Atheism

Politics

Memes

Mind

Matters

String

Random

Interact

Feedback

Email

Links

Debate

Home

How not to be eaten by aliens

Big Women

Bigger Than Jesus

Gandhi: Great Soul or Arsehole?

I last let off steam with a good rant when the site first started five years ago. The time has come to have a go at all those little niggles that have been building up within me in that time.

After You

Why do car drivers assume that being allowed to walk in front of their car is an honour mere pedestrians should be overjoyed to receive?

Regularly I will be walking along the pavement when I come to a side street, a car is about to emerge onto the main road, the car pauses and the driver looks at me as if I'm stupid for not immediately gratefully walking in front of his deathtrap. Actually, strange as it may seem I would prefer that the car just got out of my fucking way and let me walk in total safety across the road when the car has driven off. I don't see it as an honour, I see it as a small but easily avoidable risk. A risk I choose not to take, a risk I have no intention of being harangued into taking.

If you saw a stranger on a cliff top and he asked you to hold his hand would you do so? If he got cross and gesticulated at you would you feel you had made the wrong decision?

I didn't ask the car to stop. I didn't expect the car to stop. I am not in the habit of voluntarily put my safety into the hands of other people for no significant benefit to myself. Now just fuck off out of my way, OK?

Two Tone Hair What do they thing they are doing? Women with two tone hair. It seems the height of fashion at the moment to have random chunks of hair dyed in different colours. What the fuck for? It looks stupid, it costs more money, takes time, simulates some form of genetic anomaly and will be looked back on in mere months as being terribly dated.

Have women any clear idea of what is attractive, and why? I suspect not.

Sometimes fashions manage to do very well, and actually make women look better. A classic example is a fashion of a couple of years ago for horizontal shading areas on the front of sweaters. This was brilliant. Think about the way the vast majority of fish are coloured. They have a dark upper surface and a pale lower surface. This acts as camouflage when looking down at them, against the deep blue-black of the water, it also works looking up at them against the pale grey of the surface and the sky. But not only that, it works side on too, by counteracting the shadows and highlights, making the three dimensional fish blend into the background. Those shaded grey sweaters were like dead fish. Upside down fish. They made the breasts stand out more without changing their shape. The dark shades under the breast deepened the shadows under the breast, the light areas on the upper surface made the upper surface appear more horizontal, as if it was catching more light because it was sticking out. The overall effect was to make the breasts slightly more noticeable, which was especially beneficial for well shaped medium-small breasts, giving them a silicone-free size boost by courtesy of optical illusion.

Did the fashion designers actually know what they were doing? What do you think? Fashion designers helping women look attractive, what planet do you live on?

The job of fashion is to make all women wear the same things so that unattractive features cannot be hidden. Clothes which flatter curvaceous women, pear-shaped women, fat women and women over the age of 35 must be stamped out. All imperfections must be laid bare so that only the beautiful people can look beautiful.

In societies where men determine what women wear the clothes hide the shape of women and they hide female beauty. Female beauty is not under male control. It is arbitrarily distributed among the population. Powerful men would prefer a fairy tale world in which princesses (their daughters and their potential wives) were beautiful because they were princesses and ordinary women were plain women, and vice versa. In societies where young unmarried women have freedom competition between women is encouraged by single women, not by men.

The phrase “traditional society” seems to be synonymous with male dominated, for good reason. In male dominated societies women wear clothes which are traditional, never fashionable, why change clothes with the season when you can make your wife wear your dead mother's clothes? Waste not, want not. Glory be to God! When the man wants his woman he will order her undressed, why on Earth would he want to be teased by the sight of unobtainable attractive women in the streets? What else is the theatre for? Much better to tell the mullahs and priests that women should be modest.

Have you ever seen an ugly bride or girl at a prom night? Making dresses that make most women look attractive isn't all that difficult. So why do women wear any other kind of clothing? That's simple. Women want to compete, which means they want there to be losers. Have you ever seen Claudia Schiffer look unattractive? Of course not. Looks like hers can shine through wearing anything. It really doesn't matter what an attractive woman wears she will look attractive. So in a world where the attractive women are in control what do you think the chances are that fashions will be evolved that make dowdy women look gorgeous?

A beautiful woman can walk up to the water hole where the cowboy is swimming, take his dirty smelly denim dungarees five sizes too big for her, put them on, tie a belt around her tiny waist, pull her hat to a crazy angle and still look more attractive than the schoolteacher or librarian in their prim skirts. There is a constant dynamic going on in fashion between those women who look attractive in anything and those who need to dress carefully. The naturally gorgeous women are constantly pushing fashions to be less inherently flattering to the less than ideal figure. This is of course resisted by the majority of women, but that resistance is eventually worn down.

Today I see women being forced into skin-tight hipster trousers and thongs. A few years ago shaving or trimming pubic hair was considered kinky, something only pornstars and prostitutes did. Now it is virtually essential to wear high street fashions. Trousers are being worn so low that they are exposing the pubic mound itself.

I don't know if anybody has ever told you girls, but most women look DOG ROUGH in skin-tight hipsters and exposed navels. Women more than a few kilos over or above their ideal weight should avoid parading that fact by making the world look at their midriff. Keira Knightley's navel shows that the woman does not have any body fat at all. It is hideous. I regularly see young girls walking down the road baring their bellies at me, puppy fat is great, I have no problem with it, but I really don't want to see it bouncing up and down on a bare midriff as a girl walks down the street. Bouncing up and down on my groin, well, maybe...

You've got a perfect midriff. I'm happy for you. Yes I would like to fill it with salt and dip my boiled egg into it but please don't go exposing it and making it fashionable. The world would be a much more beautiful place if women learned to keep their clothes on. Nobody benefits from mass nudity or semi-nudity except those people who don't need any help to be beautiful.

There was a watershed in fashion and clothes politics with the invention of the bikini. It made some sense to make the swimsuit smaller, just to cover those parts deemed too sexual to be exposed. Of course it doesn't actually make that much sense in terms of swimming. Women who need to swim for a living usually still prefer the traditional one piece. Whatever supposed benefits there are from two piece costumes which expose the midriff I strongly suspect they are mostly bogus, as evidenced by the fact that men wear tops that reach down and meet the shorts or dispense with tops all together. If exposing the midriff is essential in beach volleyball why do some men wear full length tops?

Really beautiful women with perfect bodies don't need to wear skimpy clothes to look attractive, they would look attractive in dustbin bags. My point is that women should resist the tendency of the “I've got it, I'll flaunt it” brigade to try to make dustbin bags fashionable so they are the only women who look attractive! The super-attractive can pursue two separate spiteful strategies, they can make everybody wear really revealing clothes to show up the imperfect, or they can wear shapeless dowdy clothes that ensure that naturally dowdy women following their leads will become totally invisible. I suggest that women who are not by nature spectacularly beautiful should reject fashionable clothes all together and go out of their way to destroy and subvert trends and wear clothes that actually make themselves look good. Fuck fashion! (And please don't buy any crap from those exploitative dyslexics, FCUK)

Why should the words fashion and clothing be synonymous? The job of clothes is to make you feel comfortable, to preserve your modesty and avoid offending or over-stimulating other people. Why should these aims be subverted by a need to change clothes that are still fully functional due to barely controlled peristaltic waves in the zeitgeist?

Fashions run through industries as fast as those industries can force them. In clothing that speed is very fast. In interior design and cars that speed is slower, in furniture it is slower still, in architecture it is relatively glacial. Level headed designers hate design classics, transitory trends are far more profitable. Naïve designers think it's great to work on a Rolls Royce or a Jaguar. Smart designers work for Ford, and get paid far more often for doing a more demanding job. Why design a new fragrance for Chanel once every twenty years when you can work for Avon and have ten times more work?

Disney: a Special Case

This is the company that seeks to make childhood its own personal possession.

They bought Winnie the Pooh and made him American. Come on, can anybody ever forgive the company that did that? As far as crimes against civilization goes that is second only to the burning of the library at Alexandria. And on the subject of transatlantic accent trauma need I remind you which company was responsible for giving Dick Van Dyke the idea that he could give a convincing rendition of a Cockney accent?

They run themeparks which milk the sympathy of working class people by peddling the lie that dying children will die in misery and go to hell if they don't first go to Disneyland and get photographed next to a six foot tall three fingered mouse with a permanent expression on its face as if it has been given a japaleño enema. You are more likely to find dying children at Disneyland than Lourdes (although they probably do stand a better chance of a spontaneous recovery).

This is the company that gets more namechecks on the BBC than Sellotape, Hoover, Thermos and Fablon put together, the company that thinks it owns Saturday morning and Bank Holiday Monday TV and can place its company name and logo everywhere as if it was a ruddy charity, including in the name of TV programs. I needn't bother pointing out that no other private company or corporation of any kind gets such treatment. And of course what did Disney do in return to help British TV? Ban the use of their feature films on TV even up to FORTY YEARS after their cinema debut.

Clicky Sticks

This pimple has finally burst. I hate clicky-sticks! Walking sticks and cruthes made out of tubular aluminium with pegs in them that click everytime a person moves them. Is there nobody out there than can design a practical and height-adjustable walking aid that is silent? I really can't believe that this is a problem that should still be baffling our planet's scientists and engineers. I find it offensive that they make a noise. If our species has the technology to put a man on the Moon (or fake it so well even the Soviet Union was fooled) surely there must be a way to make a simple bloody walking stick that doesn't click click click every time you use it. Come off it, a walking stick, it isn't exactly high tech stuff is it? How about some appropriate technology here? Is there no way of joining two telescopic tubes that allows height adjustment and at the same time provides a strong and silent lock? The simple answer to that is that yes of course there is. They exist, I've seen them. So why should the majority of such sticks still make a noise? Is it that the designers can't be bothered, that they just don't care about the stuff they are making because it is only going to be used by old people or sick people and it doesn't matter if they make a noise when they move?

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited