Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

I was leafing through Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue when a juxtaposition caught my eye. On pages facing each other were this girl --

-- and this ad --

Of the many taste-changes that have most taken me by surprise over the decades, the preference that this illustration represents is high on the list. These are robot creatures ... for guys who find Lara Croft sexier than real women? Is that right?

What shall we call this preference? "Unreal digitized Photoshop perfection"? Or -- a term I believe visitor Ricpic came up with -- "android sexiness"? Even the real girl in the comparison above has an unreal, android-ish, silvery flawlessness.

It seems to me that, where sex and many other things go, the relationship to fantasy has changed.

Adjusting to the reality of real women used to be considered part of becoming a man. Back in the day, there were plenty of jokes around about how boys setting out on sex lives expected to find staples in their girlfriends' tummies -- acknowledgments of how influential the Playboy centerfold was in shaping male expectations. But it was also widely understood that fantasy was something you had to know how to keep in its place. Real life was more complex -- as well as more moving, upsetting, disturbing, and rewarding -- than losing yourself in fantasy was. And that's what a woman could represent to a man: real life. Artifice and invention? They weren't mean to overwhelm life, they were meant to enhance it.

Now, though ... By comparison to what's on the computer screen, real life apparently looks dim, inert, and depressing. Online experiences apparently hook some boys so young and so deep that many of them never recover. Real girls are never more than poor substitutes for Lara Croft, real life just a dim disappointment that can never be recovered from.

Bonuses:

• Read a history of the Swimsuit Issue
  
• Friedrich von Blowhard wrote a posting comparing Schiele and the Swimsuit Issue
  
• Donald wrote about American pinup artists
  
• Just for the record: Jule Campbell is the name of the brilliant editor who turned the Swimsuit Issue into an American pop-culture classic. For 30 years Campbell put to work an unmatchable knack for combining athletic, sweet, a little sophisticated, and beautiful. Her girls represented a healthy and friendly alternative to the creatures that inhabited fashion magazines. However glitzily produced the Swimsuit Issue has been in the years since Campbell left the helm, her special magic is now missing from the publication entirely. I'm sorry to report that I can't find much about Campbell on the web. She makes a few appearances here. I'd love to interview her. If anyone knows how to contact Jule Campbell, please shoot an email to me at michaelblowhard at that gmaily place.
  

Michael

I caught my 14 year old son looking at porn on the net, so we got Net Nanny to block it. But not because I mind him looking at naked girls.

Back in the day, we were lucky to snag somebody's dad's Playboy once a year. That was the hardest-core stuff I ever saw, and there wasn't much of it either. Like Michael's, my first exposure to the real thing was a bit disorienting, but somehow I got over it with remarkable speed!

Now though...there's no end to it, plus there's some truly nasty stuff out there just a click away that he really doesn't need to see at his age.

So in other words, I want to prevent him from the Lara Croft Geekboy Syndrome. Boys these days already have enough barriers to getting a girl.

Loved the joke about the staples, Michael.

Posted by: Todd Fletcher on May 15, 2009 5:38 PM

You moron. It's some joking misogyny. Sheesh.

Posted by: TCO on May 15, 2009 10:29 PM

Isn't there a good line in Kirk Vonnegut somewhere about this phenomenon? A scene in which a boy shows a photo of a pretty centrefold to an older man, saying "Look at this beautiful woman!" And the older man says, "Son, that's not a woman, that's a photograph."

Posted by: aliasclio on May 15, 2009 11:02 PM

Oops. That should have been "Kurt" Vonnegut. It's late and I'm sleepy.

Posted by: aliasclio on May 15, 2009 11:03 PM

Nah, nothing to worry about. Guys have been making copies of female bodies for at least 40,000 years. Somehow they still seem to want to fuck the real thing.

You'd only see a real change if there were convincingly lifelike imitations. Sight, smell, touch, taste, sound, the whole thing.

There is an uptick in the cyber-babe obsession, but that's just due to young people not having social spaces anymore. Unable to interact with real people, they make the best with what they can and hook into internet porn.

I've documented some of the trends at my personal blog, but it's more or less what Putnam documented among older adults in Bowling Alone -- except that it started decades later. Looks like the 1980s were a transition time, and by the mid-1990s it was done.

Posted by: agnostic on May 16, 2009 1:44 AM

If I was doing the "swimsuit" issue, I'd have have actual athletes (male as well as female): minor league baseball players, stars of second tier college sports, and so on. Photograph them at some lust tropic resort, sure; high-fashion swimwear, sure.

But I'd ditch the models and the not-quite-porn shots.

I do wonder what effect the ubiquity of realistic images of very good looking women has on male expectations. Not just in cheesecake or porn - the women in ordinary advertisements are all flawless. Even "housewives" touting cleaning products are beautiful.

Virtually all actresses appearing on TV or in movies are very good looking - unless they are explicitly old or homely.

And modern image repro technologies make highly realistic images easy. (Compare to 19th century display ads with line drawings only.)

This skew has got to have some effect.

Posted by: Rich Rostrom on May 16, 2009 2:30 AM

I get it. There's something about the pose, particularly with the gap between the thighs and the confident look over the shoulder. But the skin on the real girl far outweighs the symbolic sexuality of the robot. What's interesting is how the robot's creators are able to concretely capture a fetishized sexual come-on through purely visual stimuli.

Posted by: CounterClckWise on May 16, 2009 4:05 AM

Where are the numbers? Are young men less likely to be having sex these days? If porn has grabbed hold of their, ah, imaginations to the detriment of the appeal of real world women, then there should be less real world f*cking of said women. Is there? Where are the numbers?

Posted by: PatrickH on May 16, 2009 9:58 AM

"Android sexiness" would be good, except that andro- implies male.

How about "CGI candy"?

Posted by: Wm Jas on May 16, 2009 10:13 AM

There has been a large movement toward "amateur" pornography.

Posted by: josh on May 16, 2009 11:05 AM

* "CGI candy" is really good.

* In the images in the posting, the real babe's skin is also silvery, perfect, and unreal.

* There's a huge diff between the starlets-and-models crowd today and, say, 40 years ago. Flawless, radioactive teeth, impeccably toned bodies, enhanced chests. And of course the images today are all put thru Photoshop before winding up before the public.

* For proof of how all this may be affecting some youngdudes, just check out many of the comments at Roissy's. Some of the guys are amazingly intolerant of the reality of women, physically and otherwise. And in any case, the gestalt (vis a vis sex and the sexes) that emerges from conversations at Roissy's is enormously different than anything I ever witnessed until very recent years.

* "Perhaps growing up on cyberthings has a big impact on people's tastes and imaginations" -- this is the central idea in this posting. Seems so obvious it must be true, right? For instance, kids growing up today more or less expect mediathings to have an interactive component. That wasn't true through much of the history of the media; now it is. Why *wouldn't* we see these tech-and-taste changes reflected in sexual preferences too?

* Amateur porn was a very interesting development. Here's an essay about it from back in the pre-web days: LINK

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on May 16, 2009 11:44 AM

Michael-

"* For proof of how all this may be affecting some youngdudes, just check out many of the comments at Roissy's. Some of the guys are amazingly intolerant of the reality of women, physically and otherwise. And in any case, the gestalt (vis a vis sex and the sexes) that emerges from conversations at Roissy's is enormously different than anything I ever witnessed until very recent years."

Here's the thing. The images go one way, reality the other. In reality, at the top, there are pretty much flawless polished women. Thin, lustrous long straight hair, look like they came off the same assembly line. At the same time a big percentage of girls in the right age range are somewhat overweight and another group are disgustingly fat. We're heading towards a world where women are either 8+ or 5 and below and there aren't that many guys who can play in the 8+ leagues.

Posted by: Steve Johnson on May 16, 2009 12:41 PM

Steve: I agree that there are far too many overweight people (of both sexes) today, and that's a real social and medical problem. But there's more to men's issues with women's bodies than just that many of the latter have weight problems.

For example, when Roissy posted a set of pictures of mostly "real" women - non-celebrities, I mean - recently, many of them rejected not only the fat women but the slender ones as well, insisting that one slim young woman, photographed against a Rock Creek Park backdrop, was repellantly out-of-shape because, though her legs were very slender (and showed no signs of cellulitic wobble, one the one hand, or bony anorexia, on the other), they were not sufficiently "toned".

No doubt men's criticisms are louder when the choice of women is purely theoretical and not taking place in real time in a bar or a party. Still, it gives one pause. People's expectations of their prospective mates are higher than ever today, and it is only too easy to turn from reality to fantasy when reality doesn't measure up.

Posted by: aliasclio on May 16, 2009 1:52 PM

I think Steve's point is great, as is Clio's.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on May 16, 2009 2:45 PM

It's fascinating that Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe in their primes would not be fit enough for some modern dudes. That said women can be just as picky though rarely as critical about men's bodies.

Posted by: hello on May 16, 2009 2:48 PM

Rejecting a picture of a woman is one thing. But would any of the rejecters at Roissy's turn away from the girl with the untoned thighs if they'd had a chance to actually have sex with her? Rejecting a picture because it doesn't meet standards of pictorial sexiness isn't the same thing as rejecting a woman because she's not centrefold stuff. As I said before, where are the numbers? Are actual women being turned down in large numbers in favour of porn?

And the problem with basing any conclusion on what the commenters at Roissy's say isn't just that the commenters there are so full of sh*t. It's that they're commenters. A comment on a picture says waaaay less than real-life behaviour. Comments on pics are two levels removed from reality. I see no reason to grant that the comments even meet the standard of sincerity. But if they did, they'd just still be electronic doodads pointing at electronic thingies.

Hey, I love electricity. But it ain't flesh. And patterns on a screen tell us next to nothing about the fleshy behavioural world out there.

Posted by: PatrickH on May 16, 2009 2:54 PM

There's an interesting phenomenon I've always noticed regarding male and female strippers. The female ones come in all shapes and sizes (Aside from the really high-end, Vegas fembots, of course), and most guys are pretty happy to look at just about any of them. Most of them are "real" girls. Male strippers, on the other hand, at least the ones I've seen in pictures, are uniformly ripped. I'm only going from pictures here, as I've never been to a male strip show, so maybe some who have can correct me.

This difference I'm sure says something deep and profound about the male vs. female gaze, but I'm too lazy to type it out.

Posted by: JV on May 16, 2009 3:21 PM

Male strippers, on the other hand, at least the ones I've seen in pictures, are uniformly ripped.

Hypergamy. Women have simple tastes, they only like the best.

Posted by: Thursday on May 16, 2009 4:34 PM

clio:
Steve: I agree that there are far too many overweight people (of both sexes) today, and that's a real social and medical problem. But there's more to men's issues with women's bodies than just that many of the latter have weight problems.

the female landscape has been scarred by the obesity epidemic and this has profound implications for the sexual market:

http://roissy.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/obesity-to-blame-for-game/

a lot of men's issues with women's bodies would evaporate overnight if all those rubenesque shoggoths pushed away from the table.

For example, when Roissy posted a set of pictures of mostly "real" women - non-celebrities, I mean - recently, many of them rejected not only the fat women but the slender ones as well,

i get a lot of black readers, for some reason. i noticed in the comments that it was the black commenters who were rejecting the slender babes, which only feeds my suspicion that black men like their women a little heftier. or they have laxer standards.

insisting that one slim young woman, photographed against a Rock Creek Park backdrop, was repellantly out-of-shape because, though her legs were very slender (and showed no signs of cellulitic wobble, one the one hand, or bony anorexia, on the other), they were not sufficiently "toned".

for the record, rock creek girl had a fantastic body. not an ounce of cellulite on her.

No doubt men's criticisms are louder when the choice of women is purely theoretical and not taking place in real time in a bar or a party.

there is some truth to this. it's similar to how nerds will argue over the merit of two high end video cards, when to the average consumer both video cards work well enough for the job at hand. but you may be putting too much stock into this "theoretical mate choice" grade deflation. i've noticed that men take the business of ranking women's beauty pretty seriously, and after all the sturm und drang of nitpicking minor flaws, will settle on giving answers that closely reflect their real world preferences.

Posted by: roissy on May 16, 2009 7:29 PM

So that explains why my lovely girlfriend is always singing that disco song You Should Be Dancing at me while running her fingers across my abs.

Well! It seems I have a very interesting career ahead of me!

I should be dancing YEAH!

Posted by: Chip N. Dales on May 16, 2009 7:31 PM

I don't think this stuff just affects the men, it affects the women as well.

The media profoundly influences our cultural perceptions and with regard to beauty, "unnatural perfection" is the ideal. All those artificial swimsuit models are meant to be the perfection of the male sexual ideal. A man who has fanastised about a Victoria's Secret model is going to find his real partner in most instances, less visually satisfying than his fantasy ideal. Does this matter? Well it really depends on the individual concerned.

If you live a hedonistic lifestyle, which let's face it many people do, you're going to want maximise your pleasure. With men who reduce women to their physical appearance and capacity for sexual pleasure, maximum pleasure is perceived to occur with the hottest women. Men staring at flawless perfection all day the computer screen, might bang someone else, but they're always going to have that nagging feeling that there is better sex somewhere else than at home. The sex with the ideal partner is always perceived to be less satisfying than with the real partner. That's where the problem is, these images are suggesting to us that what we have is not as good as what we could potentially have, it's the constant implied suggestion that we have settled for second best.

In a culture that is drenched in "unnatural beauty" real women will invariably come up short to the ideal. The potential is always there that unnatural ideal is around the corner, the real woman never fully satisfies.

Posted by: slumlord on May 16, 2009 7:58 PM

Death to Videodrome!

Long live the New Flesh!

Posted by: Tupac Chopra on May 16, 2009 9:55 PM

I just thought I'd speak up because no one is admitting to being someone who prefers porn to real women. Really, it's like choosing a diet of Doritos over home-cooked stroganoff. The cooked meals might be better, but you have to learn to cook stroganoff and then keep cooking every day -- Doritos you can have right now, and they're pretty darn good. And they keep coming out with new flavors, but you're stuck with stroganoff for life.

So basically, I keep waiting for men to realize the giant sea change that Internet pornography has brought (that flabby statue is not the same thing) and stop dating women altogether.

Posted by: Noumenon on May 17, 2009 10:48 AM

I see no evidence that males of any age prefer artificial women to real ones. You're telling me any person alive would choose the android over the model?

Fantasies about fembots come from two places:

1) The possibility about bedding a fembot that is more attractive than the women one could actually get.

2) All sex, no nagging.

I doubt either of those is new.

Posted by: JewishAtheist on May 17, 2009 12:05 PM

JA -- When something shows up in popular culture, then shows up again and again, that's usually a good indication that a taste or a preference has emerged. Sexy robots or anime-type creatures didn't used to play a role in popular culture -- they play a prominent role in pop cult now. Silvery flawless Photoshopped flesh on models didn't used to play a role in popular culture -- now it's pretty much the standard thing.

It's easy enough to point out eras in popular culture when quite the opposite prevailed, when imperfections were relished, when the reality of flesh was doted on, when roughness, tang, and "character" were what was sought by people and marketed by marketers.

Hence: there has been a dramatic change in tastes and preferences. Why now? What might it represent? And how might it be affecting and shaping minds and imaginations?

It's such a marked and obvious development that, if you really want to argue that nothing's really going on here, I think the burden of proof is on you.

Posted by: MIchael Blowhard on May 17, 2009 12:44 PM

"Sexy robots didn't used to play a role in popular culture"?

Ever see Metropolis, Michael?

And JV hits the nail; I've been to a lot of strip joints with clients over the years and the girls come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. The male dancers are all refugees from American Gladiator. Maybe you could speak to this, Clio and the other ladies. Are the covers of the bodice rippers true? Is it the Himbo that's every woman's dream? Are all of the Fairer Sex just a bunch of Roissys after all?

Posted by: Brutus on May 17, 2009 9:03 PM

Jewish Atheist:

I see no evidence that males of any age prefer artificial women to real ones. You're telling me any person alive would choose the android over the model?

Look harder:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

The world is bigger than your experience of it.

Got a spare $6500?

Seriously, you can't make this crap up.(NSFW)

Posted by: slumlord on May 18, 2009 2:12 AM

About the flesh girl pic, doesn't she look tired, even exhausted, slumping over her knees with a rounded kyphotic spine? She doesn't strike me as being in good shape, and this contrast is more troubling to me than any "android-ness" to her. She looks like the kind of anorexic chain-smoking giantess that has dominated the model industry for a long time now. Back in the heyday of the Swimsuit issue, the women looked healthy, not hard-bodied or aerobicized, but healthy, energetic and happy.

Not like that wilting hothouse flower above. It seems like the gay-driven/social X-ray funded ideal of the model underlies the choice SI made. That's sad, because SI has sold out its hetero male audience. I've heard the Swimsuit issue doesn't sell much any more. It certainly doesn't have anything like the cultural impact it used to.

No wonder. I'm straight and male (wait...let me check...yes! Thank God!) and that lanky, tired-out skeleton doesn't do a thang for me. Or for my thang, which remains as soft and droopy as, well, she is..

Posted by: PatrickH on May 18, 2009 12:51 PM

Online experiences apparently hook some boys so young and so deep that many of them never recover.
this comes str8 out of the book of David Alexander.

Posted by: chic noir on May 18, 2009 5:36 PM






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