There was a story on Today Tonight this evening about ‘what women are looking for’.
Apparently the answer is tradies. Metrosexuality, btw, is out.
Now, good-o about the latter. Although I’m “metro” myself in some ways – I moisturize sometimes, yes, and use hair product – there’s something decidedly counter-intuitive about the idea that the more effeminate you are, the more appealing you’ll be to the opposite sex. As one forum member of bogan.com.au once scribed, in reference to pink shirt wearers, “cunts should b fuckin gassed mate”.
But I’m a bit stumped as to the first part. Actually not stumped at all - just plain fucking annoyed. Because after studying the media for six long years, I know something that most people don’t – not that it’s complicated in any way, and certainly not coz it’s covert. What I know is simply that the media, far too often, doesn’t so much report on trends as create them. When it comes to social fads, tastes and sensibilities, the media are very often describing not society’s fads, tastes and sensibilities, but society’s acting out of earlier media hype and opinion on the subject – generally from opinion columns & shit-for-brains magazines, written by shallow & overbearing women who think that they’re wry social observers but really, should’ve been confined to running the cigarette counter at their local Coles instead of being allowed any entry into the world of Published Writing. The media plants the seed, it grows in society, then the media ‘reports’ on society’s uptake of this concept/angle as though it came out of nowhere, magically permeating en masse from people’s heads – an extraordinarily retarded logic but one that almost everyone falls for.
Most of the time, I don’t really care. Jennifer Aniston’s love life, what colour of eye shadow is “in”, and the new recipe for Grilled Salmon Turds with Jalapeno & Artichoke Mash is of no concern to me. But it really bugs me when it touches on that subject of “what do we want in the opposite sex”. Because relationships, of course, are something that affect us all and love, attraction and dating is a large but also very complex and emotionally sensitive part of a normal young adult’s life.
And now we – society – are being told that with the hair-straightening/eyeliner-wearing craze of the 90s over, the “in” thing now is the other extreme – the rudimentally educated, cultureless and terminally untalented tradie. Yes, the Ultimate Man is now one that puts rectangular rocks in rows and bangs bits of metal into bits of wood. Just as the coffee-sipping, soapie-watching yuppie has finally fallen out of favour – not that you’d know any different living in St Kilda – girls should now be flocking to (note the media says are flocking to – they know their prophecy will be self-fulfilling) the bricklayer and the pneumatic drill operator, men who probably don’t even know how to spell “library card” let alone own one. While I have nothing against these professions, to be fair, it just annoys me because the loser in all this is once again the humble middle-class male, who’s sacrificed years to get a degree and a foot in the door somewhere only to be continually overlooked/shat on by society.
It reminds me why as a teenager I (and a lot of us) was so drawn to a very particular type of movie – Falling Down, American History X, and in particular Fight Club and American Beauty. It’s the story of the regular middle-class white guy getting increasingly sick of being screwed over, until he finally cracks, reinvents himself and rebels. When I think about it, it’s even why I got into Rammstein so much in those late high school/early uni years - again, the imagery, the lyrics, the sound of the band really speaks to an angst-ridden young man’s heart. The one who’s neither a pansy nor a jock, the educated, honourable & passionate citizen who, as one Polish writer put it, perished by the millions in World War 2 and was never quite restored his rightful role in the bottom-denominator, media-corrupted matrix that followed.
I remember talking to a certain someone last year after a long and frosty period of time apart. I was optimistic that she’d finally learned her lesson and had realized, now that we’re all approaching our mid-20s, the fairly obvious fact that most other guys – certainly the assortment of drug addicts, psych ward interns and sexual deviants that she’s confessed to hanging out with - do not and cannot substitute for a smart and decent guy like me. But as always, I’d given her rusted logical capacity too much credit. Not that she didn’t realize that, ironically - she did – but she’d just grown comfortable with it. And when you actually think about it, that is in fact what the Today Tonight story - just one of millions of like products, from billboard ads to music clips - is dictating. It’s not explicitly saying tradies are better than, say, their graduate counterparts in studios and office high-rises. It’s just saying go for them. You’ll be happy with them. They’re “in”. It’s Agenda Setting, the primary function of modern media. Why debate the merits of what’s on offer? Just tell the sheeple what to go for, and they will.
