Hats!

I have always liked women in hats. From my mom's friend Laura down to J-Lo, there's just something about them that gets my motor going. I remember in High School this girl named Cheri started wearing a hat, I guess it was a porkpie hat, and there was something irresistable-ish and untouchable at the same time. I've been thinking about it a lot and I've come up with a theory. Let's start with Casablanca,where Ingrid Bergman wears so many lovely hats over the course of the movie. I've always been particularly taken with this one:

I couldn't figure it out before, but look at it now, how it encloses and defines her facial space, gives a powerful downward sweep to her glance. It embodies the strength she uses here to shut Bogey out, to pay Rick back for being such an ass. Tonight, though, she will come back to his place, prepared to shoot him, but she doesn't. Instead, she melts in his arms and asks that he think for both of them. Of course, in that scene, she isn't wearing a hat. I think hats in old movies accentuated the strong-but-yielding character of a woman, the woman who is soft, but not weak, feminine but not stupid or vain. We know Ilsa will have the courage to get on that plane because of her hat

See how it makes her equal to him. He throws down the challenge of what she must do, and she accepts, although not without an arousingly feminine show of emotion.

I think this is part of why women's hats have gone somewhat out of fashion. With the strides feminism has made, they're attacked on both sides. From an antifeminist perspective, strong women are too threatening these days, so the parity given women by hats is discouraged. From the feminist perspective, the implicit softness under the hat is disparaged.

Or maybe I'm just rationalizing, but the dominatrix quality of my teaser image, I think, can't be denied.

Hats can also add mystery to a woman, which, as you know is my favorite thing. As the inimitable Bergman in Notorious
Again, how masculine. Her entire dress here alludes to masculinity without becoming androgynous. Beautiful, seductive, and strong despite her predicament.

But they don't always have to be masculine to be strong. Sometimes the power is in the mystery.

And sometimes it's in playfulness.

And, of course, the right hat can make anyone look good:

Coming Soon: Hats!

Jail Bait

In some populations, about 90% of the attractive women are high-school aged. Not coincidentally, these are also populations where teen pregnancies are high, women are often forced to raise the children alone, and consequently wear themselves out very early. If you're among one of these populations, and you're looking at a piece of hot ass, chances are it's off limits.

Especially hot asses, because they tend to develop sooner. Breasts take a little longer to fill out, sometimes not coming in until a woman is in her 20s or even 30s ('strue!)

But anyway, my point is that the other day I was watching the news, and they were demonizing some guy (in his 30s, I believe), who had gotten involved with a 16-year-old girl. He's a criminal, yes, and he deserves to be punished. But the amount of vilification they were heaping on him seemed a bit excessive and it made me think back to my pal Hesiod and what he'd said, about men who shouldn't get married until they were 27 or 30, but they were supposed to marry a woman somewhere in her teens. And I started thinking about many of the historical cultures I knew and about our probable evolutionary history, and it occurred to me that for most of this time, men were probably allowed or even encouraged to get involved with really young girls.

This day and age is different. Ideally, we want women to have time to reach emotional and physical maturity before they start putting their bodies through the hardships of sex and its consequences. I think the laws are good ones and should be enforced. Of course, when you start working at a place that sells tobacco and alcohol, they tell you how hard it is to tell the age of a person buying. That's why you're required to ask for ID at the counter. I think it's a little much to expect a guy to ask for ID in the bedroom. If he suspects something, he'll ask her if she's of age, and odds are she'll say yes. Still, err on the side of caution, or be prepared to pay the consequences.

But I think the vilification and the hatred and the long-term monitoring should be saved for the real sexual predators: rapists and pimps and makers of underage porn who combine sex with violence or money to turn it into an exploitive act.

Anybody who was in it for mutual pleasure and engaged in only consensual acts should be punished, because they should know better, but we shouldn't treat them like inhuman monsters.

I Must Increase My Bust

I Must Increase My Bust

I'm not normally a YouTube user, but I stumbled across this video while doing research for work. Go ahead and start the video while you read the commentary, but you might rather do without the sound.

I've mentioned before my early experience with pinups, so it's natural, I think, that I'm interested in anime women. This video highlights one great feature of anime women: their breasts. It doesn't really get started until you get out of the club, but once it gets going it doesn't stop. Note how wonderfully the animators show off their movement. This is a real treat, because they move in ways that no woman would let her breasts move in real life--it'd be too painful.

See the warrior woman with the high split in her skirt? Anime is great at this--giving women impossibly long legs and skirts slit indecently high--a design I've only known one woman to attempt.

Nice also are the shots of men looking at the breasts--they serve to reduce the perv factor by stressing that it's only normal for men to respond this way to such lovely sights. I particularly empathize with the bearded old man on the pole, eagerly scanning the crowd for cleavage.

There is one problem here, though. In their zeal for big breasts, the animators have made them too rounded, too globular. While I suspect that this is the result of the fantasy element of anime making the brests stand out the way they'd never do in real life, the effect is to produce something akin to artificial breasts in shape, making them a little less appealing. The movement, too, is over-exaggerated, and ruins the firm-but-yielding impression of solidity one gets from looking at real breasts.

Overall, though, an enjoyable little film.

An Apology

Guys and other fans, my apologies for being so remiss in my postings. Truth is, I have a job where I write about stuff like this all day. Here's an example of my work, with the promise that I'll get back to the Pleasure Dome very soon.

The Science of Beauty: Youth

Why is it that supermodels, singers, and Hollywood starlets keep getting changed out every few years in favor of younger models? How is it that Britney Spears, barely 26, is being seen as fat and old? Science tells us she's past her prime, sexually, since female reproductive fertility peaks at age 22. And now, especially since she's reproduced twice, her fascination to the collective male ego is on the wane.

But is that all there is to it? And if it is, why doesn't she just go gently into that good night and stop trying to shake her groove thing on the boob tube? And why can't the rest of us, past our sexual prime, do likewise, even if we have also reproduced and are engaged in a significant personal relationship that is generally fulfilling? Why do we insist on trying to maintain our youthful appearance?

Beauty Is Youth, Youth Beauty

First of all, it's hard to dispute the connection between the fading beauty of youth and the peak of sexual fertility. After about age 22, a number of significant changes happen in the face that decrease attractiveness in women, many of them making women's faces seem more masculine. The lips begin to lose tissue, making them thinner and flatter like men's lips. Also, the chin becomes more pronounced with age, also like a man's. Youthful eyes are wide and clear, and young women have high, arched brows, but with age the eyelids and the brow both droop.

In addition, the complexion begins to change, from smooth and lustrous to blotchy, wrinkly, and dull. All these things provide undeniable signals to the opposite sex that we are past our reproductive prime.

But Is that all Ye Need to Know?

But if that's the case, why don't we jus let ourselves go after we've found our soulmate and after we've successfully reproduced?

First of all, human reproduction is a long process, and is not considered complete until our children have children, so we're conditioned to try and keep beautiful as long as possible. (Not to mention pestering our kids: "When am I going to have a grandchild?")

Second, humans practice what anthropologist Desmond Morris called "supersex." In using the term, he is not saying that human sex is particularly better than that practiced by other species, although it's certainly true in some cases. What Morris is referring to is the fact that sex is not just sex. It's pretty much never just about reproduction: it's about bonding and emotional attachment. And more than that, sex is not just the act itself.

Unlike our closest relatives, the bonobos, human beings do not practice casual sex to bond the greater social body. Instead, we have substituted a thousand semi-sexual rituals to do that bonding work for us, from dancing to the hundred acts of casual flirting in which we engage every day.

And because these rituals are all linked to sex at their base, when we begin to feel ourselves becoming less sexually attractive, it is no wonder that we might feel socially insecure, even if we have no overtly sexual motives or goals. This anxiety is heightened by the numerous images of ever-youthful women supplied by television, magazines, and billboards that invade our personal environment and make us feel we are in direct competition with them.

She Cannot Fade:

For Ever Wilt Thou Love, and She Be Fair!

Fortunately, in this modern age many of the overt signs of aging can be, if not reversed, then diminished to a point consistent with maintaining our self esteem against the thousand needling doubts we cannot help but feel every time we look in the mirror or in the face of someone looking at us, their eyes darting over our face, making unconscious judgments about it.

It is possible to combat shrinking lips with a combination of injectable fillers and/or a lip implant.

A broadening chin can be corrected with a facelift, neck lift, or a chin implant. Often these procedures work together to complement one another nicely

The drooping of our eyelids can be corrected with eyelid surgery (blepharoplasty), and the contracting of the brow can be combated with a brow lift. Wrinkles can be smoothed with a facelift, brow lift, neck lift, or injectable fillers and laser collagen replacement. Finally, numerous treatments exist to keep our skin lustrous, smooth, and fair, including chemical and laser peels, facials, and microdermabrasion.

If you are interested in remaining a friend to man when old age has wasted this generation, consult the website of facial and ocular cosmetic surgeon Dr. Robert Fante and the Fante Eye and Face Center in Denver, Colorado.

Public transportation romance I

There’s a guy who gets on the bus about the same time as me, a little before 6:30 in the morning, and, like me, rides all the way to the end of the line. He’s quiet, reserved. He looks like Paul Giamatti in Sideways, only more so: bigger in every way. He’s taller, wider, darker hair, going grey, and with scruffier stubble, although all these things work together to maintain his proportionality to the Miles character. He also has a notebook that he scribbles in the entire bus ride, so I imagine he’s working on this monstrous novel.

There’s a woman who gets on the bus, too, older, about an average build: nothing much to speak of. She dresses nice, emphasizing her ass which is fairly toned, and trying to conceal the age in her face. She wears sunglasses and a scarf on her head in inclement weather. Her hair is dyed red, but fading a little bit, shoulder-length, and wavy. If she reads, it’s only the paper, but she doesn’t ride that long, so she mostly sits and looks out the window.

They both get off at the same stop, and transfer to the same bus, the one I ride. She gets off at my stop. He rides on.

Yesterday, on the second bus, she wasn’t looking out the window. She was looking across the bus at the Paul-Giamatti guy scribbling in his book. He was sitting in front and across from her. At one point, he looked up from his notebook, and glanced back over his shoulder. Their eyes met, and there might have been just the fraction of a smile before they both looked away.

Is this the first spark of a brilliant flame that will illumine the lives of these people? I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.

Office girls; or, The Cruel Trick of the Universe

You only have to be in an office a few days before you run into the office flirt. Usually a young woman, somewhere between nineteen and twenty-five, not especially attractive, but cute. Generally a little on the heavy side, although she carries it well. Coincidentally, she is also engaged, or in a relationship so serious she's certain he'll propose any minute. This is what makes her a flirt. She's enjoying a sudden burst of confidence coming from her impending bride status. She's been the center of so much preparation, that she kind of believes she's really the center of everything for a while. And besides, she's free to play with every man she comes across because there's nothing at stake. She knows nothing's going to happen, and that's the way she likes it: a game where the move of the moment is all that's in the balance. A lower cut neckline, a shorter skirt, maybe leather, maybe plaid, all serve to enhance the play, but they mean nothing. She has, for a few short months, mastered the essence of flirting.

This is the cruel trick of the universe. On your deathbed, in the instant of your last breath, an angel sits on your pillow and tells you the secret of life.

Carnivals

Today I went to a local carnival, celebration thing, a festival focusing mostly on food, but with music and rides and games and things. It was a real feast for the eyes. Labor day weekend, the unofficial end of summer, and all the women were breaking out their most revealing blouses and sun dresses to wear them one last time before they get put away for another year to make way for sweaters and heavy wool skirts (which are nice, too. I look forward to sweater season, as I look forward to all seasons, because, really, there's nothing to complain about. Reminds me of a little verse:

My love in her attire doth show her wit

It doth so well become her

For every season she hath dressings fit

Winter, spring, or summer.

No beauty doth she miss

When her robes are on,

But beauty's self she is

When all her clothes are gone.

Or something like that. Sometimes I say these poems so often, I kind of make up the words.)

But it was beautiful: scoop necks with little lacy frills around the decolletage; dresses in bright colors with narrow straps, and full skirts; tight pants; shorts that were so short and tight they threatened to suddenly become wholly inadequate skirts at any moment. Women in sunglasses of all shapes and sizes, broad sun hats, and even one who struck me as singularly beautiful in a revolutionary cap, with her hair pulled back very tight to match the dramatic energy of her walk. Not to mention the one with a jewels nestled in her cleavage. All colors: purples, reds, blues, and lovely greens. Purest white to gothic black. Delightful, not necessarily for itself, but for the memory it inspired in me, the memory of the first time I felt almost overwhelmed by my lust for women.

I was in middle school, aged 12 or 13, and I was traveling with a couple friends of mine. One of their mother's had a business conference in Anaheim, so we were invited along to keep him company and go to Disneyland.

I don't know what exactly happened in me, but suddenly the world was like a smorgasbord: girls! Girls! GIRLS!! Everywhere I looked, there was some attractive girl or woman, somewhere in age between, I don't know, eleven and fifty.

Obviously, I was in the throes of puberty, but why it should suddenly hit me so powerfully and so suddenly, I don't know. But most of my memories of the trip are of looking around with a desperate longing at all the beautifully arrayed women. I was more shy then than now, but still I tried my hand at flirting whenever the opportunity arose. There were a couple of promising contacts, but neither of my friends were interested (it turns out one of them was gay), so the promise never came to more than a smile, a wink, a glance over the shoulder.

We stayed in the park until quite late, after the electrical parades, when almost everyone had left, when there were so few people that you could ride the rides again and again and again. By the end of the day, I became so bitter with frustration that I would sit down on a bench and just look at the garbage strewn here or there. They did a good job keeping the place clean, but I focused on what little bits slipped through the cracks. I got a little cynical. All of society, I thought, was just a thin facade, a lie, painted over the desiring beast within us all.

Since then, my hormones have obviously mellowed, and I'm married, and I've had, if less than my fair share, a healthy dose of sexual exerience, so things like this don't upset me as they used to. But sometimes I miss that bitterness, because it was companion to a pure hope that I'll never feel again. The hope that true love and great sex, completely interdissolved, ever-fresh, and all-renewing, can be mine if I can just get this girl--this girl--to look at me and smile.

Skirts

The skirt is an inherently sexist piece of clothing, so much so that it became a sexist metonymy for woman. Why do I say this? Well, let's look back in history.

At one time, men and women wore pretty similar garments on their bodies. One reason for this was that people didn't have the material or the know-how to make complicated garments, so the easiest thing to do is just wrap a bit of cloth around you. But there's another equally practical reason. People didn't used to have toilets, so they pretty much squatted down wherever they were to let loose their bowels. Having used squat toilets, I discovered something: pants are completely impractical. Trying to put your pants down around your ankles while keeping them out of the line of fire is really difficult. Much easier is a skirt or sarong or whatever that you can just tuck up out of the way.

And just as the skirt allows an easy flow of matter out, so it also, possibly, allows easy access from the outside. Skirts are designed to make women sexually accessible, to help promote them as possible sex objects.

With that understanding, I have to say that I love skirts. And really not for the reason that I just gave. What I like about skirts is the way they amplify the motion of a woman's hips. Sure, tight pants can show off a woman's ass to good effect, defining each cheek and emphasizing the offset of their motions, but a soft skirt of light material changes every step into a shiverous tidal wave of voluptuousness. Short skirts are okay, but often when they get short, they get rigid, and they transform a woman's walk into a mechanical tilting back and forth with no fluidity.

And it's impossible to talk about skirts without mentioning the automatic speculation about what women might or might not be wearing underneath. And the subconscious glances men cast about to try and catch a glimpse of that which would otherwise be concealed. This does not mean that we're all perverts with mirrors or cameras on our shoes--far from it. Doing something like that is not only ungentlemanly, but it also takes all the fun out of it. Seeing up a woman's skirt is like a sunshower on a hot summer's day: unexpected, arresting, and invigorating. And it's just as innocent.

Think about Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, and how innocent and flirty her relationship with with Tom Ewell is. That's the level at which skirts excite men. Playful and pure, they conceal while holding out the promise of revealing the mystery that is woman.