So, if women ruled the world we'd live in a Jersey Shore nightmare.....?

So, the premise of this Newsweek essay was interesting, but, unfortunately, fundamentally missed the boat.....it's part of a larger Newsweek feature called "The Beauty Advantage" that seeks to break down the truths and fallacies behind the idea that our looks drive our success, for better or for worse.

The writer of this particular piece (Susanna Schrobsdorff - whom, I've decided, should stick to interviews and skip the "faux comedy") tackled the question "What if men everwhere had to conform to beauty standards set by women" and then came up with a cute list of behaviors that men the globe over would find ridiculous and appalling and would immediately eschew - but - SHOCK! GASP! - they're the same behaviors to which women are currently expected to conform in one way or another.

The trouble: she did this backwards.

The first paragraph:

...what if we lived in a world where women had always been the kings, the presidents, the bosses (and, thus, the arbiters of beauty)? Perhaps we’d call it a 'Gynocracy'—a place where superficial women would set the standards for attractiveness, and men would have to conform to them. It would be a place where ugly men would have a hard time getting a date or a promotion, and the women would burn off steam over beers at a restaurant called Hunks, where all the waiters must have 30-inch waists and grapefruit-sized biceps.

Ok, first of all: Gynocracy? Please. If women ruled society, we're certainly not going to invoke a word most of us find blatantly ugly when naming our utopia. We'd sooner call this new dynasty a "Fem-ocracy." Er, that's lame, too. Anyway - semantics. Not the big issue.

She assumes that, left to our own global-domination devices and given thousands of years of glorious female superiority, we'd naturally end up just like men, valorizing the same things men valorizing, objectifying in the same ways men objectify, etc, etc, etc. Here's an example:

Weekly Forearm Waxing : No hairy arms or knuckles. It’s a crazy fashion thing that just sort of evolved—like the way women had to start shaving their legs a hundred years ago. To keep up with the beauty ideal in the Gynocracy, men have to wax or shave their forearms. To avoid it, some men just keep their sleeves rolled down—even in the summer. But if they want to wear short sleeves, or get a date with a woman, they absolutely have to be smooth and shaven from the elbow down. Sure, they could rebel, and show up to work hairy, but it’d be like a woman in our world sitting in a meeting with thick black hair on her legs. It’d be a STATEMENT.

Well that just makes no sense. It supposes that domination and status as the "power gender" is the only factor driving cultural body hair preferences. Women are in power, now let's shave our men! But not their legs or backs or asses or underarms or what not: Death to arm hair! Death to arm hair!

Uh, no.

Why?

First - we could just as easily put it this way: why not mandate beauty standards for men that involved cultivating EXTRA hair?

Why do we suppose that men (in their hundreds of years of socio-political control) dictated whether or not we shave our legs? In fact - some "body hair removal timelines" (yes, they exist....) indicate men and women arrived at a depillatory advent fairly concurrently. Both genders decided to start removing hair at the same time - men (and women) from their faces - eyebrows, hair on the head, you name it.

Let's tackle this from another angle: when I was 10 years old (and not yet shaving my pretty significant amounts of leg hair off into kingdom come), it was other girls that pointed and giggled, not the boys. So, I'm left to assume that, while men have been conditioned to appreciate a hairless female body, there's nothing that inherently fingers men as the perpetrators of the silky smooth revolution. SO, to flip this back around on the "If women ruled the world" scenario, I don't see anything that specifically indicates our body hair preferences would be any different.

Actually, if we're taking this from a "survival of the fittest" perspective, I have every reason to believe the higher-testosterone (read: generally hairier) men would continue to be pegged as the more virile, fit mates, (the better option for propegating the species), and women would select the wide-jawed, thick-browed, furrier men for reproduction purposes, and -- as such -- fuzzy men would come out on top, body hair would continue to be a more priced aesthetic AND even the advent of hormonal birth control (which, interestingly, renders women chemically UNABLE to tell the difference between a the scent of a man who woul make a good mating match versus a poorer match -- genetically speaking -- and instead predisposes them to a preference for softer, more feminine features), might have happened very differently - if we weren't concerned with creating the ability to control when we have children and how many children to have, but instead, as the ruling party made the decision ourselves, I think the gender debate would look significantly different.

So, waxing. Right.

Here's another one I'll pick apart - flat abs. As she puts it:

Tummy Tucks and Ab Work: Because the style for men in the Gynocracy is to wear skin-tight T shirts, men are obsessed with having a flat stomach. Older guys with the intractable paunches that sometimes come with middle age have a very hard time with these fashions. They either look sad in their tight shirts with belly rolls, or they cover up with frumpy “Chico’s for Men” shirts that make them look old and dated. And of course female bosses are always paying more attention to the young guys in the tight shirts, so just for economic survival, some guys have resorted to wearing full torso girdles called Manx—which is murder in the summer.


Some men in the Gynocracy do rebel. They ask: why won’t women love us for who we are, or for our money, or our success, instead of our flowing hair and broad shoulders? The women shrug their shoulders. “We can’t help it,” they say. “It’s pure biology and evolution.” Occasionally some unattractive guys break the mold. (One was even secretary of state!) And there are a few TV newsmen who are getting close to 50—but they’re really talented. And then there was that little frumpy guy who ran for president. He got a respectable number of votes—though he could never take off his suit jacket without all the political columnists writing about how his butt looked flat in pants. Secretly, no one really blamed his wife for cheating on him—he did seem like shrew—always bossing everyone around and insisting on people doing things “his way.”


Men in the Gynocracy would have to make time for hotness maintenance and still do all the other things necessary for success. They’d exhaust themselves trying to juggle family and work. Some would slowly give up. Others would try and change the standards and try to get women to like male models with beer bellies. Maybe some women would see beyond the superficial and say: “I don’t care if you have stubble on your forearms, your gray roots are showing and when you take off your Manx, your belly expands like a balloon, I’m crazy about you. Sit down near me and have a beer.” Surely there’d be women in the Gynocracy like that. In fact I even know a few men who do it for us here in this world.

Again: really? So, if genders were flipped, the power-party would still boil down to, "You're my eye candy: go put on a tight shirt?" Women weild the sword for thousands of years and it comes down to "remove your body hair and wear a girdle?" REALLY? Is this Susanna chick even female?

Yeah, yeah, I get it, she's making a point that the things we do for beauty and the stupid rituals to which we subject ourself are more or less ridiculous - but is it just me, or does this article's version of MAN end up looking remarkably like "The Situation?" And, again, is it just me, or does that sound remarkably UN-like what most women look for? And while I'm nitpicking....where is it written that we only maintain ourselves because of pressure from the other gender? Unless there are women to woo, men would be slovenly pigs? Eh, again, I just don't think so: no more than women would go to seed in the absence of men to snag.

Sure, we can take this back to a more socio-evolutionary standpoint and argue that attraction of a viable mate tends to be what drives most of us to make ourselves attractive to the other sex, but to suggest we'd all be fat slobs unless slave-driven to look better for each other's visual pleasure: um, that would quickly lead to the destruction of the species, and I don't think it's in humanity's best interest to simply go to seed. Self-preservation as a species would probably keep us from completely imploding (er, exploding, if we're talking Spanx and girdles), present state of the nation aside......

Also - the idea that women would all tend toward the young bucks rather than the silver foxes is just silly - sure, young females are a hot commodity from a child-bearing standpoint, but since men are fertile well into the grey-haired years, would we really toss them out of the mating pool so readily?

Whatever - I'm reading way too much into what was supposed to be a lighthearted snapshot of some insane beauty practices, but this is one case where flat role reversal just doesn't hold up....

I don't want an arm-hairless, tummy-tucked, grapefruit-biceped, artificially colored man - you can take your freaky washboard abs and your starched black hair and give me something with a little more to wrap my arms around, any day. I prefer not to worry about getting bruised by bumping into a spooky pelvic muscle when I go for a hug........and we know how I feel about bald.......