Beach Body Ready and Other Women: It's About Settling

Quite rightly the ASA didn't find the Protein World Beach Body Ready poster offensive .

They did find its claims unrealistic, and banned it on those grounds. That achieves the result the body-positives wanted but not for their reasons, and in ideology, reasons are more important than results.

First time I saw it I thought the model had been photo-shopped, looked more closely and realised she hadn't. Renee Somerfield is the one young woman in the world who really does look like that, and it must have taken the agency days looking on Instagram to find her.

It's not easy finding a non-photo-shopped image of Renee, Why anyone would bother, I have no idea.

I don't have carved abs and 10% body fat. But I'm not put off by photographs of men who do, whether they are Men's Health Hunk of the Month cover model or the poster for the Magic Mike movie. I know what they had to do to get to look like that. It takes a brutal diet, exercise, the genes to put the abdominal cartilage in the right place to pull the abs into a six-pack, and personal trainers and dieticians of the kind you and I can't afford. Also I know they only look like that on the day of the shoot, since there's a fair amount of water loss involved to look that ripped. I don't mind that they look like that. If I put that much work in, I wouldn't look that good, but I sure would turn heads on the beach.

A man who trains and diets may have a look that's a little strained but it speaks of self-discipline and application, it speaks of manly virtues. A woman who trains in that way sends the same message, but those virtues are not feminine. There are a handful of mid-thirties to mid-forties women in media and PR who train hard to stay tight, but keep the body-fat higher than an athlete's so that they still look feminine. It's a narrow line to walk. But (model) just looks like that. She may keep those looks by eating sensibly, and doing some light circuits to stay tight, but by the look of her other photographs on Instagram, she doesn't do athletic training.

A model of Ms Somerfield's looks reminds most of us that we are settling with our choice of partner. However much we are aroused by them, and find them attractive in so many other ways, and however much we might not think about it, we are settling. Many people can live with this knowledge, as long as it remains unsaid and mainly invisible in their partner's behaviour. (I have roving eyes.)

But the body-positives don't want their partners to be settling. They know they are overweight, have short limbs and chubby fingers. They know they don't fit anyone's idea of even a Six. They know they aren't above the Pretty Line. Yet they want to be found attractive without reservation. And who can blame them? Most men know they can't spit sharp Game, don't do Bad Boy things, and don't have much of a sense of thier own direction, but want to be found attractive for who they are, not what they can provide, and who can blame them? Both are doomed to be disappointed, but I feel sympathy for both groups.

This is why the the funky Sevens and Eights, like Lili here, in c-heads can at times leave me in despair,

 or a stone 10 like Alejandra Guilmant

who occasionally pops up on Fashioncopious. Let alone Malgosia Bela in the 35th Birthday edition of i-D.

They remind me that if I were to set out again, my reaction would be to settle for yet another Six. Which I don't want to do and wouldn't like myself for doing. Just like the body-positives.

Speaking of living with oneself, recently I made an approach that to the only Eight that's passed through the office in a large number of years (Khazakstan via five years at an English university). I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't. But something happened between the time we arranged to meet for coffee and I was getting yes-please smiles, and the day we met. I was gently re-buffed, and she's blanked me since, but who cares? Sometimes you gotta do it, for your self-respect's sake.

Same-Sex Marriage 4, The Economy 5

It seems the Supremes have ruled 5-4 that it is no longer legal for individual States to make same-sex marriage illegal. The contention was between legal consistency across the Federation and the right of States to set their own laws. There were only thirteen hold-outs, which made the consistency argument easy. Had there been only three which allowed gay marriage, the consistency argument would have gone the other way.

Everyone pretended the argument was about “human rights” or “equal rights” for people wanting to marry someone of the same sex. That it was about Good Liberals vs Bad Religious Fundamentalists. Some, of course, see it as a sign of the continuing moral and political degeneracy of the USA. Others that the USA is gradually becoming a Better Place. This is all self-obsessed twaddle by the special interest groups.

The acutest comment about same-sex marriage was made several years ago. It was to the effect that, since the last remaining tax concession for marriage is in inheritance, and the changes in Family Law had turned marriage into a minefield of responsibilities-without-rights for men, and rights-without-responsibilities for women, marriage has no special status, is valueless or worse, and extending it to all comers was not sending any moral or social signal of approval. In other words: the minorities could have it, because it wasn’t worth having anymore. (I’m going to pass over Justice Anthony N Kennedy's tacky pro-marriage sentiments. That passage is tactical PR of the highest order, a sugar-coating to help the pill go down.)

The religious people were upset because they saw this as a sign that their State had abandoned them. Well, duh! We’re running an economy here: we have taxes to collect, workforces to populate, and the appearance of hunky-doriness to maintain. The Rainbow People got marriage because the economy doesn’t care who anyone sleeps with, or what ceremonies and legal relationships they want to enter into, or even how many there are in the bed, as long as they show up to work on time and spend their salary, pay their taxes and don’t interrupt the flow of goods and services throughout the economy. I tend to agree. Personally, I don’t care who you have sex with, or where and when you go to shul, as long as you behave in public with decorum, consideration, take your share of the tax burden and don’t want Government hand-outs for your activities. You can be as diverse as you like, as long as you stop making noise when I need to go to sleep. (A requirement that has everything to do with my participation in the economy, and nothing to do with my participation in society.)

The transition from a mono-cultural society to a multi-cultural economy is difficult. People are still struggling with it, because they don’t understand nature of the transition. Governments started to run economies rather than societies back in the 1980’s, but since the economies were in largely mono-cultural societies, nobody really noticed. Then those governments started to import large numbers of immigrants to service the economy. “Diversity” was the social disguise for the economic reasons.

Only after a while does it become clear that Diversity encourages the formation of mono-cultural societies within the multi-cultural economy. As long as there is no discrimination in the economy (because it’s participation in the economy that now matters), there can be all the discrimination and segregation within the society that we want. It cannot be imposed by the State, because the State is now in charge of the economy, but it can be imposed by the various ethnic and cultural groups. It’s not easy to cross the borders between the groups, and it’s almost impossible to make it into the political, economic and artistic elites unless you had the right background or the right luck. So a multi-cultural economy is not a society with shared values and culture. It’s just a bunch of different people who happen to live next to each other.

This is exactly why the SJW’s on the left and right are hopping up and down and screaming. They see that the Government has withdrawn from legislating and running society. SJW’s and tradcons want to legislate society: they want to tell you to do this and don’t do that. Western Governments are not in that job anymore.

The Supremes didn’t vote 5-4 for same-sex marriage. They voted 5-4 for the economy over society.

Girls Communing With Smartphones, Soho

There are so many things I could say about these images. Mostly, however, I love the colours and the light. Sunday morning Soho. Women looking communing with their smartphones is one of the new sights and indeed iconographic images of our time. I don't know what it means. But these strike me as images of devotional attention.

Diversity As Industrial Sabotage

A lot of SJW’s and PC columnists are making a noise about the fact that women are “under-represented” in the big tech companies. Those companies are making pledges about getting Women Into Tech. Oddly, there are less women graduating in Computer Science now than there were twenty years ago, which probably says something about the lack of fortitude of today’s women compared to their older cousins, but don’t let that stop anyone.

Once a company is known as a diversity quota-house, the really good people don’t apply to work there, and the really good people who do work there, leave. I’m not talking about hacks like me, I mean actually talented people who could make a huge difference to the products, processes and profits of an organisation. Those people are jealous of their time and talent, and they are focussed on developing and using it. How else did they get to be good in the first place? They do not want to deal with working for insecure managers, or with team members who can’t haul the load.

If you hired someone who was good at the job and also happened to be (enter Diverse parameters here), then you didn’t make a quota-hire. You just hired a good person who happens to be (enter Diverse parameters here). Your new hire won't cause problems with the non-Diverses because they have talent and they are a professional, and want to be accepted as that. If the non-Diverses start to make comments, you can indulge in some old-fashioned shaming and tell them to behave like professionals.

The Diversity Illusion is that there will always be enough acceptable quota-hires when you need them. This is obviously wrong. Since a quota-hire is someone you hired over a better non-quota candidate so that you could meet your quotas, quota-hires are by definition less capable. (Let me repeat, Diverse candidates who have the required talent aren't quota-hires.) Which means they are more likely to be insecure, entitled, and less talented. This upsets the genuine talent, while us hacks shrug and wait for it to pass. Or you could put all your quota-hires somewhere they can’t do any damage to the important stuff, though where that would be, I’m not sure. Which means you’re carrying un-needed overhead.

Why on earth would a company do this to itself? It wouldn't. But, here’s a thing. All those Diversity SJWs write for web companies that are owned by Tech or Media billionaires. Each one of whom is trying to get the other guy’s company to become a diversity quota-house.

It’s industrial sabotage by other means. The tech companies who take it seriously and actually start hiring women on quotas will lose talent, not be able to re-hire it, make worse products, loose their edge and go out of business.

Capitalism turns everything to its use.

The Golden Grasshopper

So I've been busy Doing Stuff and haven't had time to write meditations on the usual shite. Instead, here's a London trivia question.

Where is this little beastie to be found?

Two Great Essays on Software and Programmers

For many years, the stand-out essay on programming and programmers has been Rands’ The Nerd Handbook. It’s one of those essays which makes you wonder when you met the writer and how he got into your head so quickly. If you’re a programmer or engineering type, and have doubts about the acceptability of your behaviour and the way you look at the world, then read this and know that You Are One of Many.

Last week I read another essay that made me think “this guy has been there, understands what he's looking at, and has nailed it”. Paul Ford’s What Is Code? is the best essay I’ve read about software, programming, managing software projects, and the personalities and motives involved. Uniquely, Ford manages to explain software developers' concerns in managerial terms and managerial concerns in terms I hope software developers will understand. It’s a must-read.

The whole thing is quotable, but this one hit me especially...

What no one in engineering can understand is that what they perceive as static, slow-moving, exhausting, the enemy of progress—the corporate world that surrounds them, the world in which they work—is not static. Slow-moving, yes, but so are battleships when they leave port. What the coders aren’t seeing...is that the staid enterprise world that they fear isn’t the consequence of dead-eyed apathy but rather détente. 

They can’t see how hard-fought that stability is. Where they see obstacles and intransigence, [managers] see a huge, complex, dynamic system through which flows a river of money and where people are deeply afraid to move anything that would dam that river.

You want to understand the culture of a large company, grok that second paragraph. The word afraid is exactly the right one. Management doesn’t really know why the river of money flows through their organisation, because they know that all the competing organisations are no better or worse. So it must be magic. And they are afraid that someone will do something to turn the magic off.

If you haven't read either, read both.

Principles Not Personalities

Every now and then, someone points out that the AA co-founders were far from calm, balanced, morally sound people. Matt Forney just did so in an article on RoK. Then he made a claim about the high failure rate of AA. As opposed to the high success rates of all the medical treatments for alcoholism. Oh. Wait. There aren’t any. Because if there were, all those movies stars and rock stars would pop some pills instead of going to meetings. However, I’m not going to deny that a lot of newcomers start the program, and a lot of them drop out.

So. Personalities first. I don’t give a damn that Dr Bob was the worst doctor in his small town and a degenerate opium addict to boot. Nor do I care that Bill W took all sorts of highs, 13-Stepped and mooched on his wife. Partly because they are both dead, so I will never have to deal with them at dinner, but mostly because I don’t follow their example, I follow their program. As do all the other 12-Step people I listen to in meetings. Alcoholics learn to put principles before personalities, because the principles aren’t bad, but a lot of the personalities are pretty flawed. civilians still confuse the two. After all, if you insist that you will only adopt ideas that come from morally flawless people, you can keep your brain idea-free for your entire life. Judging ideas by their creators is what conformists do.

Sure there’s a high recidivism from AA. If I stop taking my Lanzoprosole, my acid reflux comes back within about forty-eight hours. Does that mean it’s useless? Acid reflux is what happens when a sphincter at the top of your stomach goes wibbly. There’s no cure or surgery for it. All I can do is take a palliative, and thank my lucky stars that it’s one that works, rather than a piece of chemical toxic junk with a name ending in “statin” or “formin”. Well, it’s the same with AA. There’s no cure for alcoholism: if there was, all those movie stars and rock stars would be paying for it. But no, they go to meetings just like the rest of us regular drunks. What it gives us is a palliative. Treatment centres can help start, but the recovering drunk has to prove it every day on the street. For. The. Rest. Of. His. Life.

There’s a phrase we know by heart:

“Rarely have we seen someone fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest."

A 12-Step program is tough to work, or rather, it’s tough to take the consequences. The hardest thing to accept is that sobriety comes before everything else. Job. House. Relationships. Fun. Fitness. Name it. This is not how normal people live. They juggle priorities, they compromise on their goals and principles if that's what's needed to advance something else they want to do. That includes getting drunk at and taking cabs home from a leaving do that over-ran, in the name of "networking". Alkies don't live that way. If something or someone clashes with what we need to do to stay sober, guess what? It gets or they get dumped. But then not having a drink today is the foundation of all the rest of the good stuff in my life: I lose it and all the rest goes. I turn back into a pathetic little jerk with the social skills of a resentful teenager.

AA is not a cure, and anyone who tells you it is? Don’t trust them when they tell you the time either. But then, don’t trust anyone who tells you there’s a cure for addiction, acid reflux, wilful stupidity, being a jerk, chronic lack of fitness or excess weight. There isn’t. There is only endless vigilance and practicing the programme.

And the next time someone tells you that something must be a bad idea because the person who invented it was a Bad Person, remind them that if ideas were only as good as their creators were moral, we’d all still be living in grass huts.