rahrahfeminista
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
There are friends with whom you connect intellectually and enjoy hours of conversation. Then there are friends you can trust -- who care about you, look out for you. Occasionally, you find people who fall into both categories -- they're special ones. Seems obvious, I guess. But I'm just starting to understand these things.
Sunday, August 25, 2002
Nads, the amusingly named "Aussie" hair removal product, now has a commercial targeted directly at men. Rather than the typical sisterly praise-fest that features woman reveling in their newfound hairlessness and acceptability, it suggests that men should also remove their natural carpets, implying that greater desirability awaits. It also appeals to the usual performance gains for swimmers and bikers, but the main message is that the seductive woman who is embracing the hairless male model is more attracted to hairless men. The hairless man's back, facing the camera, is the center of all the attention.
I have to admit, I do take some pleasure in companies giving equal attention to profiting from male insecurity as they do female self-image concerns. If concerns about beauty are an unavoidable fact of life, as Nancy Etcoff argues in Survival of the Prettiest, then these signs that men are worrying about it more, like women tend to, encourages me.
In Survival, Etcoff argues that men find men's perceptions of women's attractiveness depends more on the woman's physical attributes, while women are more influenced by socio-economic status indicators. Key to accepting this argument is acceptance that women have depended on men for survival -- at least during the time that these tendencies were selected for in our species. So, in some way, augmenting men's vanity signals to me that perhaps the dependence relationship is thinning and men and women are growing closer in levels of empowerment and independence.
This is just me trying to explain a visceral reaction. This isn't a thesis to which I've thought of and accounted for counter-arguments. So discuss, develop, but don't get all hopping mad.
