Tempest in a B Cup
Tony's got titties. Tony Blair, that is, and people actually seem to care. Barbara Ellen writes in the Observer:
More interesting still was that, for a change, it was the men in power whose bodies were being scrutinised and objectified. Usually it would be their women (Cherie and Samantha) who would get the cameras zooming in on their cellulite, with columnists like myself worrying on their behalf about the 'orange-peel effect' (complete with pips), and musing whether middle-aged mothers should 'risk' going on to the beach at all without being garbed in head-to-toe tarpaulin.This time around, it was the men having their various areas of flab labelled and criticised, including 'love handles' (strangely termed, because when you have them nobody loves you) and 'moobies' (the dreaded man-boobs). It's a new cultural wriggle we could probably thank Heat for - specifically the magazine's 'Not Torso of the Week' section, which features famous men looking bad topless. (For the uninitiated, a recent entry was Michael Douglas, the size of whose stomach suggested he had been following his most famous character's mantra, 'greed is good', a tad too literally). Now here are Blair and Cameron getting the same treatment. All rather heartening in a twisted sort of way. It's about time men got a taste of the body fascism women suffer from teen mag to grave. Then again, maybe not - when Winston Churchill was planning to 'fight them on the beaches' he probably had quite different things in mind than being teased by tabloids about his 'moobies'.
Interestingly, there weren't the expected levels of gender Schadenfraude among women to see Blair and Cameron being objectified, simply because most females are hardwired to be sympathetic towards anybody who gets caught out with 'holiday podge' syndrome.
No, it's that most women don't care about men's looks with anywhere near the intensity men care about women's. See Gaulin and McBurney's primer on evolutionary psychology. In the mean time, here's a quickie explanation from my column:
Evolutionary psychologist David Buss studied 10,047 of us neo-knuckledraggers across 37 cultures. They aren't reading Vogue magazine in Zambia, but men there are still as hunter-gatherer hot as men here for female fertility high-signs like youth, beauty, symmetry, and hourglass figures. Women around the world (even those popping birth control pills like M&Ms) are still driven to seek high status men who show the potential to provide for the cave-lings. (Do note that "high status" doesn't necessarily mean the richest guy on the planet. If you're a poet, a day-trader is likely to make you hurl.)
> most women don't care about men's
> looks with anywhere near the intensity
> men care about women's.
That's absolutely true. But if there's an exception (maybe/maybe not) it's for height.
Mostly I just wanted to comment this morning to note that another Bushie has killed another guy with a car:
http://tinyurl.com/y7rdb5
Note that these people aren't like those animals the Kennedys... Bushies do it *sober*.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2006/10/21/officer_struck_by_federal_judge_dies/
Crid at October 22, 2006 9:29 AM
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