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David Letterman’s confession last night that he has slept with women he works with was a perfect window into the twisted psyche of the comic. (Read Troy Patterson’s excellent close reading here.) This is why women don’t want to stay married to comedians (the subject of Judd Apatow’s Funny People). They can’t break form, even in what should be the most shattering and intimate of moments. Even as Letterman is changing our view of him forever he is exactly himself, with his deadpan delivery and self-mockery. There is hardly a moment when you’re totally sure whether he’s joking or not ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Newsweek’s big lady-baiting package this week offers a detour from the catfighting between Princeton Nobelist Paul Krugman and the White House (What? You can call it that when boys do it, too!) in order to focus on the creeping “diva-ization” of America’s young women:
Reared on reality TV and celebrity makeovers, girls as young as Marleigh are using beauty products earlier, spending more and still feeling worse about themselves. Four years ago, a survey by the NPD Group showed that, on average, women began using beauty products at 17. Today, the average is 13—and that's got to be an overstatement. According to market-research firm Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss; 38 percent use hairstyling products; and 12 percent use other cosmetics. And the level of interest is making the girls of "Toddlers & Tiaras" look ordinary. "My daughter is 8, and she's like, so into this stuff it's unbelievable," says Anna Solomon, a Brooklyn social worker. "From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities."
Why are this generation's standards different? To start, this is a group that's grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading.
The article’s premise, essentially, is that women will spend a lot of money (see infographic) on things that are judged by enlightened society to be feckless and unnecessary. Yet these imposed norms about beauty get less play than the footage of hens-in-waiting clucking about lip gloss.
Perhaps the sensationalism arises because the pressures on women are so timeless. While gamely revealing her own, er, elaborate, grooming habits, author Jessica Bennett makes the fair point that TV shows like My Super Sweet 16 “raise the bar for what's considered over the top.”
But I don’t think girls are any any more worried about sprouting crow's feet than they used to be. Rather, the 21st century has amplified the traditional idea that appearance can be perfected via externalities. Leaps in technological capacity—regarding both products and the marketing thereof—have increased the pressure on us all. Suddenly, young women can learn where to get liposuction, and Botox (themselves improvements over the Ice Age techniques of never eating and never aging) via text message, or Web advertisement. They can compare themselves to schoolmates and celebrities instantly on Facebook. When I was a 'tween, you had to wait for YM magazine to come in the mail before you felt bad about yourself.
As usual, the immensely talented Sarah Haskins nails the convergence of stupidity and modernity better than I do: “Products that use pictures of science” are clearly the culprit.
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