I had hoped to bestow the DILFITS annually, but, lazy worm that I am, I haven’t. I am happy to announce, however, that there is a winner for the 2012 Spring and Summer season.

Comme des Garcons gown 2012

On days when a woman applies too much eye makeup, and it smears all over her face when she tries to remove it, and rubbing only makes her skin look raw, and she’s knee-deep in used cotton balls and late for work, or a date, and it’s that time of the month, this is surely what she will want to wear to flagrantly and stylishly express her dismay at being herself.

The white boots, which reminded Style.com’s Tim Blanks of technician-wear appropriate for a post-tsunami nuclear reactor melt-down, or “equally….sixties couture a-go-go,” will show off every bit of mud a determinedly self-loathing woman drags herself through.

And, yes, you will look fat in it.
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If you have a nominee you would like me to consider, I’d love to issue further awards. Please use the contact form and include a link to the image as well as your reasons why the outfit reflects, soothes, illuminates or compliments self-loathing.
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stare at red dot fixedly and blue circle fades

Fixed focus and general awareness don’t play well together. Concentrating on any one thing can cause “attentional blindness,” the inability to notice something obvious.

Stare at the red dot above fixedly and the blue circle will gradually fade from view. Remember: if you focus on your self-loathing your actual loathsomeness will evaporate from your peripheral vision, but if you focus only on the positive you will eventually go blind.

(Image originally obtained here).

Go On: Look Like a Cow!

“For me,” he confessed, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port. “Boviscopophobia,” he explains in a footnote, is “the morbid fear of being seen as bovine.” He feared looking like a cow.

He imagines that not all the tourists are unaware that, to locals, they might resemble fat cattle. Perhaps, he muses, that despite it, they…

…refuse to let their boviscopophobia rule them:they’ve paid good money to have fun and be pampered and record some foreign experiences, and they’ll be goddamned if they’re going to let some self-indulgent twinge of neurotic projection about how their Americanness appears to malnourished locals detract from the 7NC Luxury Cruise they’ve worked and saved for and decided they deserve.

But Wallace is too truth-loving to compartmentalize. He can’t shake “a self-conscious and somewhat condescending concern about how I appear to others that is (this concern) 100% upscale American,” which is to say:

…large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy; the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore.*

His may be the purest example of self-loathing conflated with America-bashing we have. You don’t have to be a self-adoring patriot to see why non-self-loathers and the self-loathing-impaired might not want to ratify this sort of vision, might resent it, even.

Liberals get accused of being self-loathing a lot because, well, we often are. And we get accused of hating America because, hey, many smart, articulate liberals—like many radical Christian evangelicals—genuinely do. That is, they can only love America when they imagine it filled with people who agree with them. And it isn’t.

You can try to explain to activists why the odor of this attitude is like weaponized ammonia when it comes to organizing for change in the US, why most of their country-folk would rather eat glass—or at least corndogs—rather than identify with a vortex of self-awareness, self-rejection and moral superiority that seems destined for suicide, but listening, alas, is not the visionary’s strong suit.

What’s great about the OWS upsurge, however, is that it rightly re-assigns ordinary Americans to the ranks of the oppressed and despised—hence (for anti-authoritarian power-haters) the loveable underdog sector of the world. There’s an opportunity here to offset liberal self-and-other revulsion with some genuine fellow feeling. I hope we grab it. Fan as I am of self-loathing as insightful as David Foster Wallace’s, I don’t want his sensibility leading our country into another impotence-infatuated Naderite ditch.

Fellow citizens: Do not be afraid! Look like a cow! Love yourself as you would any other grass-fed, pasture-raised icon of bucolic simplicity. Stuff your face and your shopping bags. Waddle to freedom. Drop your cow pies and make your milk. Watch your Housewives of Atlanta. Remember: We, too, deserve liberty, good governmnt, democracy, and a reasonable amount of equality—no matter how bovine we appear to great writers…or to ourselves.

*for quotes, see .pp 310-311 hardcover ed.

gendered colors

It’s called “Blue and red” and it’s by a professor, at San Diego State University, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, named Thomas J. Impelluso. He writes:

The color blue is often associated with boys, while red (or pink) is associated with girls.

[Keep your eye on that "often."]

Neuroscientists Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling demonstrated through a series of tests that women tend to prefer the red end of the spectrum. But is this a cultural phenomenon or is it biological? Chinese researchers demonstrated through another series of tests that this preference extends across cultures.

[Well, two cultures. Because let's not get all fixated on the British Redcoats, Stalinist Russians, and Catholic cardinals. They obviously wore red, not to express their preference for it, but to attract warm-spectrum-loving girls. ]

Hurlbert and Ling conjectured natural selection as a cause: Women were assigned the role of foraging for food and had to distinguish the red berries and fruit in the green brush.

[Red berries in the bush! A bit of clitoral grotesquerie here, thrown in gratis… Because by this logic, wouldn't men prefer tan and brown or whatever the heck they hunted for? And wouldn't foragers have to work harder to distinguish gooseberries, nuts, tubers, and blueberries?]

Prior to 1910, red was the color deemed appropriate for boys and blue was the color for girls – the reverse. So why were these the colors associated with each gender, and why did they switch? And why at that time?

[Um, let me guess: Because such things are arbitrary or worse, used by societies to manipulate strata of status, power, and dominance? Couldn't be.]

…Primitive man would sit by a fire, and respect the red flame: its heat, intensity, and energy.

[While women, presumably, fled the flames in fear, preferring to huddle disrespectfully in the cold, staring at their blue fingers with delight.]

Red was thus deemed a color that represented the traits needed for hunting and defending the tribe.

[THUS????!!!???!!!? See, I'm going ballistic here over something and someone who is obviously too intellectually inconsequential to even notice, let alone respond to. Yet I can't control myself and keep reading...to see just how far this guy is going to reach to make blue "fit" boys and warm colors stick to girls. Obviously, by this time even I have to realize that I'm being a glutton for punishment..a glutton whose plate will be piled high with it. And sure enough:]

. . .In 1905 Albert Einstein began to publish his work. Scientists realized the nature of the red shift with regard to the Doppler effect on light waves. Blue light has a higher frequency than red light. Scientists discovered that blue stars are hotter than red ones. Blue is a more energetic color.

[Ask any Chinese baby boy, but not before 1910.]

Around 1920 several family magazines began presenting pictures of baby boys dressed in blue-colored clothes. By 1925 the switch was in.

And with no evidence whatsoever to connect the fashion preferences of family magazines and Einstein’s findings, we are invited to imagine a causal connection between them. And this in an otherwise peer-reviewed publication. I am not making this up.

This is just one of millions of examples of silly gendering one must endure. Why bother with it? This is the kind of picky feminism I normally despise; not because it isn’t accurate, but because it is wasting its time and breath on something strategically irrelevant. If Larry Summers wrote this piece, or E.O. Wilson, one of the big boys, it might be worth a go. But in this case I can only think that I must be suffering a bout of horrible self-loathing that I am trying to assuage by loathing this poor little fool of a professor’s blog entry even more.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PinkGirlBlueBoy

1.  Thou shalt not compromise thy principles, ever.
2.  Thou shalt be best at everything, else thou hast failed.
3.  Thou shalt be chill; let nothing get to thee.
4.  Thou shalt eschew banality, nor be ordinary.
5.  Please thee thy crazy parents, be they satiable
    or be they not.
6.  Thou shalt feed the hungry—every living one of them.
7.  Feel at all times happy, for moodiness is an abomination.
8.  Remember: to err is regrettable, to forgive thyself, defeat.
9.  Thou shalt trust thine own judgement, yea, even when thou art nuts.
10.  Thou shalt not self-loathe.

From SL4B; “the Building Blocks of Self-Loathing,” page 29

…surveyed about 1,000 mothers in their 30s and 40s nationwide and interviewed about 100 for their book. They found that the women broadly fell into two categories: “never enoughs” and “good enoughs.”

Never-enough women felt they had to be the best at everything and often agreed with the sentiment that “I need to be a superstar even if it kills me.”

As a recipe for self-loathing, that’s hard to beat. One of Tugend’s blog readers, Fritz Ziegler, moreover, noticed the Catch-22 of self-acceptance:

… Acceptance includes accepting that sometimes we act in perfectionistic ways about self-improvement, i.e., accepting that we aren’t accepting enough. This can also be said as: Complaining about not being accepting enough is just another version of perfectionism. It’s all so recursive!

Yes, Fritz; it is. You’re catching on.
 

The stylish self-loather will want a pair of these hand-crafted shoes for incorrigibly flamboyant sub-human moments. This article appeared on page 100 of T Magazine’s Fall 2009 issue in the ReMix section.  You can click on it to make ita readable size. Bob Bassett and his workshop, the creators of these, do other amazing things with leather, mad masks and dragon bags, all very steampunk and passing strange.

Click thumbnail to see larger version of my T Magazine piece on the subject of Darwinian Shoes, or download the PDF file below.

Darwinian shoes PDF

Is it clear in my article that the brain doesn’t really have clearly-definable “centers” for complex functions like speech? No. Is it clear that diffusion of Botox into the upper reaches of the cranium from a shot in the forehead has (as yet) no support from experimental evidence? Not really. Was I able to suggest that the nicotine receptors that Botox blocks have never specifically been shown to occasion the release of dopamine – a neurotransmitter associated with a very different set of receptors? Barely.

So this article makes me out to be something of an idiot, neurology-wise. And that for me is the fun of it. Because really we don’t need Botox to make us into fools; the simple task of trying to write clearly will do that nicely and far less inexpensively. Alas, it also causes the brow to wrinkle.

ClickHERE to order Self-Loathing for Beginners from Amazon.