“It’s better to marry young because you can marry a girl straight out of high school, before she gets set in her ways and too comfortable by herself.” –Clem “Golden Boy” Hartford

“You have to get to them when they’re young before they get set to certain ways of thinking.” –Jonas, probably.

Unsurprisingly, Gannon finds it interesting that the honchos behind the FLDS, unconstrained by feminism and social convention, chose to mate with very young ladies. I find it interesting, too, though for different reasons. I actually agree with Gannon that men frequently can be sexually attracted to younger women and even people that we call children (but aren’t in any biological sense). Where Gannon and I differ is that he finds this to be determinative that to struggle against it is counterproductive and unnatural and that’s not how I see it at all. From my perspective, to the extent that it is a natural instinct it is sometimes natural in some men in the same sense that a propensity for violence is natural and the desire for men to have sex with as many women as he can is natural. In other words, it’s an aspect of our nature that we set up societies to moderate.

One of the more disturbing aspects of a lot of Gannon’s comments here and elsewhere and the comments of those like him are their talks about how unsullied young women are. They haven’t been embittered by feminism or a perpetually broken heart or whatever. He talks of how… fresh… they are. Not just in the physical sense, but in the mental and emotional senses as well. This disturbs me the same way that it would disturb me to hear a land developer talk about how natural and pristine a particular place is. He likes it natural and pristine so that he can himself develop it.

Between the ages of 15 and 25, a young lady will do her growing and by the end of that will become the core of the woman that she’ll be for the rest of her life. What Gannon, Golden Boy, and Probably Jonas are essentially saying is that it’s better to get in on the ground floor of this elevator and that the woman that appears at the top is inferior to the one at the bottom. She hasn’t been properly trained. The 25 year old has all sorts of inconvenient ideas and desires.

And I’ll be honest and say that I understand what they’re talking about. It’s nice to able to influence someone into being interested in what you’re interested in and doing the things that you like to do. My ex-girlfriend Julie (who was in the 15-25 bracket) was wonderfully malleable. She came around to agree with me politically, religiously, and we’d watch anime together, play video games, and listen to the same sorts of music and watch the same sorts of shows despite not having a whole lot of similar interests when we first met. It was something of a big deal when she wanted to watch Will & Grace and I wanted to watch SportsNight, which came on against one another.

My wife, I’ve learned, is not nearly so malleable. Getting her interested in a number of the things I am interested in is a longshot. Comic books and anime are out. Playing video games against one another is also not going to happen. Alternative rock? Not so much. Politics? We disagree a lot. Religion? Woooooo boy. Some of it is because I married a much more hard-headed woman than I dated a decade ago, but at the same time I’m less malleable when I was then. Ten years ago I acquired an interest in country music from Julie but I haven’t really made a similar effort with Clancy’s preferences of chick rock and classic rock, to pick an example.

To me there is an inherent problem when it comes to someone that has grown out of their malleable years dating someone that hasn’t. I can agree with Golden Boy’s comment so long as he says that men should get married young, too (which, since the LDS advocates it, I suspect that he does). But people with the wisdom of 25 years experience extolling the virtues of the inexperience of a 15 year old troubles me. It makes me believe that there is an element of control involved. A desire to be Pygmalion and create a statue to fall in love with.

While Gannon sees the FLDS situation and the apparent preference for teens on the part of the old men as supportive of his belief that such relationships should be more commonplace (or at least not illegal), I look at the same and see exactly what I fear about such relationships. The FLDS is built upon the manipulation and control of the young. So it’s not at all surprising to me that they would bite the bullet and take control of their sexuality as soon as they possibly can. Marry them off at 14 and they’ll never have anything to compare their sexual experience as a member of an old man’s collection.

I’ve thought about what I would do if my fifteen year old daughter came home with a twenty-five year old boyfriend and whether or not I could bring myself to approve. In the end, I couldn’t, and more than anything I think that the reason would be that she hasn’t fully discovered who she is yet and he probably has. Further, it is not necessarily in his interest for her to become all that she is capable of becoming. Unspoken would be the corollary that he is in a better position to prevent her from becoming all that she is capable of becoming than some numbnut that she’s going to school with.

More than once I’ve run onto someone that has gotten on their high horse about the fact that “American” is an imprecise term. After all, Canadians are Americans, too, because they’re from North America. And isn’t it just indicative of our arrogance that we think that we think we can just hijack the entire word for ourselves and blah, blah, blah.

Not that anything they say is technically untrue. The problem is the absence of an alternative. If the term “American” should be used to refer to someone from any nation in the Americas, what do we use to refer to citizens of the United States of America? And with the absence of an alternative, it’s not so much arrogance that keeps us referring to ourselves as Americans as much as it is inertia. If the rest of the world were to come up with some (non-lame) word to differentiate ourselves from the Americans of Canada and Brazil and whatnot, I wouldn’t be opposed to using it.

Thus far the only nation that I’m aware of that has done so is, not unsurprisingly, France, which has dictated that Americans should be refered to as Étatsunien, or as best as I can tell the equivalent of Unitedstatian. Doesn’t quite have a ring to it.

I have a Canadian friend that once made the mistake of referring to me as a “yankee”. He was apparently unaware that “yankee” is a regional designation. One that southerners don’t take too kindly to. He pushed back a little bit saying that Canadians use that term all the time and southerners shouldn’t have a problem with it, but I explained to him that there is a history there that he is unaware of. He relented, though he still didn’t have a term to use.

I honestly don’t think that the terminology comes down to Étatsunien arrogance. We’re called “Americans” because we put it at the center of our name. Had we called ourselves Columbia, it wouldn’t be an issue. Had another nation popped up at the same time called itself the Republic of America or something then we likely would have had terms to differentiate between us. Had the South won the Civil War and had there been a United States of America and a Confederate States of America, different terms would likely have popped up (possibly Yankees and Confederates).

So what is there to do? I think that the most logical explanation is the status quo. When it comes to the continental designations, go with North Americans and South Americans. North and South America may share that little strip we call Central America and Mexico may have more in common with South American than Canada and the US, but insofar as we need continental designations, North American and South American are sufficiently different.

Addendum: Apparently Italy has gone with the term Statunitense, which is the equivalent of Étatsunien.

Capella has a post on what she looks for in a man. I’ve got some thoughts on such lists, but I want to mull it over before writing anything more extensive about it. Reading over the first bullet point, which is a thirst for intelligence, the thought occurred to me: There’s got to be a dating service that focuses on people with high IQs. It’s not always easy for these people to meet each other and a relationship with too high an intelligence differential can be problematic. Plus, people with more intelligence often have money. Not super amounts, but perhaps enough to fund a dating service.

Turns out that there is something called IQ Cuties. Obviously I’m not in a position to check out how worthwhile it is. I think that such a service would be better off the internet. I once enrolled in a specialty dating service a while back and got fleeced pretty good. It was of a religious nature. I probably would have been better off going to church. In any case, it’s a lot easier to get sums of money out of people (like me) when you’re brick-and-mortar-plus-Internet rather than potentially some fly-by-night Internet operation.

The specialty operation that I enrolled in went out of business shortly after my term expired. So maybe Lavalife is the way to go, business-wise.

Has anyone seen those ads for Chemistry.com that rib on eHarmony? The gay ones I understand, but I didn’t quite understand why “We accept everybody!” is a great selling point for a dating service. I signed up with the aforementioned fleecing agency in part because they did cull the herd, so to speak. Then again, they were probably rejecting people that were more up my alley than the ones I actually dated (except one who was absolutely marvelous though of course I failed to recognize that at the time), so maybe that’s where Chemistry.com would have come in. But while I wouldn’t refuse to date someone that was rejected by eHarmony, I don’t know that I’d jump in the pool with a bunch of rejects. I did that enough in junior high, thankyouverymuch.

A while back Unfogged clued me in to something called CrazyBlindDate, where basically you set something up on short notice and in stark contrast to the aforementioned dating services is indiscriminate in nature. Even though it’s completely out of my nature, I might have done something like this when I was single. It’s sort of like the old apartment complex I lived in out in Deseret. It was $300 a month with all bills paid, filled with ex-cons and miscreants, and the most interesting place one could ever ask to live for a little while. Particularly when you’re writing a blog, as I was at the time. CrazyBlindDate probably provides excellent blogfodder.

I ran across this little snippit in something called ShinyGuy:

There’s only one entity worthy of more contempt than the Womanizer, however: His protege, the Hapless Wannabe.

The Hapless Wannabe is the man who truly feels less-than-full when compared to the Womanizer (a lifeform we’ve already established to be a {bleep-bleeping bleepatory} amoeba living only to grow fatter and grosser and increasingly irrelevant with each passing moment). While the Hapless Wannabe buys into the {male cow excrement} of the Womanizer, he lacks the social skills to actually indulge in what he perceives as his “male biological imperative.” (If you have witnessed a single episode of Blind Date (awesome show), you have seen the Hapless Wannabe at work.)

The piece is a slap on Maxim and the lad-mag industry as a whole, but I think that the author touches on an interesting point here. Not necessarily about Maxim (or only Maxim), but something I’ve seen on a lot of blogs that delve into male-female relations.

Trickle-down economics is based on the theory that if enough capital is supplied to (or left in the hands of) the wealthy, they will generate more wealth that will trickle down to those that have less wealth. I believe that this theory is true to some extent, though how much is up for debate. The degree to which it is true may be overwhelmed by the adverse effects of the disparity of wealth. In other words, though the wealth of a wealthy society materially benefits even those that receive only a tiny fraction of that wealth, the psychological harm done to the unwealthy may outweigh the material benefit significantly. The poor may get some better toys, but their comparative lack of wealth is greatly accentuated, leaving them with more worth but feeling more worthless.

My generation and the generation before me and the generation after me has greater access to sex with more people than any generation prior to these in the history of our country as far as I am aware. Sex is everywhere we look. It’s on television, at the movies, in the music we listen to, and in the stories we hear. If we’re not having sex, we’re often left to believe that there is something wrong with us. That we are sexually worthless. The more we hear about how much sex other people are having, the more worthless many of us feel.

In this age of sexual access, those that are denied sexual access for one reason or another can sometimes feel cheated. Even those that do get some sex thanks in part to the sexual revolution and the subsequent overall increase in the availability of sex feel comparatively cheated. More cheated than they would probably feel if they got no sex in a culture where most people weren’t and those that were were expected to keep quiet about it. Objective wealth, subjective deprivation.

The deprived can react in many ways. Some less fortunate people try to fake not being less fortunate. This is where the conspicuous consumption of the poor comes into place in the economic world and where Maxim comes into place in the sexual world. Reality bedamned, they’re going to fake it. If they fake it well enough, people will believe it. In the economic world, maybe they will be accorded the respect that they would be if they had earned the money. In the sexual world, maybe they will be able to parlay the image for a reality. Confidence, they’re told, is sexy.

Another reaction is more in line with what I’ve seen over the last couple years: bitterness mates with feigned moral superiority and gives birth to conspiracy theories. In economics, we have cultivated the image of the honorable yeoman’s successor, the honorable working man. Myths are born such as the notion that the middle and working classes tip better than wealthy people do. The honorable working man stands in contrast to the evil, greedy, rich man that goes to absurd lengths to keep poor people poor. In relationships I have seen over and over again the sexually less fortunate divide the world into meek nice-guy beta males and malicious asshole alpha males. We have meek nice guys that are tossed aside by loathsomely superficial women in favor of the jerks who look cool and drive better cars.

There is always enough truth in these theories to keep them afloat. There are enough jerkly playboys that we can attribute that character to anyone that has easy access to sex. There are enough women holding out for a man that seems to be out of her league that we can attribute that to all women. There are enough women that are generally attracted to the edgy sort of guy that always hurts them in the end that we can see ourselves as would-be saviors or heroes thwarted by the system. Ignore or explain away all counter-evidence and you’re all set. Better yet, you’re permitted to lie and cheat because all you’re doing is playing their game. You’re still better than they are because you are only doing it because you have to and they are doing it because they’re flawed.

I think that it’s these sorts of attitudes that seep into the consciousness of some men that give the unsuccessful the bad reputation that we have. It’s why we’re not seen as the heroes to the women that we so obviously are in our own minds. In the same way that the wealthy often see the poor as a collection of useless dimwits and thieves — and not always completely without reason — the popular see the unpopular as morally or substantively lacking. They see their own success as something that they’ve earned. It’s easy to pay yourself on the back for never having stolen anything when you’ve never been hungry. It’s easy to believe that the game isn’t rigged when you’re always the winner just as it’s easier to convince yourself that you always lose because the game must be rigged rather than to attempt to improve.

So you’ve got people saying that the game is fair and you have those saying that it is impossibly unfair. Neither are entirely correct. The less fortunate in both spheres can often do a whole lot to improve their prospects. Sometimes they’re lazy, though sometimes they just don’t know how and they don’t have the skills to improve nearly as much as they would like to so they get discouraged. And these limits are real. No matter how hard they work they’ll end up in line behind at least some of these people that didn’t have to work much at all to get where they are. These people that have the money and sex that dwarfs whatever incremental improvement they make. Objective improvement, subjective deprivation.

In a previous post about a friend I had when I was younger, I wrote :

Once upon a time he had smart, witty, and ambitious young ladies swooning over him and girls of modelesque beauty competing for him and the last two girlfriends of his that I met were mediocre-looking art school dropouts crafting the lowest form of amateur adolescent/post-adolescent art… poetry.

My friend Kyle and I went to hang out at a mutual friend’s house last week. The mutual friend’s wife is a professional graphic designer and a visual artist of many stripes. While I feel a bit self-conscious about the bare 12 year old anime character hanging on the wall of our bedroom, our apartment has nothing on their house. Hanging on their wall is some abstract piece with an unclothed woman on all fours. The front half of her is on the bottom left of the piece and the back half is on the upper right. That’s about all their is to the painting.

Kyle’s wife commented that she was unimpressed. They’d also apparently been to an art showing a while back where he was similarly unimpressed. Kyle’s a pretty culturally liberal guy, but there’s only so much art with genitalia placed against a backdrop of this or that before it gets sort of boring.

I responded:

You don’t UNDERSTAND! They’re SPEAKING OUT against our SEXUALLY REPRESSIVE CULTURE. They’re expressing their SEXUAL FREEDOM by exposing our PURITANICAL SOCIETY and all its taboos. If you fail to appreciate their artwork, you’ve been BRAINWASHED by the religious zealotry of our culture that seeks to control us by making us ASHAMED OF OUR BODIES!!!!

Or… alternately…

They’re EXPOSING THE POINTLESSNESS OF LIFE AND MORALITY by taking our most private parts and putting it out there for all the world to see! They are taking that which we see as SACRED and DEFILING IT as a grand tribute to the NIHILISM that is our culture, every culture, and LIFE ITSELF!!!!

I don’t know if that’s what the guy with the painting of the penis in the wine glass was aiming for, and it’s almost certainly not the terminology that he would use, but I’d be surprised it wasn’t along the lines of one of the above options or something else equally inane.

But it’s not the point that they’re making that bothers me. Yeah, sure, exploring what we do believe (sexual freedom or opposition to it) or don’t believe (nihilism) has been done, but there are few areas of art that haven’t. It’s not even the repetitiveness of it within the anti-commercial art world, necessarily. What irritates me a little bit about it is that they do something simple, assign the more complicated task of interpretation to the viewer, dismiss criticism of it as a failure on the part of the viewer, and take credit for the viewer’s ability to see the patterns in the static and find some grand meaning in the image of a penis wrapped around a can of aerosol or a Jesus dumped in a jar of urine or whatever.

The problem with a lot of abstract art, of freestyle poetry, or of any sort of extremely abstract art, is two-fold:

1. Bad art is incredibly easy to make.
2. Good art and bad art are not easily compared or differentiated from one another.

Take the absolute worst action film you’ve ever seen. The worse, the better for our purposes. For me it was a movie called Terminal Impact, about a cop trying to bust an organization that’s taking college students (that look way too old to be college students) and turning them into cyborg warriors. The movie was so bad and so destined for obvious failure that the only hope they had of selling it was to name it similar to a Charlie Sheen movie called Terminal Velocity that came out a couple years earlier, replicate the font of the movie’s title, and cross their fingers and hope that people get confused in the video store and say “Hey, Terminal Impact. That’s the one with Charlie Sheen, right? Let’s not even look on the back and rent it anyway!” Notably, after the Terminal Velocity is forgotten, Terminal Impact was renamed Cyborg Cop III so that they could sell it as a trilogy with two completely unrelated movies with the guy who played the American Ninja in the third and fourth American Ninja movies.

Despite all this, Terminal Impact is in some ways more impressive to me than Piss Christ. Say what I will about the movie, but TI took quite of big of effort to make. Sure, they didn’t have the special effects of the Terminator, but their were motorcycle chases and some explosions. More than that, though, there were sound people and lighting people and people that played their parts (I hesitate to call them “actors”). Production costs I’m sure ran somewhere into the thousands. Money was raised, allocated, and spent. Piss Christ required a crucifix, urine, a jar, and some great lighting.

Further, Terminal Impact can rather easily be judged on its own merits. I judged it and found it lacking. Compare Terminal Impact with its namesake or any Jean Claude Van Damme movie or even American Ninja IV (which coincidentally was the worst action movie I’d seen prior to TI). You not only have something to compare it to, you but you have technical merits in addition to artistic ones that you can judge it with. With the aerosol can, all you can say technically is “Yep, that looks like a weewee. Yep, that’s a spray can that says ‘aerosol’ on it.”

I’m not saying that abstract art isn’t art and that it cannot be really, really good. It really can. The problem is the “e. e. cummings Effect”, wherein the comparatively few good artists are swamped by the lazy ones that don’t want to put any effort into adhering to any guidelines or doing any of the work that less abstract art work requires.

When I was in junior high I used to write comic books. The original ones weren’t very good, but I did put some effort into them and the thought and effort I put into them became the building blocks with which I started producing works that were good (in my opinion, at least). But for a while after the original ones, I got lazy. I found a formula to use to used it over and over and over again (though, to my credit, I was able to use the established pattern to make later deviations more interesting and humorous than they otherwise would have been). By virtue of the comic book medium, it wasn’t hard to tell that they sucked. With abstract art, there’s no way to tell, and thus for people that don’t want to make the effort, it’s an extremely easy way out. Just let the audience to the heavy lifting.

When it comes to the creation of something — most things — there is a mixture of artistry and craftsmanship. Even utilitarian things things such as cars that are meant to drive us places have artistry impressed upon it to make it look like something we want to be seen in. Carpentry is making something useful but also making it aesthetically pleasing. Movies are meant to entertain us, but pre-production requires a lot of thought and the production requires a lot of work. Novels are a mixture of ideas (artistry) and presentation (craftsmanship). Art without craft leads to the proliferation of crap.

And so it is with poetry. I was a bad poet once. I wrote poetry because I didn’t know how to write prose well. A poem is much easier to write than a book and if you go all “freestyle” you remove any effort at all. Maddox nailed it when he offered the following tips on writing (bad) poetry:

Writing bad poetry is easy when you disregard meter, pace, and rhyming scheme. Just make sure to follow a few simple guidelines:
1. Never write about anything cheerful. Remember, you are a tortured artist. Be one.
2. Be sure to use the following words at least once per sentence, no fewer than 50 times per poem: lament, loathe, soul, darkness, bitter, agony, despair, misery, anguish, pain, suffer, woe, hate, death, love, sultry, angel, rose, acrid and nihilism. Nihilism is a good one because it comes up all the time in normal conversations.

It’s easy, here’s a sample to get you started:

fire… burning… agony…
sultry shivers of a dark essence
why am i tortured with this nihilistic existence?
bitter… darkness… despair.

notice the constant lower case? i added that touch to be unique. unique people type in lower case.

That is the tragedy which e. e. cummings has wrought. Generations of young people that can just string together some sentences with some basic idea in mind and allow themselves to think that they’ve created something worthwhile.

I don’t wear the fact that I do a lot of writing on my sleeve like I used to. If it comes up I will say that I wrote or that I do some writing, but will only refer to myself as a writer if it is understood that I am (mostly) an amateur. I have in fact been paid for my writing in the past, but never has it amounted to more than minimum wage when the hours put in are accounted for. Besides, I’m more proud of the writing that never made me a dime because it was far more ambitious and time-consuming. So, despite the fact that I’ve written four novels (in varying degrees of editing disrepair), I don’t generally identify myself as a writer.

To the extent that I have referred to myself as a writer, I have never tried to suggest that someone that has had a novel published or has had even moderate success with articles is some sort of equal or colleague. I’m not saying that they’re better than me in any grand scheme, but I think it does them a great disservice to suggest that what I do is the same as what they do when they have dealt with deadlines, professional editors, compromised intellectual properties, and so on. So while I may trade writing techniques or something like that, I don’t suggest that the only difference between the two of us is that we’ve gone different routes. We have, of course, but my route is easy and theirs is at least some degree more challenging.

Lastly, I would never brag that if I really wanted to, of course I could get published. Maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t. The truth is that I have much improvement to do, I’ve never sacrificed what I wanted to write in order to write something more publishable, and there are elements of luck and connections involved.

I mention all of this so that I can segue into a pet peeve of mine. Every now and again I’ll run into a self-described “writer” that earns the quotes around the description due to the technicality that he has never written anything more substantial than an infrequently updated blog or LiveJournal. They frame everything in terms of what they want to do or what they could have done because they have nothing hard that they can point to. To make matters worse, they don’t use their conversation with me, someone that has actually gone through the process, for advice… but rather they are the ones that end up giving advice to me. Don’t get me wrong, I welcome feedback on what I’ve written and ideas on what I’m writing, but I get annoyed when people tell me “You should have this happen and that happen.” I’ll admit, it’s a thin line sometimes, but tone-of-voice makes a difference (as does how well I know the person).

What they end up doing instead is stacking their awesome idea for a novel that they’ve never written and compare it to either what I’ve written or how I describe it. The book I wrote isn’t the book that they’d write, thus they are more talented than I. Occasionally I’ll see a different tactic. The reason that they haven’t written anything is that they’re too good to. My ex-girlfriend Libby used this one. She just talked about how she could really write something great that could get published, but she’s just so much of a perfectionist that she’d hate and couldn’t bear to let anyone see it. At least there is an admission that perhaps it wouldn’t turn out as well as imagined, but it’s still the same “too good” attitude that some amateur writers in regards to why they’ve never tried to get anything published even though what they do is better than the dreck that’s out there. Amateur writers don’t want to be a sell-out to the publishing industry because their work is so important, the non-writer writers that I’m referring to don’t want to sell-out to reality (when it’s obviously their own limitations that they’re afraid of).

It’s actually gotten to the point that one of the reasons I don’t talk all that much about my writing unless it comes up (and even then not even when it comes up sometimes) is not only because I don’t want to set up the pretense that I am something that I am not, but rather because I don’t want to get into a discussion about the writing I do and the writing that they don’t do and the comparative value of each. I don’t want to see the countless hours I’ve spent organizing my ideas and sitting down reduced to an option no more or less valid than choosing to instead eat Cheet-Os and play some GameCube.

Cassandra observes:

When I go out in jeans and sneakers people aren’t rude or unpleasant, but the sense of friendliness and niceness does drop. The difference is more noticeable in men than in women – when I’m decked out in full girlie regalia men actually go out of their way to do favors for me – but it’s there in women too. I used to have a job at which every time I wore a skirt at least 3 or 4 female co-workers would stop me in the corridor and compliment me. In all these scenarios it almost feels like I’m being approvingly patted on the head for conforming perfectly to what is expected of my gender, even though my personality remains as assertive and non-girly as ever.

Bob asks:

We do get rewarded for conforming to norms. That’s how they come to be norms. What are norms if not those things society pats us on the head for following? Is this bad though?

This actually opens the door for a fundamental difference in opinion that my wife and I have, but I’ll have to table that for the time being because this is going to be a long enough post as it is.

Cassandra’s point is broader than mere dress, and hers has more to do with gender norms than anything, but I think that dress is a good place to start since it is mostly voluntary.

Simply put, how we dress is a representation of who we are. We make minor changes because we think that a particular color or style looks better on us, but for the most part it’s a representation. Even if someone dresses based solely on comfort, their representation is that they don’t care about their representation. Even if we dress a particular way because our job requires it, the only difference being that we are making the representation that someone else wants us to make and that we’re willing to do so in exchange for food and shelter.

Everyone knows this, yet people frequently forget it (or at least forget the inevitability of it) when it’s convenient to. For instance, a mohawked, blue-haired punk might complain that store clerks watch them more closely because they falsely assume that everyone dressed that way is a shoplifter. The obvious solution is that if you don’t want to be treated like a punk, don’t dress like one. But that seems so unfair because people shouldn’t make judgments based on someone’s appearance. Poppycock. They dress that way in large part precisely so that people will make judgments. Maybe not the negative judgments of the store clerk but at least the positive judgment of those with similar sensibilities. You can’t have one without the other.

On a sidenote, I want to be clear that I do not endorse harassment of anybody based on how they dressed. A clerk looking a little bit closer at strangely dressed customers does not constitute harassment, in my opinion. I am merely using this as an example of negative behavior that some people complain about.

I’ll go even further and make what I don’t believe to be a controversial statement: in some sense, these people want the negative attention. If store clerks, as a proxy for society at large, approved of their fashion they would probably go out of their way to change into something else. Expressing one’s individuality requires differentiating yourself from others and you can’t expect people that you’re making a point of differentiating yourself from are less instinctively warm to you. You’re sending a signal. You can hardly be upset that they’re receiving it.

We might say that we dress this way or that based solely on how much we like it aesthetically. To a very limited extent, this is sometimes true. Some ladies genuinely look better in blue jeans and a shirt than they do in a dress. Some people look better may even look better with purple hair regardless of the social norms (though purple hair usually involves social context). Even when this is the case, however, we are choosing from the cafeteria of social conventions. I’m sure that by some objective criteria some guys would look best in a toga, but such a fellow would probably make do with a tanktop.

In the end, it always comes down to the baseline of social norms. Those that conform to the norms usually end up changing as the norms do (until we reach an age where we’re tired of changing) and those that deviate from the norm usually deviate in some familiar way. If you want to dress in true rebellion, but on that toga, a powdered wig, or heck a giant garbage sack. We don’t, though, because they (generally) make the same judgments about people that do that straight-laced folks make about them.

So having said all that, let me pull this post back to gender norms before wrapping it up. As with any other deviation from a norm, men and women suffer (though not equally) when they deviate from that norm. So why are the norms different and who does it benefit? I can’t explain why they are as they are, though who it benefits depends on one’s personal tastes.

A woman that dresses in men’s clothes without make-up makes off a whole lot better than a man that dresses as women do. A woman can enhance her appearance and detract from her flaws with make-up while men (generally) can’t. Women have all sorts of dresses and shirts and shirts and pants to choose from, men get only a select portion of those options. On the other hand, more is expected of women. They’re under more pressure to put make-up over their flaws. They’re looked at differently when they dress lazy. Some of their clothes seem deliberately designed to cause discomfort. Women have the freedom of options and more responsibility to match while men lack freedom and pressure.

Would the world be a better place if both genders had the exact same expectations and pressures? Maybe, but it’s sort of a moot question. Just as the punk needs Tommy Hilfiger to define who he isn’t, women will find ways to differentiate themselves from men and vice-versa. Further, with our bodies being different and all, we will almost certainly always want to accentuate different parts of our appearance.

It’s been observed a number of times in a number of places that romantic relationships constitute a market like any other. You have something to offer and you need something in return. You try to get the best that you can with what you have. It can be as sturdy as the diamonds market or as loose as a futures market, but it’s something of a market all the same.

As with any other market, it is rife with inefficiencies. Some people benefit from these inefficiencies, though I suspect more people lose from them. One of the big causes for inefficiencies is the lack of a singular marketplace. If you want a house, you go to the real estate section of the paper. If you want a relationship… well, you can try to get that from the paper, too, but there are too many intangibles to fit into an ad and it is on the whole less successful the same way that housing ads are not as helpful as car ads (people need to see the house, they know ahead of time what they’re getting with the car and if they need to see it they are just verifying).

I have a friend that’s an investment banker in New York City (he commutes from Connecticut… probably driving Peter crazy on the train). He tells me that the real estate market in NYC is brutally efficient. There are so many people looking so intently at it that if there is any added value to a location it will be appraised and the price adjusted. The housing market in the Colosse area is not nearly so efficient. There are some places that you can get great deals on a four bedroom house going to the same schools and having the same degree of security as a guy that paid twice as much for his house in part because there are so many people that aren’t as familiar with it or don’t question their initial assumptions about what they want. On the other hand, the market does often play catch-up. My Midlerth apartment with Karl had rent go up 86% in a year and a half as more people discovered what a prime location that place was.

I’ve been talking a lot to my friends in Deseret and I am reminded of something that I noticed up there: the relationship markets for non-Mormons are much less efficient than they were in Colosse and seem to be here in Santomas.

The more people there are, the stiffer the competition becomes. That may sound like a bad thing, but it isn’t necessarily. You have more people to compete with, but you have more options to choose from. Deseret is not nearly so densely populated where I lived. Further, half of the population was Mormon and most of those were reluctant to seriously consider marriage outside the faith.

So now we’re dealing with a half of what would already be a small dating market. Being a non-Mormon covers a lot of ground, so you take that half and you have to further fracture it because the evangelical Christians that live out there (and yes, some do) would have a problem with the atheists for example. The Mormons have added efficiency in their market because they have singles groups and a strong sense of community. Non-Mormons have no such thing and have reason to worry that they are wasting their time with someone they just met because they might be a Mormon. The longer I was up there, the easier it was to tell, but it’s still guessing (particular with the females).

Even if you take out the Mormon factor, though, the population base makes quite a difference. In this case, it just exacerbates the problem for non-Mormons. It was a good thing that I was married while I was out there, because romantic options would have been practically nill. There were a handful of people I knew from Colosse out there. One of them had a minor crush on me. I wasn’t interested, but in the backdrop of Deseret she became a lot more appealing.

Ordinarily it’s unlikely that I would ever consider dating someone like Carol Goddard or she dating someone like me — in fact, it’s unlikely that she and I would have even gotten along — but we had more in common simply by being on the outside of the local culture and had either of us been single (and I older or she younger) I would have considered it all differently than I might have if we had met in Colosse. In fact, I knew people like her in Colosse. I had no use for them. In Deseret, she was one of the better friends I had in the office.

And on and on.

I remember seeing an engaged couple in a restaurant. while I was up there. Though I hadn’t seen the movie yet, they looked strikingly like Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen from Knocked Up. I still remember that couple because I remember thinking that such a coupling would never happen in Colosse. Often there is a difference in the level of attractiveness of couples, but you can usually see off-hand where the less attractive partner makes up for it. This guy seemed like a stoner and the ring was tiny. He didn’t seem particularly charismatic, though that sort of thing is difficult to tell without talking to him. Then I did talk to him at the video store where he worked and he reminded me a lot of me.

At the same time, I didn’t look at this couple and say “Why is she choosing such a loser?!” the same way that I might have in Colosse (ahem… particularly when I was single). Instead, I looked and saw exemplars of the observation about market inefficiencies in Deseret. It struck me that as a non-Mormon (which she seemed to be) living where she did, this guy may have really been the best that she could do. Or to put it more kindly, she gave him a longer look than she ever would have considered doing in Colosse and found something in him she otherwise would have missed.

There is one big exception to the population=efficiency argument: College. I saw a whole lot of mismatches in colleges and yet in college you are numerically barraged with options). I’d have to guess there that it comes down to insufficient information. When we’re in college, we don’t always have a clear idea of what we’re looking for, so we experiment. Also, when in college it’s extremely difficult to figure out with of the charming rogue sorts is going to use his charm and charisma to become a captain of cutting-edge industry and which one will be using his charm and charisma to convince his landlord not to evict him because he’s six months behind on rent or convince some girl to take him in if he is evicted.

Some people hate comparing the relationship world to a marketplace, but in some ways I like it. For one thing, it helps me understand why things are the way that they are sometimes. For instance, why was it so difficult for me to find dates when I was 23? It was because I was undervalued by the market because 21 year old girls were still in college and were more interested in college guys but 23 year old girls dating beyond college could just as easily date a 28 year old with a better job. When I got 25 or 26, things started to improve.

I could also see myself as somewhat undervalued because of my introversion. Sometimes introversion is something that legitimately decreases someone’s relationship value because they’re harder to talk to and are awkward around people. I’m a pretty good conversationalist and not bad with people, though I don’t seek them out so much. I don’t like crowds, which legitimately decreased my relationship value, but I’m good at dinner party kinds of situations, though since I didn’t often get the opportunity to demonstrate the latter it becomes an inefficiency.

Some folks believe that there are no inefficiencies in any marketplace because something is worth precisely what one will pay or barter for it and never more or less. That makes a lot of assumptions about consumers have all of the information and appropriately weighing it for how positive or negative an effect that it will have on their life. It also means that I can’t say that I was an undervalued commodity in the relationship marketplace and deprives me of a rationalization that was helpful to me in the more distressing periods of my former single life.

Addendum: Bob Vis writes a ridiculously better post on the subject.

In regards to a previous post, Peter commented:

Getting back to the original issue, one thing to keep in mind is that changing your behavior/appearance/whatever to eliminate undesirable characteristics might not do much in terms of attracting women so long as you’re in the same social environment. For example, if an overweight guy manages to lose a lot of weight his dating prospects may not really improve among the women who knew him when he was fat, as they’ll still think of him as the fat guy.

It can actually be more complicated than that sometimes.

One thing that heavy guys see a fair amount of that gives them hope is older married couples with a heavy guy and a slender wife. What they often don’t realize is that when they first got married, it’s often the case that he was in better shape. Whenever that’s not the case, though, in almost every single instance that I’ve known it to occur, the guy was at least in better shape before they met. That’s the kind of thing that when you think about it shouldn’t matter, yet it seems to and when you think about it, it makes a certain amount of sense.

Take a guy that was morbidly obese from ages 5 to 25 but lost it all by 30, more often than not you’re looking at a guy that is less successful with women than a guy that was in good shape from 5-25 that let himself go and became overweight by 30.

A guy that has been overweight for most of his life will often think of himself as such after he’s lost the weight. Even if he notices some improvement, instinctually he will think that women see him as they have seen him for most of his life. He’s less likely to ask girls out and even when he does, he is up against a pretty big learning curve never having been successful before. Once I learned to shower regularly and lost 70 pounds or so (and gained two inches in height) in high school, I was still way behind a whole lot of my peers. I didn’t know how to talk to girls, didn’t know how to ask them out, and didn’t know the 100,000 ways I could accidentally repel them.

That’s not to say that losing the weight didn’t make a difference. It did. But it didn’t make as much difference as one might expect. I was still the same awkward kid, just in a smaller frame. Eventually I got caught up somewhat on the socialities of girls and women and I began to improve considerably… though I was still behind a whole lot of my peers. Then, even when a fair amount of the weight came back on, the improvements actually stuck regardless of the fact that I was heavier than I needed to be.

It’s kind of depressing to think about it. It’s actually something of a demotivator when it comes to trying to get into shape a little later in life. If I were told at 15 that losing the weight would still leave me behind my peers, I might not have lost it. I’m certainly glad that I did, of course, but sometimes to lose weight you’ll have to think that it’ll make all the difference in the world. Particularly if you’re losing it for social rather than health reasons.

The same is often true for women. The one formerly fat girl that I dated was half-crazy with insecurity. I know a couple guys that managed to marry quite well for themselves (in the appearance department) because the girl they married used to have a serious weight problem.

And as mentioned at the top of this post, the inverse is also often in effect. Girls I know that started gaining weight well after college often project a confidence and social adeptness that helps guys overlook the excess baggage. The fat former frat boys that I know managed to marry some real hot women.

My family is close to another family named the Lamonts that was raised in a quite healthy household. No soft drinks around, little or no chocolate, all four food groups at every meal, no fast food, and so on. Once the girls left the house, though, they all started putting on the Freshman Fifteen and beyond. Some lost the weight, one didn’t until very recently. I remember thinking to myself that one can really go overboard with raising health-conscious kids because they can rebel as soon as they leave the house. As I get older, I see that to matter less and less. The fact that they were thin and attractive in high school mattered more than I would have expected.

Bob tackles the subject of soul mates:

The idea of a soul mate is a Noble Lie. If you are single, you are not seeking the one, single, solitary person who is right for you. You are seeking for someone who is right for you. Once you find this person, declaring them to be your soul mate merely gives you the confidence to actually go through with the deal and marry the person. It also dissuades you from looking around for something better. It is a lie, but it has a noble purpose. That’s what makes it a noble lie.

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had was with Evangeline. She believes in their being “the one” and I don’t. I believe in God and she doesn’t. The bending of the arguments around one another and how the beliefs in soulmates and God are expressed in such similar manners (as are the counter-arguments) was a real learning experience. Someday I’ll have to try to reproduce the conversation for a Ghostland piece.

I think that the mistake of the notion of “soul mates” is that believing that there is a single one. The idea of their being hundreds or thousands of potential soul mates out there almost negates the meaning, but not quite. I believe that a soulmating is something that occurs over time. I believe that there are many potential soulmates, but that only one can be cultivated and be formed at any given time.

It’s sort of like pregnancy in that regard, I guess. Lots of sperm, but (usually) only one can become a baby at a time. Sometimes none do.

How does a soulmating cultivate? After people spend enough time with one another, they start growing together. Those aspects that are completely incompatible with their partner either become compartmentalized or phase out entirely. You let another consciousness enter your mind. You start seeing the world the way your lover sees the world. That’s not to say that you start thinking exactly the way that they do, but you find other ways to look at the world in addition to your own. You feel their pain in a way far more empathetic than the sympathy you might feel with a friend. You grow into a unit of sorts. Individuals, but connected by something.

And if such a relationship ever dies, a part of you dies with it.

This thinking gets tricky when it comes to widows and widowers. My temptation is to say that only one soulmate can be cultivated over a lifetime, but in case of the death of a partner I don’t see why another can be found. I’m actually not a huge fan of the seeming rush remarry after becoming a widow or widower, but I wouldn’t banish those unfortunate enough to have a spouse die to forever being alone.

That actually leads into another idea for a post that’s percolating in my mind: How can one fall in love again when one starts off loving their partner considerably less than they love someone else? Check back at some point in the next week or two*, different bat-time, same bat-channel.

* – Actually, check back quite frequently cause I enjoy having people read my writing because I’m vain that way.