Soul Inside, and symmetry denigrated. So, in response, men start affecting hunches, even purchasing very expensive prosthetics to wear under their clothes, men with natural spine problems leave them untreated, and some extreme trend-followers go out and have their spines put out of whack by unscrupulous chiropracters at great expense, so as to get more female admiration and, ultimately, pussy. Believable? No? That's what we've been doing for millennia with rib-overlapping corsets, foot-binding, neck-stretching, poisonous cosmetics and now plastic surgery accomplishing the same deformities of wasp-waists, dainty feet, and taut facial skin - all with the goal of pleasing and attracting high-status male mates.
Now, to be sure, nobody's perfectly symmetrical, and a good deal of spinal variation is normal, and I'm certainly not saying that people with scoliosis etc are themselves defective and ought to be taken out of the gene pool. But having a number of relatives with chronic, congenital spine problems, some requiring surgery, I can say that none of them thinks it's a good thing to be stuck with, or something they would have chosen for the character-improving experience, or something that has any good trade-offs, the way I feel about my extreme myopia (hey, I can read 2-point type with my glasses off, this comes in handy sometimes.) It's not something that they are happy has been passed on to their children, and if people started going out and doing it to themselves for the sake of fashion, they'd think it was insane. Being out of pain and able to function freely is what they strive for, and sometimes attain.
And yet, induced physical deformity to the point of incapacity and unhealth - which all has deleterious effects on fertility and thriving offspring in ours like any species - has become a sign of sexual desirability in females, among high-status and upwardly-striving humans. There is something quite perverse in this, with no overtones of "kink" at all - as if the symptoms of jaundice or dropsy or wart-causing viruses were to become sexually attractive in a society, with natural jaundice/dropsy/papillomas being the most desired, but the synthesized appearance also acceptable as a substitute. (Think this is impossible? Think again - we already do this with foliage and flower plants, many of whom are only variegated because of deliberately cultivated viral infection...)
I am, of course, not the first to describe the surreality and dark humor of this phenomenon - there is a good address of it in The Screwtape Letters which deals with the fact that this creates two parallel problems: firstly, no human woman can attain the standards of skinny/smooth "perfection" in the media imagery, and so women are put on an endless cycle of stress and effort and dissatisfaction with themselves; and secondly, since no real female body can look like the pinups and airbrushed ads, men become increasingly turned-off by real women and real sex. And this is so, so true - I thought of this again as I hear how HDTV is actually bad for porn as voyeurs are forced to realize that women have OMGpores and are not actually as smooth as bone china even when waxed to oblivion (Myopic's NB: even perfectly-smooth glazed ceramic is not really smooth, up close.) And there is sweat coming out of them! Egads! And so this is causing them revulsion and distress, because when they get in up close in perfect detail to these supposedly "perfect", "ideal" (waxed, liposuctioned, silicone-stuffed) female bodies, their fantasies are shattered.
It isn't just the problem of wanting mute, compliant, undemanding, unthreatening sexual objects that makes all-too-many guys prefer porn (at least as long as it isn't too hi-res), it would appear. Real women just aren't desirable enough - we have bones and muscles, tendons and guts and textures to our bodies - for men raised to sexual maturity on a diet of unreality.
This really is a very recent phenomenon, too - at least, the skeletally-thin part of it; a swift traipse through any mid-sized art museum will quickly show that until the 20th century, "stick-insect" was not considered an aspect of female beauty, not even in the High Gothic era, and from the Venus de Milo to Ingres, despite corsets, women who were supposed to be beautiful and healthy were drawn with enough flesh to cover their bones completely. No nude goddess in the Western art tradition shows up looking like a pair of lollipops, and "skinny" was a negative with low-class social implications (just like "suntanned"), before our great-grandparents' generation, and the combination of the rise of cheap, subsidized food and most work moving indoors.
And so we come to the deformed figure of Mary-Jane as rendered by the Sideshow artists, and not only her impossibly-thin abdomen and gravity-defying musculature, but also her bizarrely-large feet. Several of us noticed the freakishly-thick insteps on the statuette and concluded that the sculptor doesn't actually know what our feet look like, when not wearing high heels, and thus carved MJ with feet that are both too short, front-to-back, and too thick, top-to-bottom, like Barbie feet with extra clay underneath them - and thus quite possibly hasn't actually ever looked at any real human women, buxom or not, clothed or unclothed, but only caricatures of us -- but I have a better and more plausible idea.
See, look at the bodily structure of the MJ sculpture - clothes and hair, as any art student knows, can hide a multitude of sins, so I've traced over the photo to eliminate the distracting lines of her garments - and at the forensic reconstruction of what the being in the statue must look like when erect with arms at sides.
This goes way beyond any amount of mere stylization. The Venus of Willendorf is a more realistically depicted woman, and Barbie looks positively normally proportioned, by comparison.
It's pretty obvious where all "her" internal organs must be, now, right? And why she needs such ginormous clodhoppers. It's really pointless to argue that the pose is physically impossible, that the human head alone is too heavy for that, and that even a reasonably fit and flexible woman would not be able to stand bent unsupported at a right angle with her heels together, and not fall over on her..nose - this simply is not a human being, and not supposed to be one, either. There must be very dense bones and muscles in those astonishingly-thin and overlong hind-limbs, to balance the upper thorax, which may have a large air cavity inside as well, making it less insupportable.
There are only two possible explanations:
1) This is supposed to be an alien which is taking on the appearance of MJ as far as it is able, in order to attack Spidey from within his own home, and the sinister grin is its gloating over having him at its mercy, symbolized by its fondling of his attire, representing his superpowers. What has happened to the real MJ? Oh noes! There will have to be an Unmasking of the monster, at a dramatic and possibly risque moment, and a rescue, of course.
2) I think, alas, this is the more likely scenario: over the past few decades, an alien species, probably insectile (chitin could stand up to the lordotic build without snapping in half at the waist), has been slowly reprogramming American males with a new sexual orientation, so as to make their invasion and assimilation of us easier. (When the Borg Queens arrive, their breasts will be bigger than their heads, and a significant majority of US leaders will be utterly incapable of resistance.) The adaptability of humanity has counterbalanced this somehow, as American females have recognized this changing attraction away from what is normal for our species and tried to compensate with artifice, which has always worked for us in the past. But the BEMs have upped the ante so far that we can't possibly keep up with them - no human can possibly be more wasp-like, with bony thin legs and bulbous body, than a wasp. The Bodysnatchers have invaded, and they look like RealDolls--
--C'mon, isn't that more likely, than that Sideshow's sculptors not only don't know how to represent the human form, didn't learn the basics in high school drawing I class, but can't even find a single real live woman to pose for them in order to get it right? Theory 2 also explains why it was an instant sell-out, despite the obvious deformity...
* I also can't figure out, speaking as someone with a lot of experience wearing, mending, and even making denim jeans, for myself and for a gaggle of small children who spent their free time climbing trees, sliding down dirt hills, roller skating, and falling down - how on earth her pants got ripped that way. The frayed cuffs on overlong pants is normal, and even the knee holes aren't too implausible, but that perfect huge slice on the rump and upper thigh - looks like someone took a razor blade to them. I've never seen that sort of damage in normal wear, not even on the pants I caught embarrassingly on a chain-link fence during a short-cut...