That Girl from Derwent dwells on the value of religion this Christmas.
That Girl from Derwent has learned a few more things about prejudice since moving up North.
That Girl From Derwent reckons if you're going to be offensive, you should find a better reason.
That Girl from Derwent considers why it is that some words have wider implications than others.
The perpetual conundrum for British womankind: do men want to snog, marry or, God forbid, avoid me? The BBC TV programme that takes ‘fake’ looking women and transforms them (with the help of a monotone photo booth with an exaggerated sense of its own femininity and fashion sense) into more demure, ladylike women has become a guilty pleasure for many bored students. As Natalija Sasic pointed out in her blog on The Yorker, there is an element of “allure” that many of us succumb to.
However, I am with Natalija in her slight disgust at how judgemental the programme encourages viewers to be, even if I won’t join her in referring to the women as “hags”. When I found myself revelling in how typically white and middle-class I look in comparison to many of the participants on the show, I stopped watching it. My mum taught me not to say anything if it isn’t nice, and all those years of dedicated parenting were going down the pan, along with the rainforest of face wipes dished out to the women on the show.
But what I hate the most about this programme is how it manages to contort self-respect into simply reflecting the aesthetic preferences of ‘real’ men on the street. When many of the women on SMA find out that most of the five or so men polled would ‘avoid’ them, rather than snog or marry them, their faces painfully reveal how eager they all are to receive male attention. Deprived from this by a careless vote on the street, they are normally more accepting of their ‘make-under’ when the votes eventually go in their favour. Remarkably, now, most of the men want to snog them, and some are so transfixed by their new baker-boy hat and mascara-with-no-eye-shadow that they throw all caution to the wind, and want to marry them.
Of course, none of the men want to marry them. Also, in my opinion, most would snog them in a club when they’re wearing latex knickers and an elastic band bra. After all, if the women on the show are so eager for male attention, if they didn’t get it regularly, they wouldn’t go out wearing little more than an air of desperation. It’s too cold.
And yet, what the programme highlights but does nothing to address (yes, because it’s entertainment, but we’re students so let’s celebrate our powers of close-reading) is that whenever a women changes her appearance to please men on the street, they still retain an element of desperation. I respect a hell of a lot of these women. They brave horrible (generally northern) weather, take hours getting ready, have more confidence than most of us in the first place, and are still prepared to hear that bloody POD tell them the inevitable: “sorry love. Most of ‘em wouldn’t snog you”.
It just seems so strange to tell women not to dress tartily as men don’t like it. That’s not empowering, and it doesn’t make much sense. If men don’t want women to dress like glamour models, who cares if women do anyway? And if men want women to dress more conservatively, how is this worse than telling women to dress like Jordan? If the men quizzed on the street responded by saying “she’s clearly pretty, but I prefer women who look like cats. You know. Fluffy tails and that”, who cares? Or would they dish out a giant furry suit and whiskers? You never know. They just might. After all, what this programme really teaches us is that there ain’t no self-satisfaction unless the majority of people think you’re pretty. Ah, the twenty-first century. Breathe it in. It tastes like inevitable failure. Natalija's article
I think the point is more that the women degrade themselves for male attention and that it takes many hours to put on layers upon layers of make-up and they end up looking horrendous when men would like them just as much if they didn't put make-up on at all. It's showing women who think that they have to be somebody else that they can be themselves.
Of course that's not technically true; their style is chosen for them, the bias is obvious (where sometimes they ask people to guess the age and often they for some reason don't) and the people on the street that they talk to are obviously people in the street at daytime and not drunk guys at a club but I think it's a *good* thing that they're encouraging women not to be utter tramps.
If the women are shallow enough that male opinion is all they care about, they're not empowered anyway - they're already slaves to male opinion so they might as well use clothes instead of duct tape or the like. Obviously women should make their own minds up and display themselves as they wish but as with "Hotter Than My Daughter", TV can show that dressing ridiculously isn't always worth it...
#1 - I think the point of the article is that essentially, the women are still degrading themselves for male attention, but many people, including youself, feel that if they're going to degrade themselves they may as well do it in more 'socially acceptable' clothing. Isn't it bad when women are encouraged to dress for men anyway?
I meant that by showing them that they can both dress like a slag and look good or cover up completely and look good, they will know that it doesn't really matter how they dress as they will always look good to some men. Therefore it could enable them to dress solely on what they enjoy wearing and not what they think other people enjoy them wearing. Empowerment.
#1 - "I think it's a *good* thing that they're encouraging women not to be utter tramps." riiight...
Tramps = wearing as little as you can solely to try and get male attention when you can wear whatever you like and get the same attention.
What if "whatever you like" is to wear as little as you can?
Then that's fine. Hence my entire point!
But that sounds nothing like your entire point. Your original post suggests that women who look like 'utter tramps' do so soley in order to receive male attention, and therefore, if this is all they care about they should do it wearing more clothes: "they're already slaves to male opinion so they might as well use clothes instead of duct tape or the like." You don't seem to consider at all in this post that it's ok for women to dress revealingly if they enjoy it AS WELL as enjoying receiving male attention for it.
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