yes. i'd add only that aoc's openness about managing and taking pleasure in management of her appearance sends both right and (a certain segment of the) left into outer orbit of craaaaayzyyyyy. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXqZllqGWGQ&ab_channel=Vogue
It's not like the right is very nice to liberal women otherwise though.
Part of it is just that if there is any way they can, they will frame the problem so they can attack a woman.
2: Well, they just can't see them when they're not beautiful. The rest of us are just a curious smudgey area. Or rather, a smudgey area which generates zero curiosity.
Maybe, but I can recall Rush making jokes about Chelsea Clinton's appearance when she was still a child.
True. I was going to continue on the gag of faux-justification, but it made me feel slightly ill.
I think the linked article misses the connection between rightwing bigotry and the possession of beauty, power, intelligence and wealth.
The author understandably doesn't want to waste time with the stupid argument that a socialist ought not wear nice clothes, but that's tied up in all of this.
AOC possesses qualities that, in rightwing orthodoxy, are only available to deserving people (as the author does point out).
But if you possess those qualities and don't tow the ideological line -- or straightforwardly violate ideological imperatives by being a minority or a woman -- then you are a traitor.
John Kerry was indisputably a war hero and a Democrat when he ran for president. The Right hated him specifically for his heroism. George Soros is rich, and is hated specifically for his wealth (though obviously being Jewish doesn't help).
AOC's existence is a violation of the natural order.
10: But Kerry was the presidential nominee, and Soros funds lots of campaigns (plus Jewish bugabear). Doesn't it seem like the AOC-vitriol is at a level all out of proportion to her influence?
AOC's existence is a violation of the natural order.
I understand what you're saying (and I think the link in the OP is smart), but the problem of talking about attractive women isn't purely a conservative one. I seem to recall, deep in the archives, discussions of attractive conservative women and I doubt that they make unfogged look particularly good (not sure that I remember enough to find a post in the archives, but I'd be a little curious).
I'm kind of not sure either about the exact equation at work here. Surely we can say that AOC is disproportionately famous relative to her power because of her looks. But I'd not say that this negates the deeper points about the natural order.
Who else can we say is hated for her beauty? (Not exclusively, but for using beauty against the PTB)
11: Maybe the criticism and the praise that she gets are out of proportion to her influence, but I think that anyone who attracts that much attention is, by definition, influential.
12: The problem on the left has (some) different attributes, I think.
I think part of what makes AOC's looks upsetting is that they aren't an important part of her biography. She's not Bess Myerson or Sarah Palin with a beauty pageant background, she doesn't have a professionally important romantic history (married to or having dated anyone politically powerful). Obviously her looks helped her get elected, but the same way Beto O'Rourke's did, not more than that.
And that's peculiar for women in power. She really is unusually pretty, but there's no non-insane way to say that she doesn't deserve her position because she faked her way into it with her feminine wiles. Which makes people who hate her lose their minds.
Didn't Beto at least use his good looks the traditional way (marrying money)?
dq captures something important in 1:
aoc's openness about managing and taking pleasure in management of her appearance
AOC is pretty, but Ilhan Omar is also unusually attractive. One gets the sense that Omar doesn't catch flak for that the way AOC does. Maybe the head-covering helps.
You know what politician is really attractive? Barack Obama is a fine-looking specimen.
The prime minister of Estonia also.
17 I'm not sure your basic run-of-the-mill racist agrees with you about Rep. Omar's looks. Recall a bunch of folks saying stupid shit about a recent (but not the most recent) former First Lady.
The comments to the OP have a bunch of people denying AOC's attractiveness. Which, ok, de gustibus and all that, but protesting a little too hard there fella?
13.2: Jane Fonda? Back in the day, at least.
I liked the essay, but think she may be working her premise a little too hard. I'd say that for the right, AOC violates ordinary look-ism. They want beauty=good, and they see that she's got beauty but she isn't good from their viewpoint and that's just terrible for them.
I sometimes wonder if AOC's looks would get as much attention if she represented (oh let's pick somewhere completely at random) Dennis Hastert's old district, instead of the center of the Extremely Online universe.
||
So, having gotten as far as they can for now with trying to help the economy with attacks on trans-kids, our Republican legislature is working to solve economic anxiety by changing the law making it easier for rapists to defend their parental rights wrt children thus conceived. Yes, you read that right.
This is what the people chose, in order to tell AOC (and her puppet Pelosi) who is boss.
|>
I'm sure books have been written about teasing out the distinction between charisma and looks, but it's also true that AOC is unusually charismatic in a way that's not reducible to just looks and also not entirely about "smarts" or whatever. She's also, along with DJT of course, one of the only politicians who is also fantastically successful as a social media star independent of their political position.
A number of years back there was a photo essay -- and I use the term lightly -- purporting to compare conservative prolife girls with liberal women's rights girls, and arguing that conservative girls were more attractive (white, made-up, thin, long florbly hair). The implication was tired - feminists are ugly, and they're feminists because they can't get men so they dye their hair blue. I have to think something like this is behind the apoplexy over AOC (whom shiv the ignorant Canadian described as "I think she's a Congress -- what do you call them? The Congresswoman who is really pretty) because she ticks the relevant boxes with respect to attractiveness but isn't conservative. In their world pretty girls get ahead only when the guys say so.
aoc's openness about managing and taking pleasure in management of her appearance
But there's also this story (which, too be clear, isn't in conflict with managing her appearance, just indicative of AOC's consciousness of these issues).
Until Coffee Shop, a Manhattan restaurant and bar, shuttered last year, it was known for its mediocre food and self-consciously clubby vibe: A restaurant for the "young, urban, and professionally gorgeous," as an early profile put it, Coffee Shop was the kind of place where seats in the front of the restaurant were permanently reserved for whatever celebrity might stumble in. . . .
....
Given all of this, it's unsurprising that the restaurant institutionalized some of the service industry's grossest tendencies, particularly for its female servers. For his book, , reporter Ryan Grim interviewed some of Ocasio-Cortez's former colleagues at Coffee Shop, who described a culture of persistent and overt objectification: In one instance in 2015, writes Grim, a manager instructed all the servers on the floor, including Ocasio-Cortez, to line up against the wall. The manager would then rank all the staff by how attractive he found them, and give the servers he deemed to hottest the best table sections that afternoon. The story, relayed by the colleague and confirmed by Ocasio-Cortez, is that the now-representative stormed out and quit both jobs on the spot. She returned only after much "pleading" from management, and when it was promised no similar "contests" would be run at Coffee Shop again.
Incidentally, the colleague remembered Ocasio-Cortez winning the contest before she walked out, further objectifying her--more importantly, the people Grim spoke to remembered the now-representative as being "different" from the other servers. "She was always working towards something," a barback told Grim.
25: there was one of these just the other day, with at least one interesting response about Roger Ailes and the showgirl aesthetic. I also found the repeatedly-posted, less flattering shot of the woman on the left sort of hypnotic.
Isn't there a general belief that beautiful people shouldn't be smart? Because we want to believe there is some justice in the world?
The fucker who did the first tweet was arrested for attempted coup.
The tweet quoted in the first tweet, that is.
It seems pretty obvious at this point that a lot of men pursue power because they believe that power entitles them to have their way with attractive women (sexual and otherwise). As an attractive woman, AOC is supposed to be trading her looks for favor from powerful men. She's not only not playing that game but working hard to subvert it and to take both power and access to attractive women away from men who play it.
This is truly not worth pointing out, but I'm barreling ahead anyway. The woman on the right in the first link of 28 is actually quite attractive. She's just not playing by the same rules as the woman on the left. If you let a make up artist at those two women, she could transpose them in about ten minutes.
I must be a good feminist, because I find Kayleigh McEnany is indistinguishable from Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Todd has it right: Jane Fonda, back in the day caused these GrOPers to go outta their cotton-pickin' minds like AOC does today. I mean, she was a bete noire for decades. Decades.
Fonda was deliberately provocative in an extreme fashion, so there are other ways to explain the decades of contempt.
Fonda herself explains this.
"The image of Jane Fonda, Barbarella, Henry Fonda's daughter, sitting on an enemy aircraft gun was a betrayal, the largest lapse of judgment I can imagine," she said in 2005 of her controversial trip to Vietnam.
I've been wondering for a while how the complete reversal of heavy-makeup-is-liberal to heavy-makeup-is-conservative happened, and how it felt at the time. Both my grandmothers lived through it, both of them were extremes at some point in their lives -- one started as a flapper but didn't give up makeup in the 1970s, but by then she wore *much* less than my conservative Southern grandmother who resembled a Gilded Age salon with button-upholstery and ormolu.
The ex-flapper laughed and said she couldn't remember the switch, although it did amuse her sometimes when she remembered her childhood. Only fast women paint and bob their hair! I was never brave enough to ask the conservative.
I can't think of a novel that touches on the change.
33: Not the point, but also you're totally right. New spokeswoman is pretty, but not trying to look like a 20-year-old contoured Instagram model (which I happen to think looks plastic and fake but hey, if that what you need to work for Trump go for it because your makeup is the least of your problems.)
33: I think conservative men, in particular, do not appreciate how much artifice goes into looking like the woman on the left. Or maybe they do, and find the level of effort in itself attractive?
The guy who tweeted that was a hairdresser before he turned to fraud.
I'm also very curious about 39. Per 39.1, was it the Southern Strategy? I'm a tiny bit serious... (More likely had to do with second-wave feminism and the conventional story, but I do think there are significant regional differences in gender norms in the U.S., and tracing them out would be interesting.)
17, 19: Who is more attractive is one of those "greatest [sax player/first baseman/novelist]" arguments, but both AOC and Omar are both pretty high on the chart by any reasonable standard. What strikes me most about Omar are her outfits. Half the time she looks like she just walked off the cover of a magazine.
I look like I live somewhere where you are likely to step on a magazine.
I think this piece misses the mark. As this thread is proving (discovering?) AOC is attractive, sure, but that doesn't set her apart from all other congresshumans. It's that by dint of being a certain age and a certain way (charismatic, yes, but mostly Very Online) that she lands in the hot-or-not/fuck-marry-kill zone of online right dudes, and because she's more successful at their own game of being online and also has way more traditional power and influence than they do, their paste-this-head-on-this-naked-body objectification/dehumanization games are pathetic, even to themselves, and they lose their fucking minds. It's complete emasculation. She wouldn't fuck you, even though she was "just a bartender" a few months ago, she's not ashamed of being attractive, and now she's on TV, she's in Congress, and you are still a piece of shit.
AOC is attractive, sure, but that doesn't set her apart from all other congresshumans
NMM to Louie Gohmert. Not because he's dead, but just because he's Louie Gohmert.
46: You're saying that her head is shaped exactly the like the country Chad, and this is the source of her powers?
There were ads in the fall of 2020 against Bullock because he accepted help from Jane Fonda.
Not only is Omar smart, beautiful, and far left, she's also Minnesota Nice. Never anyone like her.
Further to 23 -- Oh whoops, sorry, we didn't mean it that way; bill withdrawn.
Per 39.1, was it the Southern Strategy?
How would it connect up? I can't connect "good cloth coat" instead of fur to foundation and peroxide. And I don't think, before the switch, more makeup made a woman more White, although I'm sure it was complicated.
Did it switch as divorce was gaining ground? If I remember ?_The Dress Code_? correctly, in the 1970s and 1980s it was a better bet for a woman seeking promotion to be groomed but look as little made-up as possible. (What was that book called?)
how much artifice goes into looking like the woman on the left
Agreed - coordinating the pantsuit and the sensible shoes is no picnic. [ducks]
54. Who knows?
I don't find either of them particularly attractive or unattractive on the basis of those photos, just a couple of ordinary looking women with too much make up, probably the fault of the photographer.
What's the big deal with them?
I'm worried now that the joke in 54 was not only dumb but unintelligible.
For full disclosure, the premise is that I not only (dumb bit) misinterpret the 'left' in the quote as referring to the political left, but am also (furthermore dubiously intelligible bit) somehow both a person who thinks that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi types count as being on the left, and a person who is supportive of their clothing choices.
Don't want to live in a world where anybody seriously thinks either Clinton or Pelosi is actually left wing.
I was always slightly embarrassed that whenever I see a picture of Ilhan Omar, I think "she looks like a movie star".
See, under the surface she's an Alinskyite radical and has a Vagenda of Manocide.
The thing I find most irritating about the right-wing discourse about AOC is that she's stupid. I mean have they ever watched her speak?
On how hair and make-up switched from Racy to Conservative:
It's got to be in the 1960s, when the 1950s became the emblem of safety and security. In the actual 1950s, fancy hair and make-up probably meant you were a slut. But as soon as the 1960s sexual revolution took off, anything to do with the 1950s became safe and secure and, uh, MAGA, so my guess is that conservative women in the 1960s wanted to convey that they had 1950s morals, not like those 1960s tramps.
have they ever watched her speak?
Wouldn't help - they see what they want. They used to say the same thing about Obama: "... the president needs a teleprompter because he doesn't have a sound command of the issues and doesn't know what he's doing." Just infuriating. That talking point only dissipated when they started to televise Obama responding unscripted in real time to GOP questions about policy details.
60: The right wing obsession with Saul Alinsky is baffling.
But he has a clearly Jewish name, so it works for them.
I guess the last sentence of my 65 technically contradicts the first, but the point is that AOC's speaking with a level of fluency and wit that would convince an unbiased observer won't work with rightwingers. If the speech is at all polemical rather than technical they'll attribute any effectiveness to empty rhetoric rather than intelligence. It's almost the definition of 'prejudice'.
My Trump loving brother has said she's being coached. This in response to her questioning some witnesses in a hearing which clearly showed her as very quick on her feet.
70: Maybe this Cambridge Analytica clip? What a champion she is.
39, 53 -- A thought that occurred to me was that if you apply the Southern dress code from Albion's Seed using late 2oth century elements, this is what you get.
66: Kevin Drum likes to point out that although these Republican obsessions are intellectually-speaking incredibly stupid, when pursued with sufficient shamelessness and persistence they practically-speaking get results. The Benghazi hearings led to the email scandal which led to Trump's getting the presidency.
The beauty/feminism conundrum goes back at least as far as Gloria Steinem, who was sufficiently hot to get hired as a Playboy Bunny,* and wrote her first major article about the experience. Her sometime collaborator, Betty Friedan, was older, had had several children, and made the political decision not to dye her hair or wear makeup. When they appeared together on TV in the 1970's, some men found the situation very confusing. One's hot, the other's not, and they work toegether? And they both expect to be paid as much as men?
* Playboy bunnies served drinks at Playboy Clubs while wearing bathing suits, high heels, and bunny ears; Steinem didn't pose nude.
74: She and Jim Brown had a brief fling. Dept. of Things I would Not have expected. He was an interesting guy in many ways in how he interacted with t power structures, but generally a troglodyte with regard to women.
73: Likewise Whitewater ...
It's going to be interesting to see if the media learns anything from this. I see encouraging signs that the liberals have learned from this.
I guess things are past enough that you need to explain that, but it makes me feel old.
46 misses the point entirely, relying on an understanding of contemporary context-discourse to stake a claim that this particular moment is unique. reality is several centuries (minimum!) of structurally misogynist society, with a bit of inquiry you'll find exactly the same dynamic recreated in every single prior era, e.g., jane fonda as has been mentioned by others.
this entire discussion is a solid example of how the game is played, i.e., the women--whatever their appearance--structurally cannot win.
even in this (presumably sympathetic, thinks of itself as feminist) crowd what do we have but e.g. 55.2 (just an example! not meaning to particularly pick on chris y, everyone else feel free to consider themselves equally picked on). watch the vogue video at the link i posted, aoc is skillfully creating a look technically indistinguishable from that deployed by trumps spokeswoman-that-was, and i have no way of figuring out how 55.2 intends to refer to biden's spokeswoman in this context but she, while certainly paying attention to her self presentation, isn't playing in the same aesthetic lane as aoc and the trumpist woman. yet 55.2 slides oh so effortlessly into assigning a negative value to any woman paying any (noticeable as such) attention to her self presentation.
I will note that back when I used to interact with Republican co-workers the most surefire way to get a rise out of them was to suggest they were not as smart as any given political figure. Especially if they were black or a woman (much less a black woman, any mention of Maxine Waters* would send them over the moon). They just dismissed me as trolling which I was by bringing it up, but I also believed** it. Oh my delicate snowflake not the brightest tools in the shed by the standards of an ancillary department in an industrial enterprise, what sweet summer children you were. But in aggregate you are the death of democracy, you bigoted, benighted overpaid fuckpigs of banality. You shits. You utterly vacuous privileged mediocrities. (I actually managed to charm most of them because I am a worthless collaborator that way plus they generally got wrong when I was kidding and when I was serious.)
*The recent crap at the Capitol reminded me of how at some point in the 90s/00s Maxine Waters had some kind of minor hassle going through a checkpoint manned by the Capitol police and it got a lot of play for some reason. Even the general (non-wingnut) drive time rock radio morning show spent a lot of time mocking her (and they just took for granted that she was "ugly"***. And apparently she was one of the Congresspersons who was most aggressively pushing for answers and reassurances before 1/6.
**With a cringe as I really do not like giving credence to the general notion of generalized " smarter than" narratives. I should not be giing undue credence to G.
***Just like "disco sucks" and "rap isn't music.
80: I just yesterday quoted Colbert to a European colleague (in a supervisory position) who talked about how much better they are than Americans at dealing with race issues because they don't emphasize race so much. Honest, he's a good guy and means well, but Jesus Christ ...
fuckpigs of banality is my new band name
I admit that if I went to Europe, I would probably at least glance at a woman.
Re: Obama and teleprompter, even though mainstream media did not jump directly into the Obama is stupid swamp, they did often mention teleprompters to critique him as being aloof, part of why he was not connecting with the banality fuckpigs.
Here's Peter fucking Baker a the NYT March 5, 2009 with a major piece on teleprompters:
Yet Bradley A. Blakeman, a former White House aide to President George W. Bush and a Republican strategist, said the teleprompter makes Mr. Obama look robotic. "He is extremely scripted, and he is cautious to the max and afraid of gaffes," Mr. Blakeman said. When answering questions without a script, Mr. Blakeman said, "his speech is very halted, and you can see him take a lot of time to think about what he's going to say."
yet 55.2 slides oh so effortlessly into assigning a negative value to any woman paying any (noticeable as such) attention to her self presentation
This interacts with JPS@81 in an interesting way:
***Just like "disco sucks" and "rap isn't music.
When are we expressing an aesthetic preference, and when are we being bigots? When are we making a reasoned assessment, and when are we adopting the biases of our environment?
Rap is music, but the stuff from the past five years isn't very good.
||I think I need to admit myself to a Buddhist monastery or something. My wife is listening to The Daily in the other room and hearing Michael Barbaro's and guests recap of the history has reduced me to frothing beast. Dems opened the floodgates for the Rs. Jesus. Jus tthe whole tome of the thing is why we can't have nice things.
\>
Cocaine is proof that God wants us to listen to disco and not watch the TV.
86.last: The podcast You're Wrong About That just had a good episode that touched on that. Nominally on the Disco Demolition riot but it got into the whole place of disco.
Here's something to feed JPS's rage. And everybody else's rage, for that matter. Ex-NYTer explains the workplace culture there.
I think it was a smart stylistic choice to not name names -- most obviously, James Bennet -- even though there are enough identifying details that everybody can probably be identified. But I do want to know all the names.
I thought that was from when he was at The Atlantic?
92-93: Quite right. Now go through it and give me all the other names of the anonymous victims/perps.
19: They don't think Ilhan Omar is pretty because to them Black women can't be pretty, Black women are excluded from beauty. And Muslim women who cover their hair are also excluded from beauty. They are, in short, really racist in every single way it is possible to be really racist. (Also, a lot of Ilhan Omar's outfits are cued around her headscarf and no right wing person is even going to recognize that as fashion.)
The other thing about AOC's looks: She's not just pretty but she's fashionable in a specifically young and left-liberal way and her looks are the kind that are currently fashionable. Contrast most Republican beauties - their looks are the timeless Republican looks - bleached, highly processed hair, conventional make-up that's basically been the same since the eighties, generic slightly professional/slightly-revealing polyester crepe outfits, etc. AOC is pretty and she doesn't bother with GOP beauty standards. GOP women dress for men and for women who want to dress for men; AOC dresses to seem contemporary, striking and fashionable, and her clothes are the kind of clothes that a lot of young women would wear if they had the chance. (And, I mean, some older women - but her clothes are specifically youthful.)
I mean, I'd prefer it if social media hadn't led to more and more emphasis on looks in politics, AOC isn't perfect, etc etc, but she's a person who is pretty who is also a politician, whereas the GOP women are very clearly always trying to look like the bleached fantasy of every 50-something regional rich dude.
you bigoted, benighted overpaid fuckpigs of banality. You shits. You utterly vacuous privileged mediocrities.
New lyrics for Fairytale of New York?
oboy. It's not looking good for the answer to the question is our media learning? The story really is as stupid as the headline: "Biden embraces order and routine in his first week. How will that fit this moment of crisis?"
The question to be answered in coming weeks, however, is whether Biden's orderly presidency matches this moment of national urgency, and whether it's sustainable in the face of multiple crises. Biden himself said last week that the government was on a "wartime" footing -- then took the weekend off from public appearances.
"From public appearances."
And publicly, the White House is carefully controlling what Americans see, with no direct line to Biden's minute-to-minute thoughts the way Trump's Twitter feed became a live stream of his id. Each weekday Biden has appeared in front of cameras for less than 30 minutes, often with a teleprompter to keep him on message.
A teleprompter! (And not the only mention.)
Should we have unrestrained chaos, or tight organizational discipline? Opinions differ!
On the other hand, Joe has abandoned disclipline at times, and that's bad.
He has not been able to entirely avoid the off-the-cuff comments for which he is known and that his staff often has to clean up.
Pressed last week by a reporter on whether his goal of 100 million vaccinations in 100 days was too low, he snapped, "Come on, gimme a break, man." When Fox News's Peter Doocy asked what he discussed with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden replied with a smile, "You," adding, "He sent his best."
This is by a fellow named Ma//tt Vi//ser, whose work I'm not familiar with. But you can see that this is a person who is going places. He'll be running Politico someday.
I just want to chime in at the end here and say that I do not hate AOC because she is pretty, I hate AOC because she's smarter & more successful than I am. I feel good about being willing to be completely honest about this.
57: If "centrist" is anchored in some reasonable way to the idea of the median voter/Congressperson/Senator, then both Clinton and Pelosi are clearly left wing. The best example of a truly centrist Senator right now would be Joe Manchin - 50 Republicans to his right, 49 other Democrats to his left. Hard to get more median Senator than that.
Our political discourse got corrupted because the 2016 primary pitted the 10th-12th most liberal Senator (by DW-Nominate during her time in office) against the 2nd-5th, and supporters of the latter coopted "centrist" to describe what they didn't like about the former. If you think that the centrist line really belongs somewhere around the 93rd percentile of elected officials, then what you are really saying is that the true left is a tiny group of radicals who have almost no hope of getting the votes to have their agenda enacted.
97: Ah, but then counterpoint:
NY Times editorial board: Cool it with the executive orders, Joe.
In conclusion, the presidency is a land of contrasts.
I'm reading _The Saturdays_ to my kid (1941, New York) and the teen daughter is absolutely abused for painting her nails red, which is presented as the right outcome. She feels a great deal of relief at getting the nail polish off and returning to being a good girl. A big shift on attitudes toward makeup hadn't happened in that book.
In 1941, the nail polish was needed for the troops.
If Trump would have won, the women of the relevant group would have probably gone back to giant shoulder pads and bangs lifted to the sky with aerosol spray.
Someone on Twitter a few days ago noted that right-wing guys' attitudes towards AOC are similar to Frollo's obsession with Esmeralda in "Hellfire": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3NoDEu7kpg
God as my witness, a Stormcrow rant is truly one of the great pleasures on this earth to read.
101: We're also working our way through The Melendy Quartet! I love them a lot. (We're pausing in between to read other things, though. Next up is the 3rd book.)
Contrast most Republican beauties - their looks are the timeless Republican looks - bleached, highly processed hair, conventional make-up that's basically been the same since the eighties, generic slightly professional/slightly-revealing polyester crepe outfits, etc.
This, and it's so weird. What is it with absolutely frozen fashion? Rural/country fashion has a similar frozen-in-time thing going on. Until the cold-shoulder-weird-cut-outs became a thing. I guess cold shoulders made sense for frozen fashion.
Let it go, let it go. Like the ice and the snow.....
Do you think that if more people knew the origin of red mail polish it would become less popular?
64 & 74 suggest to me that maybe the change-up was that there are now more ways to present femininity on the left than on the right. I mean, duh, I'm all West Coasty mystifying to my Southern relatives in either flannel and workboots or the faintly goth regalia of my youth, and there are plenty more ways my friends can be without our looking odd when out together.
Is that trapping women who want to signal conservatism into the specific TV-presenter faintly-eighties look? Because they're bracketed on several sides?
107. Conscious valorization of a past idealized as a righteous caste system, like the retro hair of Fox dudes or the physical stylings of Disney anything
which brings me to 104. THERE'S NO FIREPLACE INSIDE THE CATHEDRAL the whole fucking book was ekphrasis to a building that instantiated a past which was in many ways horrible. Appalling enough to turn the thing into a musical but to violate the building that inspired it, why? Soliliquy into song is I guess a tolerable choice, but Frollo dosn't especially think of himself as personally better than Phoebus
I wonder if what changed in rural/traditional/conservative culture was the rise of the stay-at-home housewife - for most of US history wives were not much more limited to housework than husbands were, although they did that too. More leisure to do hair and makeup (at least among a good chunk of the middle class), more omnipresent boutiques, and finally Hollywood having become the monolith of beauty standards.
105: this thread offers some of the same pleasure -- https://mobile.twitter.com/drvolts/status/1354650905283420162
113. archives of street/work photos might be a way to look.
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/two-workers-stamping-glass-jars-with-new-device-for-lettering-painted-bottles
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/semi-skilled-worker-putting-in-pallet-arbor-hamilton-watch-lancaster
Our political discourse got corrupted because the 2016 primary pitted the 10th-12th most liberal Senator (by DW-Nominate during her time in office) against the 2nd-5th, and supporters of the latter coopted "centrist" to describe what they didn't like about the former. If you think that the centrist line really belongs somewhere around the 93rd percentile of elected officials, then what you are really saying is that the true left is a tiny group of radicals who have almost no hope of getting the votes to have their agenda enacted.
The more fundamental problem is that the idea of a center gets awfully strained when some people are talking about policy and others are just yelling slogans. Giving money to people is socialism if AOC advocates it but right populism if Josh Hawley does.
Oo, lw. Short but treated hair on working women, in a decade in which IIRC more women were working for money than in their parents' generation?
Collapsing into bathos, maybe it's all Barbara Cartland's fault. She was a poor deb when debs started powdering their noses, and by the time she was richer and older was wearing lots of makeup and nostalgic for the days when ladies were treated well and other women weren't. I wonder how much the conservatism of her books tracks how much money she had.
AOC is streaming tonight with a dilettante VC guy who's running to replace Newsom on a platform of 0% taxes, apparently because he put out cogent twitter threads on Gamestop.
I worry she's developing the same friend-picking problem Sanders has in parts of the country he's not familiar with. Michael Weinstein, Cenk Uygur: this person says some radical-sounding things, so he can be my surrogate.
Or Jefferson ending up with Burr? It's a universal problem in movement building.
Here is the twitch link for AOC's GameStonk discussion.
Right now she's having trouble with OBS. She's just like us!
The podcast You're Wrong About That just had a good episode that touched on that. Nominally on the Disco Demolition riot but it got into the whole place of disco.
One of the hosts, Michael Hobbes, is friend-of-the-blog from Rotten In Denmark.
On changing makeup standards in the 20th century, the history of flight attendants gives some insight. It was none/minimal, and IIRC, lipstick was controversial at first. Lots changed with the jet age and lots more changed in the last two decades of the century.
112: I thought that the Russians were the only ones who built an ekphrasis. And they used its ground effect to separate the congregation from the altar, merely offering a description of same.
126: TWA required a full face of makeup from the beginning of the sixties forward -- Mom had to get remedial instruction and spent her whole career cheating on the requirement by only wearing lipstick. That's compatible with what you said, of course, I'm just giving an interim date.
126, 128 -- oh excellent, and there's already at least one book on it (Femininity in Flight).
LizardBreath, do you remember if your mother's coeval coworkers were resisting the requirements too, or what?
Mostly not, I think. Mom wasn't being principled, just lazy and with the kind of coloring where the lack of makeup wasn't obvious unless you really inspected her (fair with dark brows and lashes). Mostly they were compliant.
OT: There's a guy on Nextdoor complaining because a neighbor reported him for running a business out of his garage. He argues both that he's not running a business out of his garage and that they complainer is interfering with his ability to work to provide for this family. He should probably pick one or the other of those, but I don't think it would be cheered if I pointed that out.
129. Feminity in Flight is good. There are some unpublished dissertations on the history of flight attendants that address this. It's near an area of history of aviation/culture/technology that I once considered for a dissertation, so I had surveyed the literature (as it was a few decades ago).
I still think it's a fascinating area. One thing that struck me was that while I had a fixed image of flight attendants, there was a lot of change throughout the 50s to 90s. Men were barred from the job with the coming of jets. But in a little over a decade later, courts ruled that the airlines couldn't discriminate on the basis if sex. Interestingly, Pan Am had the last male flight attendants/stewards and it was the airline that lost the case on sex discrimination (Diaz v. Pan American World Airways, 1971). More interestingly, to me, is that United kept hiring stewards through the 1960s but only for one service: flights to Hawaii. And, the only men hired were Hawaiians! United wanted to make the trip itself exotic. Whee! There's a lot of meat in leisure travel vs. business travel and how the airlines advertised to and treated these market segments (all under the CAB regulation of routes and fares, a constraint that usually took price wars off the table)!
Thanks LB. I was hoping you'd have some input from your mother's stories.
*nervously checks thread to see if AOC crush problematic*
There are no non-problematic crushes.
(I don't make the rules; I just infer them.)
No Problematic Crushes to the Left!
(This obviously does not supercede the half plus seven rule, though)
I had to finish The Good Place. The finale was way too sad and now I have a crying hangover.
Where is everybody?
INHABITING VIRTUAL UNIVERSES IN WHICH WE ARE AS GODS!
141: I thought the finale was good, and appreciated the sadness and, like the rest of the show, the sadness was very earnest (which is probably why I liked it).
I loved the whole show. I just feel so SAD though. The first 59/60ths aren't particularly sad.