Pinterest-based pseudoscience

When I was a little girl, I don't recall having ever given any thought to my future wedding. Now, this wasn't because I was preoccupied with saving the world or science fairs or anything useful. Nor was I defying gender norms. I was plenty interested in boys and moderately interested in clothes, but weddings? No. I don't think that interest ever set in, even though the desire to get married eventually did.

But this is, allegedly, a thing - this having dreamt of one's wedding since girlhood. So I was curious to read Abby Ellin's Styles piece about the phenomenon. That, and the article's premise was an interesting one. That is, it might have gone in an interesting direction. It is strange that despite a great deal of female economic independence, despite a culture where premarital sex is far from taboo, despite a whole host of developments, the dynamics around marriage remain so gendered. Not the trappings, because that's just... trappings. The actual decision-making parts. The male proposal remains precisely because the default assumption is that a woman always wants to get married. Which is, indeed, curious.

Alas, because Styles, there's no such investigation. The evidence that women dream of princess weddings seems limited to the existence of women who take an interest in weddings prior to having found a groom. But... isn't that just kind of an aesthetic thing? So some women make Pinterest boards for as-yet-to-be-scheduled weddings. I have Pinterest boards full of clothing I can't necessarily afford, but think looks cool - does that point to something fraught? To some kind of delusion or agony? More to the point: I can't figure out how all this virtual flower-arranging lead to the following conclusion:

Dr. Markey also believes the wedding is the “biological imperative” made manifest. “Women tend to be more selective when picking a mate and have a greater desire for monogamy and a stable relationship than men,” he said. “Thus, they are more likely to dream of a wedding, which symbolizes this desire.”

Never mind that the latest science on this is apparently that women are less suited to monogamy than men, and that women's alleged lack of interest in sex in middle age is due to their being bored with their partners. Which would, if anything, suggest that women's greater interest in weddings is precisely due to their being symbols of a new relationship.

I did, however, get a kick out of this:

Sue Johnson, a clinical psychologist and author of “Love Sense,” finds this mentality worrisome. Women are planning the show before the script is written and “before the leading man shows up,” she said. She understands the desire for companionship. Marriage, she said, “speaks to our longing for connection and our fear of aloneness.” But, she added, the emphasis on weddings and marriage is also somewhat dangerous. “In North America, we’ve made progress,” she said. “Hillary Clinton might be the first female president, but a woman still wants this badge of legitimacy that she is wanted and desired by a man.”

Hillary Clinton. A woman who's accomplished plenty, yes, but whose name we know because she was married to a president. At first I thought that this was Johnson's point, but then I reread the paragraph and I'm maybe 95% sure it's not.

"Styles" peak outrage

Women are now getting cosmetic surgery for the express purpose of looking good in their engagement-ring hand-selfies! All women? No. Lots of women? No. A bunch of the author's friends? No. Two women. The Style section tracked down a sum total of two women got their hands altered (presumably both hands - symmetry and all that) so as to show off their rings. Actually, not even two - one is simply planning to do so. The rest is inferred: many women wear engagement rings (true), and of those, a good number take photos and post them to social media (also true). Meanwhile, cosmetic surgeons and dermatologists can be tracked down who'll confirm that hands are part of the human body, and thus that there are people willing to spend money to have these parts somehow improved. It's therefore possible that we've got a hand-selfie-surgery epidemic on our, uh, hands, but not all that likely.

That said, this was - and Miss Self-Important, I want your thoughts - the perfect Styles story. Engagement rings themselves, as a topic, elicit tremendous class-and-gender outrage. The cost! The ethics of diamonds! The problematic sexism of the "tradition" if we can even call it that, invented as it was by DeBeers, which has been written about a ton but which you, foolish woman distracted by shiny objects, probably somehow missed! The resentment of women who want these rings but don't have them! The assumption that all women want one! The lemme-see-the-ring that follows engagement! The implication that this isn't enthusiasm for a friend or colleague's news but rather an attempt to figure out how much money her dude has or is willing to spend on her!

But this latest story brings all that outrage and crosses it with existing fury about cosmetic surgery. The ring-oriented hand-lift - invented though it may be - is like an extreme version of painting the nail of your ring finger to highlight the rock. It's so infuriating that it might even manage to rile women who do wear engagement rings and aren't losing sleep over said rings being problematic. So much outrage! So much that there hardly needs to be a trend of women doing this. I mean, it's nice that they found the one woman who did, but really, it wasn't necessary. 

Oh la la Bean

Sometimes, I just want to be like, New York Times, enough with the French stuff. Is France really that great? I mean, congratulations, Inès de la Fressange, for being "almost 6 feet tall, about 125 pounds and hipless." She will teach us, oh, she will, the essence of being a Parisienne. Might it involve wine, cigarettes, and scarves? A certain insouciance? A certain je ne sais quoi?

What she can't do, alas, is teach you how to wear the boring clothes you already own, yet look ... what creative word could we use here?... chic: "One of her uniforms — a navy crew-neck sweater, rolled-up jeans and brown loafers — makes her look elegant-casual; most anyone else would look like the L. L. Bean catalog."*

So I was delighted to read Jon Caramanica's "Critical Shopper" column about a new Agnes B. store/gallery that's opened in Soho/Chinatown. In the very same Style section as brought us the Fressange profile, Caramanica really gets at the heart of commodified Frenchness as marketed at suggestible Americans:

"[Agnès B.] specialized in, essentially, up-market basics with minor flourishes, one of them being an air of Gallic impossibility that made a white button-up shirt so much more than just a white button-up shirt. After the brand peaked in the 1990s, its mantle was picked up by A.P.C. and, to some degree, Isabel Marant. Like Agnès B., both companies promise more than they deliver, if you’re counting only the tangibles. The clothes are fine, the pose is better. "

And!

"[...] that would probably cost one-third as much at Uniqlo [...]"

Yes to that! And!

"Agnès B. made the original fancy French basics, pawned off on thin American bodies that didn’t know better. Globalization has rendered it more or less obsolete, but it’s still trying."

*Speaking as one who goes around Paris with brown loafers that honest-to-goodness are from the L. L. Bean catalogue (well, the online version), I will attest to the fact that pairing those with jeans and a sweater, as a mere mortal, a hip-possessing one at that, has not made me the toast of this town. The street-style photographers are not exactly lining up. Nor are the cat-callers who apparently make life impossible for the young women of Paris. It would be possible to walk stark naked down the street in Paris with those loafers on and get no reaction. (Man-repeller blogger, consider the not-refined loafer, and turn your blog, which was a brilliant idea, into what it's meant to be.)