https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/femininity-as-fashion/
If your life is easy, you can choose to make it tough. E.g. sports. If it is tough, you can usually not choose to make it easy.
Tough lives make masculine (attractive) men and masculine (unattractive) women who cannot choose otherwise. Easy lives tend to make unmasculine (unattractive) men but they can choose to make it tough. Easy lives tend to make unmasculine (attractive) women, they can choose to be masculine, but this kind of fashion is usually not through self-imposed toughness (yes, there are female athletes, tough as nails, still it is not the usual way) but easy tomboyish fashion statements. It is not being seriously tough, just playing at it.
One interesting irony is that men having high status is generally attractive to women, yet high status means an easy life and thus high status men are not forced to become masculine – they can choose to, if they want to. While a low status life – farm hand, 1900 – typical makes a tough, masculine man, which is attractive, but his low status is unattractive. This leads to all kinds of weird results in mating – see Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
It is a bit more complex for women. Men don’t necessarily find low status in women attractive. This is one of the things Red Pillers don’t get fully right. Yes, doctors marry nurses. But overally they want to marry an intelligent, well-read, “presentable” nurse, who can converse intelligently and teach the kids and so on. If a nurse is dumb as rocks and pretty, she is good only for a quick fling. (Actually if a woman is dumb as rocks, I don’t want to hire her as a nurse either, but whatever.) So men for long-term mating do value status in women, just like to keep it below theirs. This means the poor farm girl doubly unattractive: her tough life made her masculine (unattractive) and for high status men her low status means she can only be a mistress, not a wife. Usually.
“Let’s go back to 1900 or so. Most people are farmers, and farmers have to work damn hard. The wives of farmers are not delicate wilting flowers, but extremely hard workers themselves, with very little excess time or money to spend on things like closets full of shoes. The traits we associate with femininity and gender role performance were largely luxuries available only to the wealthy, a situation that had probably been largely true for centuries.”
Read: farm girls were largely unattractive, and could not really hope for a really desirable man.
“Then came industrialization, the shift to the cities, and the rapid growth of the middle class. By the 1920s, the middle class could aspire to ape upper class behaviors, spending their new wealth on clothes and shoes and stay-at-home-motherhood. It is probably no coincidence that at the same time, fashionable women began dressing and acting like men, even aspiring to “boyish” figures.”
Ugh, this is going a bit fast, but basically it means that middle class women got more attractive, and got better men. Upper class women, choosing to be boyish in order to differentiate themselves from middle-class women, got less attractive. What does that predict? High status men marrying from the middle-class – middle-class women were educated enough to make a good conversationalist – but what did high status women do? In Europe the answer is clear enough: their compatible aristocratic men were dead on the WWI battlefields. WWI disproportionately killed off the upper crust. So boyishness was not the biggest of their problems. Perhaps they entertained themselves with feminism and suffragettery? After all, women like Virgina Woolfe were absolutely from the elite.
The point I am trying to make is this – in that age, high status men had little incentive to get tough and masculine. They did not want the boyish elite women and the middle-class women would more or less marry them just for status – although possibly cheat with the tough gardener. So I think this was the “dandy” era.
“Then came the Depression and WWII, and people went back to eating spare shoes instead of wearing them. By the fifties, femininity was once again a symbol of luxurious good living, complete with the magical wonders of modern technology like vacuums and Jello.”
The age of attractive women. The age where men also had strong incentives to both gain status and get masculine, because the “prize” had worth it. James Bond movies as an exaggerated version of that era.
“Of course, as soon as the middle class (and even, god forbid, proles,) started aspiring to vacuum in their pearls, such things became horribly retrograde. Poors might aspire to have enough money that one of them might be able to take off a little time to care for their children, but rich people had much better things to do with their time. No self-respecting career woman would be caught dead in public with a parcel of screaming brats; if they must breed for the sake of some horribly chauvinist husband, the actual care and upkeep of the children must be farmed out to suitably low-class (often non-white) nannies. Nor would she deign to humiliate herself by cooking meals or doing laundry. (Such work can also be done by low-class non-white women, to allow rich white women to keep up their masculine lifestyles.)”
Which reduced the masculinity of higher status men – they saw point in getting tough if that is the reward. Meanwhile, things started to look good for lower-status, blue-collar men.
“Of course, poors and proles never quite got the message and continued buying their daughters Barbies and Bratz and whatnot, despite all of their betters’ constant harangues about the dire moral dangers of such toys. As the economy continues to suck and the middle class shrinks, will femininity become again the domain of the super-rich?”
The poor will stay fat. Fat girls being all Barbie is still not a very attractive offer for men. Rich women are more likely to be fit but also to be feminist.
It is unlikely the economy could shrink back so much that most people are back to hard manual labor. If it does, it will be the least of the problem. The big problem will be that hard manual labor isn’t productive enough to sustain the current level of Western or world population. Which means wars and civil wars. Which means tough men. What do women do at such a situation? Get feminine to attract a tough man? Or the suffering of the war makes them tough and masculine? I don’t really know.
By the way, thanks for these responses! I do intend on responding in turn when I get a chance :)
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A few thoughts…
To be perfectly frank, I’ve never liked “masculinity” on men. I don’t think it has much to do with status–I doubt I have any interest in low-status men, but high-status men aren’t particularly interesting, either.
So I don’t know if I’m just a weird outlier and basically everyone else but me finds “masculinity” highly attractive, or if there exists some subset of women who agree with me and there is some sort of variation in sorts of traits women find attractive. If the former, then we just have the conflict between looks and status; if the latter, we potentially have the additional difficulty of different groups’ tastes being elevated at different times.
On “masculine” female fashion–to what extent is this just signaling sluttiness? Whereas masculinity in terms of doing actual sports seems to signal the opposite. (Are there similar dynamics in men’s fashion?)
Back in 1900 and before, I think we may have to adjust our notion of what “high status” means to only look at people who were high-status in their local farming community, since the vast, vast majority of people were farmers and there simply weren’t a lot of people in other professions around. There were still “good” farmers and “bad” farmers, (and I assume,) attractive farmers/farm girls and unattractive ones. But I doubt it had much of anything to do with fashion trends over in the cities.
Wouldn’t a dearth of men post WWI lead to more female competition over men, not less? That is, we’d expect aristocratic (and common) women to increase their efforts to attract men, rather than take up unattractive fashions. I suspect, for men, the exact contents of a woman’s clothes matter less than the status signals they convey, so suddenly changing fashions might be a symptom of a more competitive dating market, irrespective of the actual fashions involved.
Any predictions for future fashions have to account for the different breeding rates; fancy, thin, boyish women do not have as many children as plump, middle-class women who value their femininity. If future generations were actually raised by feminists, we might see a generation of women simply shop in the men’s departments. But the children of normal people generally aspire to look nice and conform to social norms. If prosperity continues, I suspect we’ll see a resurgence of more feminine norms among women (and, relatedly, masculine ones among men.)
But serious economic hardship (or contraction) leads to people not caring terribly much about their clothes. If war and depression come, everyone will be masculinized for a long time; only afterwards will people be able to aspire to femininity.
Thanks for all of the interesting thoughts.
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You are rather obviously an outlier, I mean, how many women are interested in the kind of things you blog about and how many of them can blog about them with such an awesome quality? Let me put it this way: highly intelligent people are always one of a kind, cannot really be categorized.
For example, the main reason MTV and suchlike is focusing on crappy music is because on a low enough IQ level, basically everybody will like every song from a broad meta-genre, like pop. As you go up the IQ tree you get more and more divided tastes, some will only like death metal but doom metal not, some will only like certain bands, on the top level, only certain songs. So as you go up the tree it gets more and more diverse and harder to cater to.
So if you want to make any predictions about human behavior on the large, you have to make some kind of a cutoff point like only caring about people below 110 IQ.
>On “masculine” female fashion–to what extent is this just signaling sluttiness?
I never made this association before red-pillers started pushing this idea and I am not 100% sure about it even now. I never found girls with short hair and heavy boots particularly “easy”, but I had not much interest in them either. No, I am not really sure about having a connection here.
>There were still “good” farmers and “bad” farmers, (and I assume,) attractive farmers/farm girls and unattractive ones.
IMHO this is where the US and EU is going to be different – or perhaps, in general, high-density and low-density is going to be different. High status farmer in the Euro mindset around 1900 meant “inherited a lot of land” not “was good at it”. High-density meant land was more scarce than labor. Low-density is probably the opposite. I think density is one of the best predictors of human behavior in general, precisely because is maps to what is more scarce, human effort/labor vs. “things”. So low-density, effort/labor-scarce leads to a kind of meritocracy valuing efforts/success, high-density, things-scarce means more of an aristocracy / oligarchy without much importance of merit. This is also why socialism is easier to sell to high-density people, and also why some sci-fi writers suspected to reinvent libertarian values one must reinvent the low-density, effort/labor-scarce Frontier: out in space. Think Larry Niven’s Belters of Known Space or many of Heinleins books.
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