Persuasions: Identities, Stereotypes, & Fights

I have been thoroughly enjoying all of your post-Postrel posts, and figured that perhaps I should join in on these meditations on “attractive wrappings.”

So, who watched the VMAs? I tuned in purely because I am completely fascinated by Nicki Minaj, who performed during the pre-show with will.i.am.

Minaj is a Queens native, and one of few women associated with Lil’ Wayne’s Young Money. But, what does this have to do with “Surface and Substance”? Postrel writes, “we judge people, places, and things at least in part by how they look. We care about surfaces.” (458) Hip hop (as is the case with many music/media/art forms) is often associated with the objectification of women, “sex sells,” and a place where “image is everything” and in this case the image of women comes with cleavage, bling, and seductive dancing.  As Postrel points out, “we’re simply attracted to anything that helps us compete for recognition and dominance.” (459) In this case, it appears that “recognition” and “dominance” is achieved through money, fame, and girls.

But, then we have Minaj. A woman who refers to herself as “Barbie” and as a “bad bitch.” And, it seems like people (the public) do not know what to do with such proclamations.

In a recent interview, Minaj said, “I started making it my business to say things that would empower women, like, ‘Where my bad bitches at?’ to let them know I’m here for you.”

Minaj puts hip hop first (“substance”) and decidedly takes the “road less traveled” approach to “surface.” Do you think that Minaj’s real appeal is that she has changed the stakes for the hip hop industry? Is it possible to really change gender roles and the way “aesthetic value” is affixed to different sexes?

Why can’t I stop listening?

Most people ask does aesthetics truly matter? Some answer this question by saying that it does not and the only thing that counts is what is on the “inside”. Meaning, even if something looks bad aesthetically, such as a person or a phone, as long as either his/her personality good and kind or the phone’s technology works the way it looks should not matter. These people are what I like to call “dreamers”. Dreamers are people who believe that we live in a world where no one is superficial and everyone, whether they look good or bad, will mingle. In today’s society this is not the case, believe it or not, looks play the most important role in decision making, as well as life success. We are attracted to things that are appealing and make us feel good. It is an instinct that we cannot help.

In Virginia Postrels article “Mr.Charisma:Obama or Osama?” she says that “Glamour is an imaginative illusion like a literal magic spell.” Obama according to Postrel, has Glamour not Charisma. He is seen as “the fresh young prince onto whom Democrats project their hopes and dreams.” Aesthetics in politics does indeed matter. The democrats chose Obama because he is a good look for them. But according to Postrel what Obama lacks is charisma. Charisma in Postrels definition is having a stage presence, being able to inspire followers, and subjects himself to the same disciplines he expects from others. Having charisma does not mean you must have glamour. Postrel mentions leaders such as Hitler and Osama who had charisma. They were able to inspire followers for a cause that they believed in. Having charisma according to Postrel is not such a good thing at times.

I agree with Postrel because having charisma to commit an act such as 9/11, and holocaust is devastating causes that cost peoples life. However, if charisma is used to garner followers for a good cause such as raising money for cancer research, then yes being charismatic is advantageous. People in today’s society can’t help what they are attracted to. It’s an instinct as I mentioned before. We must find a way to control these instincts and find ways to use them for a better cause.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/item_K1JJrjVwwrGiFAyynPBm4L;jsessionid=E38814F08D37457ACCEECFA5DF00191A

Charisma?

Glamour?

No matter what anybody says, looks do matter to some extent. Everyone at some point in their lives will buy one thing over another because it looks better to them, or make some type of judgment on somebody because of the way they look. This can even occur subconsciously. People think about what others think of them. It’s human nature. Some may think about this to a larger extent than others, but the thought is always there at some point. Everyone wants to live the best life possible and have the best things, however sometimes the best functional things are confused with the best looking things. A perfectly good business can be ruined because another with a similar product may have a better design. Even if they do the same thing, people more likely than not will go with the better design.

Way too much time and money is spent on one’s appearance. Sometimes it is important to have a lot of focus on this. You’re not going to go to work looking like a slob or some type of mess. And you won’t just be out at night or in public looking like you just woke up all the time. But there should be some type of line. Nobody needs ten, give or take, pairs of shoes, hats, or other accessories just to match them with one outfit to go out. That’s just going to the extreme and worrying about your appearance. It’s okay to look nice, but you don’t need to spend all your money on getting every type or color of a shoe. Money can be spent in more productive ways.

In Virginia Postrel’s essay in The New Humanities Reader, she points out that “We are also producers, subject to the critical eyes of others. And that makes us worry. We worry that other people will judge us by our flawed appearances, rather than our best selves.” The world can be a cruel place. A person’s social life can be decided on just because of the way they look. Postrel says “As anyone who has been a teenager knows, the right style can determine who’s in, while the wrong look can mean social oblivion.” Unfortunately, this is true. People can be labeled an outcast at a glance without ever saying one word to anyone. You never know someone until you spend time with them, and in many cases that gets shut down without one conversation. People may have the same interests and hobbies, but never be friends because they dress differently from each other. People need to stop worrying so much about what they and everyone around them looks like and focus their attention on the personalities of the individuals around them, including themselves.

Virginia Postrel also talks about the value people put in appearance in her article The Politics of a Retouched Headshot. Fox News got mad at Newsweek for not touching up a photo it used of Sarah Palin. They said it was “ridiculously unfair to her”. This is the problem with society. We worry about appearance so much that we want to change how we actually look in photos. How could it be unfair to use a picture of what she actually looks like? There should be no problem with taking a picture and then just publishing it. If they wanted the picture to look differently, then they should be yelling at Sarah Palin for not fixing herself up. All they did was take a picture, they didn’t purposely make her look worse. And this is an example of how we focus too much on looks, and not enough on personality. There’s no reason to change a picture, because then it’s not the same person.

People need to stop just looking at what people look like and start actually trying to get to know them before they pass on whatever judgment they have of them.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/10/the-politics-of-the-retouched-headshot/7095/

Appearance is a huge impact in the judgment of anything or anyone. It is natural for people to be attracted to things that are beautiful rather than to things that are ugly. It may sound shallow but it’s true.

In Virginia Postrel’s article, Economic Scene: Like It or Not, Appearance Counts in the Workplace, Postrel talks about how your appearance influences your job. Meeting new people, going to job interviews, or just walking down the street, there’s no doubt that you’re being judged by eyes passing by. Those eyes don’t know if you’re a nice person or if you’re the devil. They can only judge you by how well put together you look. It shows respect and seriousness. Postrel’s article also shows statistics that good looking men and women get better jobs. Yet they were compared to less good looking men and women with the same background. The truth is no one cares if you think they’re superficial if that’s what it takes to make it to the top.

In Surface and Substance, Virginia Postrel’s essay in The New Humanities Reader, Postrel talks about how people tend to pay attention to things that are in style rather than things that function better. When people shop for new things they are attracted to pretty designed products. The quality of products are being judged by their style nowadays more than their function. In Postrels essay, the former head of Motorola’s paged division said, “The moral of the story, which I repeat many, many times to engineers, is that all the fancy ass technological engineering in the world couldn’t get us a nickel more for the product.” He’s smart. I know when I go shopping I don’t even bother to look at things that seem ugly to me even if it may function better because I wont like it. I would rather pay more to get something I like the appearance of even if the product wasn’t as great.

Both Postrel’s essay and article show that sometimes substance and function just aren’t enough. You need that surface and style to compliment it.

In current society, appearance and status go hand in hand. That might be the reason why no other generation has ever been as obsessed with appearances as we are. Plastic surgery, tummy tucks, nose jobs, and liposuction are just a few of the ways for us to bring ourselves to closer to that image of the modern ideal man or woman. Having a brand name item could mean the difference between being respected and admired or shamed and ridiculed. Aesthetics have become a very powerful force in modern society, something that changes the very way we live our lives.

We are constantly pressured into being in the fashion circle and not out of it. Everyone knows that there are certain standards to what one can or cannot wear. Those who don’t know find out rather quickly. In general, you will be judged by what you’re wearing and treated as such. The ones who know the current fashion trends will find themselves admired; the ones who don’t may be avoided or ignored or in extreme cases spurned. In order to avoid the latter, one must follow those who do know what’s “in”. Aesthetics and social pressure are tied close together.

Society has given us multiple ways to change ourselves as well. Not only in the way do we change the way dress but we also change our physical appearance. Pills, makeup, creams and tanning salons are some of the things people use or go to by the thousands. Virginia Postrel’s article (which I have linked at the end of this response) on a new drug that raises children’s height is a reflection of how we strive to change children to our ideal as well. Advertisements about how we could look younger, slimmer, stronger, prettier, and so on are placed everywhere. We are constantly reminded of the ideal wherever we go, and of ways we could attempt to reach it.

Of course that doesn’t mean people are always caught up by social pressures or the ideal. Appearances are also a way for us to show who we are and what we are like. Virginia Postrel’s explains it well in her article “Our bodies are us. Yet our inner selves do not always match our physical forms. Our bodies impose definitions and limitations that falsify our identities and frustrate our purposes.” The power of aesthetics in our society is steady and growing, and maybe that’s the way we want it.

http://www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/opeds/greatlengths.html

(Know the image is large just click on it to read it. )

Have you all ever wondered why the owner/owners of Facebook are million/billionaires? When all they do is create a website? They don’t create a business, or a franchise. There way of making money is quiet simple. They utilized “The Wave of a New Age”, as I would like to call it. Prior to the advent of the “internet”, companies used billboards, signs, and other tangible assets as a way to advertise. In the present time, I am sure that all of you receive emails everyday saying “$599.99 HP Laptop on sale at Bestbuy”, or something along those lines. All these businesses have to do is purchase a server, have a team devise a tantalizing ad, and have the server mass emails out to everyone who virtually has an email account. This is the benefit that the “internet” has given us; Free Advertisement! The same way owners of Facebook make a fortune. However, for every positive contribution the internet has created, problems accompany. Technology investor Esther Dyson says “Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid; enforcing copyrights won’t be enough, because creators will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual property is distributed free and suppliers explode in number. . . . The problem for owners of content is that they will be competing with free or almost-free content”. I concur because if something is free, why not exploit it? Obviously one person alone will not only come up with this idea but tons and tons of people. This will cause a competitive online market where the “Power of Aesthetics”, as Virginia puts it, comes into play. Initially, the goals of these online ads were to get as much people. Now since every company/business is using them, it becomes very routine and predictable. Instead the new goal is to increase the superficiality of each ad in order to increase the attention given to the ad, in order to get as much people in. Evidently, an extra step in the purpose of the ad was inserted. I have noticed that since people started to use Facebook more businesses started incorporating it into their means of communication. I myself have subscribed to the Online store “Newegg” on Facebook for them to send me monthly deals. I did this because I did not want to spend the extra ten seconds or looking through the site. Bottom line is that the internet has provided business with a virtual realm where everything is pretty much free (after the first copy of a product is purchased), and this has been exploited to a point where “The power of Aesthetics” is the gatekeeper between a lucrative business, and a bankrupt business.

In every second of every minute of our lives, we are faced with the dilemma of appearance. Every magazine, advertisement, commercial and billboard reminds us how to look, how much to weigh, how to dress and what we should strive to be. We walk down the streets and flick through pictures on people’s Facebook to judge them, based solely on appearance. We spark entire conversations on how atrocious someone’s outfit is or how awful their hairstyle is. As girls, we are conditioned to believe that being tall and thin with all the right assets is the only way to be beautiful. As a society, we make fun of and shun the “ugly” and the “fat.” What people fail to realize majority of the time is that many of the things that we make fun of are things that people can’t help. Being heavy or being physically “unattractive” may not be a biological disorder but simply something that we dislike, as Virginia Postrel states in her article, “Going to Great Lengths.”

Almost everything about our society screams “superficiality.” There are countless television shows based on makeovers and weight loss along with products and cosmetic procedures to make us who we want to be. There are millions of self conscious girls in the world due to these standards that we are supposed to meet. It is true, to an extent, that it’s more pleasurable to be serviced by a good-looking employee but to not allow someone to even have the job is simply misguided. People are giving in to the idea that it is okay to be put down simply because of our biological physical appearance.

“Biological fate doesn’t just give us disabilities and disorders. To a large degree, it gives us who we are. Our bodies are us.”

I think many girls will agree with me when I say that being a girl is hard in today’s world. So many things are expected from us. We are supposed to be smart, beautiful, well dressed, well coifed, graceful, and for the most part, perfect. If we aren’t, we’re looked down upon. Girls dress up everyday, not only because we feel the need to, but because other girls are our worst critics and we experience it first-hand everyday. I bet that all of us are guilty of being overly critical of other females too.

There are so many arguments and immoral behaviors that we practice everyday. There aren’t even any signs of this discrimination coming to a halt.

What is our world coming to when this is what we are supposed to be?

http://www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/opeds/greatlengths.html

Can fashion be timeless? After reading Virginia Postrel’s Essay, “Ralph Lauren: Still King of Glamour,” I’m going to have to say yes, it can. Comparing images of the 1980s Ralph Lauren collection to his modern collections, I barely notice a difference. A slight logo and hem change at most. Postrel writes, “If fashion is of the moment, Lauren is an anti-fashion designer. ‘I’ve never designed for obsolescence,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve designed for longevity.”

I was automatically drawn to Postrel’s piece on Ralph Lauren. The title was very light and easy-going and the topic seemed interesting enough to hold my attention. She is very articulate and persuasive in her writing. I’m no fashion expert and never have I liked Ralph Lauren more than your regular Joe, but I feel like I would like a piece of his clothing after reading her article!

I thought the article was over, but as I scrolled down, Postrel talks about how the company photoshopped their model’s heads’ to be smaller than their pelvis’s. It was even referred to as “pornography for anorexics.” This turned me off to the company but the point of the article was to say that Ralph Lauren has always excelled at being timeless. When they tried to change with the times by making their models abnormally skinny, they received open criticism from major blogs and other outlets for expression.

In comparison to Virginia Postrel’s Essay in the New Humanities Reader, I would barely know that they come from the same author at a glance. This may seem like a bad thing but I think it’s actually brilliant. She can write in depth essays, lacking no description, and then turn around and write a very light page-long article that I can imagine being published in Seventeen magazine. She is more than just a fashion critic, she is economically literate and obviously has a strong opinion. Postrel is your ideal journalist.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/22/ralph-lauren-photoshop-glamour-opinions-contributors-virginia-postrel.html

Its pretty interesting that only females completed the assignment first. This really reminds me of the article that we read from Tanner last week. It does mention how females are not objective in class. In addition, it mentions that men participate the most during class. So from this observation, where is that extra energy from the females most allocated towards? Perhaps actually completing what there suppose to do, or participating the most outside of class where the “Macho-ness” is less acclaimed…instead of battling teachers and voicing over each opinions. I don’t have enough evidence to draw any deep hypotheses but its worth observing. Tell me what you guys think.

A topic of debate that has been around for quite some time is: do appearances really matter? And the general consensus has been that it doesn’t. But in this time and age, looks have become more and more important. People buy things because they’re aethetically pleasing. People will pay a higher price for a different color. People spend hundreds, thousands, millions of dollars on clothes, shoes, makeup to better their own appearance. The opportunities to make something more pleasurable to look at are endless. Having a bigger, better decorated house and having a flashier car are just some of the many. People are willing to do anything to comform to the idea of beauty in every aspect, and plastic surgery proves this. Both women and men will spend money they don’t need to spend on fixing something that would not have needed any fixing at all were they not caught up in a fixed idea of beauty. Society is “effectively trying to define ugliness as a disease. Looks are, after all, a biological condition.”

Within the last decade, belief that appearances are important have taken the next step, and in 2003, Virigina Postrel brings to our attention in her article Going to Great Lengths, a new drug that has appeared on the market. This drug, called Humatrope, is for children who are abnormally short, and can add several inches to a person’s height without harming them in any physical way. The idea of this seems preposterous, that such a thing as height should really matter enough for a person to take such measures.

But in society today, it appears as if being less than average height, or weight or just not being pretty enough is all the reason a person needs to feel the need to change themselves. “…being short does, on average, hurt a person’s prospects. Short men, in particular, are paid less than tall men. The tall guy gets the girl. The taller presidential candidate almost always wins.” Postrel gives us several examples where society has given us reason to believe that the better the appearance, the better treatment you receive from society. Given that, the idea of using a drug to change something natural about yourself doesnt seem so preposterous after all. If appearances didn’t actually matter, the world wouldn’t be as it is today. “The power of aesthetics”, as Postrel calls it, is quite impressive.

Going to Great Lengths

http://www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/opeds/greatlengths.html