Designer Clothes Help Parents Turn Their Toddlers Into Real-Life American Girl Dolls [Fashion]

As our economy slowly emerges from its torpor, affluent citizens are starting to become less abashed about spending exorbitant sums of money on anything from diamond-studded rollerblades, to cows fed with gold-plated blades of grass, to designer outfits for their toddlers. Marquee fashion designers like Oscar de la Renta and Gucci are turning their attention to the affluent toddler demographic, which is really just a way of saying that designers are targeting parents who want to dress their children up like little American Girl dolls and send them out into the world, exclaiming, "It's my very own miniature status symbol!"

According to CBS News, sales for luxury children's clothes still make up only a fraction (about 3 percent) of the $34 billion fashion industry, though that fraction is growing as economic conditions improve and the more affluent come out of their caves, sniffing around for places to spend lots of money. The research firm NPD Group reports that children's wear sales rose a total of 4 percent between May 2011 and May 2012, with the upscale children's clothing component rising nearly 7 percent. All of this, meanwhile, is happening amidst a 3 percent rise in the overall clothing market.

Designers are mostly targeting households with a total income of $350,000 or higher, appealing to parents who want their young children, in lieu of practicing math, perhaps, to sharpen their fashion sense because a kid falls behind real fast in the asshole arms race if he or she doesn't know at least twenty major designers by puberty. New York-based fashion consultant Robert Burke explains the trend in terms of the "mini-me phenomenon," adding that, for parents splurging on expensive clothes for themselves, "It [buying something for their kids] feels good. It's like one for me and one for you."

That kind of consumer palliative, however, can get to be pretty expensive, with boys shirts from Dolce & Gabbana running in the $190 range, and girls dresses starting at about $500. Stifle your gasps — I mean, you don't want your kid to look like some kind of poor, do you? Shuffling around the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a, gulp, J. Crew ensemble, smelling vaguely of syrup. And not maple syrup either, but corn syrup, like that Log Cabin of lies. Disgusting.

Anyway, parents spending serious coin on their kids' wardrobes (one New York mother planned on spending in excess of $10,000 on her 3-year-old daughter's fall wardrobe), don't care if their kids grow out of clothes in like three days or if they're instilling some nefarious streak of superficiality that will blossom (fester) in their kids until they're 22 and decide to rebel by doing Americorps for like, a month — these parents just want their kids to look good and receive positive reinforcement about looking good. "I really believe," says one fashion-forward mother about her 3-year-old's self-esteem, "when she dresses like this, she feels better about herself." That's probably true, considering that every time the 3-year-old girl gets stuffed into a Burberry jacket, her mother beams at her and says something she doesn't even realize is screwing with her daughter's value system, something like, "Mommy loves you when you dress pretty." Sad face.

Rich toddlers draw fashion designers' eyes [CBS News]

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Stores May Now Know Too Much About Their Customers’ Fifty Shades Reading Habits [Fifty Shades]

According to Uproxx, this Fifty Shades of Grey masturbating kiosk is located in a Sainsbury's, which is a chain of supermarkets in the U.K. that apparently specializes in dirty books and special vibrator batteries. Oh, and those shortbread cookies that are so maddeningly delicious. This display should remind everyone why the internet (and, by extension, e-publishing) is a thing — so everyone can look at their dirty books in private and make a more discreet battery-run later.

Now that the indie literary darling Fifty Shades of Grey has gone mainstream (it now boasts a classical music soundtrack), it's probably all but impossible for you to enjoy it anymore. The novel about sadomasochism (pro-tip: if you use the word "sadomasochistic" to describe Fifty Shades, you're halfway to a doctoral thesis about the metaliterary experience of reading E.L. James as well as a tenure-track position at Yale) has already sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and is being prepped for distribution in 43 other countries even as we sit here not leafing through its titillating pages. Soon, readers the world over will be hiding their copies of Fifty Shades so that no one judges their literary tastes, which they'll eventually realize is silly when they learn that everybody else is secretly reading the very same book.

‘Fifty Shades': sado-masochistic romance now a global hit [AFP via Yahoo!]

Fifty Shades of Grey Makes an Album [WYNC]

Image via Uproxx

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Why Don't Women's Magazines Care More About Their Websites? [Mag Hag]

Bonnie Fuller, head of HollywoodLife.com and former editor of multiple mags like Glamour and Marie Claire, has some thoughts about why most women's magazines have lackluster websites. While it should be noted that her most recent column for Ad Age is partially just a giant advertisement for her website and editorial skills (Sample quote: "Coming from magazines, I have to say that editing a digitally native women's site is incredibly freeing..." How nice for you, Bonnie!), she makes some good points. "Even though young women's magazines had owned the hearts and minds of their audiences on the newsstand for decades, anticipating and responding to their every need, they have not established themselves as daily indispensable online destinations for their readers," she writes. "The question is why?"

Naturally, Fuller has a few ideas: Most editors probably come from print backgrounds and therefore work in a monthly mindset, where snagging subscribers to the magazine is more important than page views. Their websites aren't technically structured for easy posting. There are staffing issues: a site like Fuller's employs fifteen staffers who post constantly, whereas women's magazines usually only hire a few staffers to run their websites.

The most interesting point she brings up is this:

I also believe it's hard for traditional women's media sites to flourish in the online arena when they may also be seen as competitors to their own mother magazine brands. If their parent organizations see their mothership magazines as the primary revenue source, then they might see investing in sites that draw readers' eyeballs but not the equivalent revenue as a bad investment.

I definitely experienced that uneasy dichotomy when I worked at print publications. At first, I was shocked by the animosity between web editors and print editors who were basically forced to compete against each other for attention and resources from higher-ups, but that's an unfortunate but obvious consequence of the type of mismanagement Fuller is talking about.

Fuller's piece inspired me to check out the sites she mentioned: Glamour.com, Cosmopolitan.com, MarieClaire.com and Elle.com. It's not that the websites are clueless about their web content; it's more that they're clearly not focused on becoming a breaking news destination. Marie Claire pretty much only promotes print content or related extras on their homepage, but the other sites seem like they're doing a fine job of producing regular, original posts. Glamour in particular covers a fair amount of celeb gossip and news, and someone over there definitely knows the value of an SEO-worthy headline: one of their most popular stories right now is "Kristen Stewart is reportedly dealing with the cheating drama by eating THIS. Is this your go-tobreakup food, too?" (Yes, I clicked. It's ice cream. BORING.) Cosmo's also got the hang of the clickable headline, with posts like "Surprising Foods That Can Eff With Your Sex Drive" and "Match The Sexy Olympian With His, Err, Bulge."

But clickable headlines might not be enough, or at least not enough to encourage subscription sales. The Wall Street Journal reported today that magazines' newsstand sales dropped 9.6% in the first half of this year, a worse decline than ever before. Even Cosmopolitan, America's #1 women's magazine, saw its newsstand sales drop 5.5% to 1.3 million.

"Lucky for us, it appears the women's traditional media sites have affectively [Sic. Insert sad joke about lack of proofreading online here] made the decision not to compete for their own readers — the millennial generation — in the online space," Fuller writes. "But with these print titles experiencing double-digit newsstand drops in the past year, can they afford NOT to get with the program." Will women's magazines follow the example of magazines that have successful, heavily-staffed digital sides, like The Atlantic and Wired?

The Reason Women's Magazines Are Missing Millennials Online? No News [Ad Age]

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Why Do Some Dudes Assume All Their Female Friends Want to Bang Them? [Genderal Interest]

Of course men and women can be friends. In 2012, the claim that sex will always get in the way comes across as antiquated and essentialist; our hopes and our ideological convictions about gender leave us believing that platonic friendship between guys and gals is — absolutely — possible. But while our lived experience tells us that men and women can be friends, recent research suggests that these relationships are neither as common nor as easy to find as most of us would like. Based on recent research, the question we need to start asking isn't "can men and women be friends" but rather "how can we better equip dudes to handle non-sexual friendship with the ladies?"

As Doug Barry discussed previously, a new study suggests the obvious: men are the ones who have the harder time with boundaries in opposite-sex friendships. In Benefit or Burden: Attraction in Cross-Sex Friendship, April Bleske-Rechek and her team of researchers found that men are much more likely to be sexually attracted to their female friends than vice-versa. Both men and women reported that desire was a "cost more often than a benefit," with the sad potential to bring "potential negative consequences for individuals' long-term mateships."

One problem with the study shows up in the first sentence of the abstract which declares that "cross-sex friendships are an historically recent phenomenon." That's not entirely true. As Jodi Bilinkoff argued in her landmark 2005 study, medieval Catholic priests and wealthy female penitents often developed nonsexual "deep friendships" around the sacrament of confession. Theologian Dan Brennan has documented a long history of cross-sex friendship in the church in Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions: Engaging the Mystery of Friendship Between Men and Women. Simply put, it's a massive over-simplification to suggest that friendships between men and women were unheard of until our modern world. (As an aside, it's worth noting that lead investigator Bleske-Rechek once compared trusting a romantic partner's platonic friendship to the risks of letting "your teenage daughter go to a concert dressed like a slut.")

Whatever the study's shortcomings, it does seem to bear out that Harry was at least partly right when he told Sally that sex would always get in the way of male-female friendship. But as the study itself makes clear, the problem that destroys friendship isn't the physiological reality of sexual attraction, but rather the inability (or refusal) of so many straight men to believe that their female buddies aren't secretly crushing on them. In other words, the problem isn't that guys are totally overwhelmed by the hornies whenever they get in close proximity to a female friend. The problem is that men misunderstand women's intentions for wanting friendship, falsely assuming that ladies only want "one thing."

FMK is a fun meme. If you're not familiar, it involves taking 3 or more dudes (like the Romney sons or the Game of Thrones cast) and deciding which one you'd most like to fuck, which one you'd be most likely to marry, and which one you'd most want to kill. These debates are great for procrastinators, but no one here seriously believes that the longings to "fuck," "marry," and "kill" constitute the sum total of women's desires. The problem (and the blame certainly doesn't fall on the FMK meme) is that a great many men do labor under the delusion that women have no interest in being "just friends" with guys. If you're smiling at me over coffee, you must want to fuck me and have my babies –- or so more than a few dudes conclude. For them, FMK isn't a joke, but a plausibly accurate reflection of women's chief feelings about men.

The problem isn't just, as the Bleske-Rechek study shows, that men wildly overestimate their female buddies' sexual interest. It's that they also undervalue their own worth as friends. In a world where we still cling to the belief that women are naturally more intuitive and verbally adept than men, many guys assume that if a woman wants a non-sexual friendship, she'll naturally choose from the ranks of those who "do" friendship well: other women. The idea that a straight woman might want to be close to them without wanting to fuck or marry strikes them as utterly implausible. As a result, men do two things at once: they overrate their own sexual irresistibility and depreciate everything else they might have to offer. Little wonder, then, that so many dudes wrongly assume that their lady friends are crushing on them.

So what can we do to better equip guys to be "just friends" with the women in their lives? For starters, we can debunk once and for all the myth that sexual desire makes friendship impossible. The traditional reasoning is that male-female platonic relationships only work when neither friend is ever attracted to the other. Given how fluid and surprising desire can be, those friendships where lust never appears for even an instant are going to be relatively rare. But this reasoning overstates the power of sexual attraction to drown out everything else. As this new study makes clear, it's not that women are never attracted to their male buddies. It's that women are probably better acculturated to put lust aside for the sake of a friendship.

As Juliet Lapidos wrote at Slate, a close examination of the existing research shows that "sexual feeling within friendship exists on a Kinsey-type scale, and moderate attraction does not necessarily ruin or invalidate the relationship." While it's difficult to quantify "moderate attraction" in a universally applicable way, it's fair to assume that the occasional fantasy about wanting to bone your buddy doesn't mean that your friendship is founded on a lie. No one's sex drive –- not even young men's –- is so powerful that it must always trump any possibility of enduring friendship.

In the long run, what will most help adult cross-sex friendships to thrive is a culture that encourages children and teens to develop close and enduring platonic bonds. In Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men sociologist Michael Kimmel offers compelling evidence that boys who grow up with close female friends are demonstrably less likely to engage in destructive behavior. Friendships with girls not only provide young boys with a kind of inoculation against sexist cruelty, they set boys up to see their female peers as complete human beings. Alas, too many adults undermine cross-sex children's cross-sex friendships, often by asking little Joey teasingly if little Emma is his "girlfriend."

The more we encourage non-romantic, non-sexualized relationships between boys and girls, the better we equip kids to have great platonic friendships as adults. Guys who grow up with girl buddies are less likely to assume that an eagerness to spend time together is proof of a secret crush. Boys who grow up liking and being liked by girls will almost certainly be better prepared to handle the inevitable ambiguities that come with any relationship. And presumably, they'll be a lot less inclined to imagine that their female friends just want to fuck -– or marry –- them.

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Teen Girls Are Wearing Shapewear to 'Normalize' Their Bodies [Spanx]

Today in sadface, more and more teenage girls have taken to wearing shapewear underneath clothes on a daily basis, even wearing it beneath their athletic uniforms, because they "don't want to stand out for the wrong reasons," i.e. be seen as fat among their peers. In fact, one of the hottest teen trends (ranked between One Direction and sexting) are Spankies, brightly patterned spandex shorts that work much like Spanx, except, you know, they are not for boring old grandmas.

Some, like doctors and psychologists, worry about the effects that shapewear will have on teens' mental and physical health (from all of the organ squeezing), but don't worry because fired Real Housewife of New York Jill Zarin says it's totally fine that girls are wearing these undergarments:

"Nobody wants to see anybody's body parts rippling. It's just not attractive... What I think shapewear does is that it normalizes the girls' body figures and it evens everybody out."

First, it's important to note that Jill Zarin is currently hawking her own shapewear line Skweez, which is to say that she has a keen interest in girls' health money. Secondly, "normalizes the girls' body figures" is a nonsense phrase for idiots. Third, Zarin's claim that shapewear is beneficial to teenagers because it makes them all the same (skinny) is a depressing sentiment that many people likely share, but few are oblivious enough to voice.

Spanx also weighed in on the issue, releasing this statement to Good Morning America:

"Our mission is to help women feel great about themselves and their potential... Regarding those medical issues for teens using [our] products, in twelve years of selling shapewear, we've never had this issue."

Dare we dream to live in a world where Spanx' reply would be that their product was meant for adult use only? DARE WE?

Shapewear Might Be Affecting Teen Health [GMA]

Image via lynea/Shutterstock.

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Men Too Busy Saving Their Own Asses to Let Women and Children Go First [Chivalry Is Dead]

When a gunman opened fire on an Aurora, Colorado movie theater earlier this month, three men died protecting their girlfriends, while another ran from the theater, got in his truck, and drove away, saying later that he "went to get help." The media (us included) heaped praise on the the dead men, extolling them as examples of how a guy should behave in the face of tragedy. But according to a new study, men who face disaster by taking care of the needs of others aren't the norm — in fact, throughout the last 160 years or so, it seems that many, many more men are in the "get in the truck and get the hell out of dodge" category than those who would take the bullet. Women and children first? More like looking out for number one.

A new study of shipwrecks dating back to 1850 has shown that not only has the "women and children first" mantra fallen out of favor, it probably was never in favor in the first place, or if it was in favor, it was in favor for, like, a second. A pair of Swedish economists examined the survival records of 18 disasters and found that women and children are actually less likely to survive disasters than men, and the people most likely to survive are the people who are, according to chivalrous rules, supposed to go down with the ship: the crew. While 61% of the crew and 37% of men typically survived shipwrecks, only 27% of women did, and only 17% of children made it.

According to the LA Times, the initial reasoning behind letting women and children access lifeboats before men was that men ostensibly had a "survival advantage;" they tend to be more physically hardy and stronger, and crew members should have a familiarity with the vessel and the water that would allow them a greater chance of survival without lifeboats. Therefore theoretically, men giving women and children access to help first would increase the overall survival rate in maritime disasters. In Role/Reboot today, Hugo Schwyzer points out that on a more philosophical level, handing one's survival advantage over to women is only fair, given that, until very recently, every time a woman has had sex with a man, she's put herself at risk of pregnancy, and, by extension at risk of dying during childbirth.

Not every seafaring disaster resulted in men scrambling to save their own asses at the expense of the younger and physically weaker. "Women and children first" was coined during an 1852 disaster involving the British ship the Birkenhead. When the boat hit a rock in shark-heavy waters, the men dutifully loaded women and children onto the lifeboats and stood on the deck as the vessel sank. During the Titanic disaster in 1912, crew members made sure that women were allowed the ship's limited lifeboats. Additionally, Leonardo DiCaprio floated there shivering to death in the water like a chivalrous idiot while Kate Winslet hogged an entire piece of floating jetsam that they totally could have shared.

But all human beings are wild-eyed, limb-chewing forest creatures when faced with the possibility of imminent death, and even though it's unpleasant to think about, it makes sense that when animal instincts take over, a guy may feel compelled to shove a kid down some stairs so he can get one of the last remaining life vests. The Swedish researchers behind the analysis call this "every man for himself." I call it a proto-Ayn Randian paradise. Ron Paul for President!

[LAT]

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These Olympic Bodies are Worth Their Weight in Gold [Thighlights]

Jul 30, 2012 6:00 PM  

The 2012 Summer Olympics have kicked off with bang, giving spectators around the globe the chance to cheer on our countries' best athletes as they compete in various feats of strength. Not only do the Olympics offer up the perfect opportunity to take in some magnificent demonstrations of athletic prowess, but they also give us a glimpse at what are, arguably, the best physiques in the entire world.

All week, we'll be bringing you special coverage of these glorious Olympic bodies. Now, let the games begin.

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Terrible New Arizona Law Forces Horrified Parents to Watch their Babies Die [Roe V World]

It's tough to find a job in this sluggish economy, but now, thanks to a law about to take effect in the state of Arizona, there may soon be a need for something called a "fetal grief counselor" in the American Southwest. Thanks to anti-abortion lawmakers' efforts, starting Thursday, mothers of babies with fatal fetal birth defects will be forced to carry their pregnancies to term, give birth, and then watch their babies die. See? Republicans are job creators, after all.

Earlier this year, Arizona governor/ terrible person Jan Brewer signed into law a measure that would ban abortions in the state after 20 weeks' gestation with no exception for fetal abnormality — but unlike other 20 week bans, Arizona's law counts gestation from the first day of a woman's last missed period. It's the most extreme abortion ban in the nation, and it's especially heartless when you consider that many fatal fetal abnormalities can't be detected until after that point in a pregnancy, which means that if you're pregnant in Arizona, you're placing a pretty bold bet that your fetus won't have any defects it can't survive. And if it does end up completely non-viable? Tough fetus, ladies. You should have thought of that before you had sex!

In anticipation of the disastrous effects House Bill 2036 will have on Arizona families, groups like the MISS Foundation and Embrace are directing their already-stretched-thin resources toward Arizona, where they anticipate having to help families to prepare for what's known as a "fatal birth," or the birth of a stillborn child, or a child who cannot survive for long outside of the womb. In addition to preparing families for "fatal births," they work to plan funeral services for children who are often wanted and mourned, and provide counseling to the families left behind, including women who were forced by the state of Arizona to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term.

Of course, 20-week bans are mostly political theater acted out by anti-abortion rights lawmakers who want to sound like big men in front of their rabidly anti-choice constituents — almost all abortions performed in the US occur before 12 weeks' gestation, and, according to Think Progress, only about 100 post-20-week abortions take place in Arizona per year, so if lawmakers want to reduce the number of abortions occurring annually in the US, banning late term procedures isn't the way to do it. Although the procedure is far from common, for the 100 or so Arizona women that need it annually, a late term ban could be disastrous, forcing them to either give birth and watch their babies die or spend considerable time and money traveling out of state for the medical care they've decided is best for their families.

To borrow words from anti-abortion rights, pro-forced ultrasound Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett, women can just cover their eyes!

[Think Progress]

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