Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Science

I recently purchased on eBay a lot of 40 back-issues of a certain French fashion magazine, called Numèro.

I did this because I have the idea that these magazines might be a good source material for painting beautiful women. But it's a little more involved than that, really, because it's not hard to find images of beautiful women online, or in Playboy or Penthouse magazines (I have quite a few of those). You see, I believe there's something fundamentally different about the attitude expressed by the women in fashion magazines from the attitude expressed by women in erotic media. 

I find myself quite interested in these subtleties. (In much the same way that I have, in the past, found myself interested in the subtleties of posture and style of dress in their capacities as means of communication - consciously or unconsciously - about who we are, who we want to be, and who we want to fit in with.)

In fact I was disappointed and perplexed when I tried to google variations of 'differences in facial expression porn vs. fashion magazines" and came up with nothing. This seems like a viable topic for a scholarly dissertation... to me anyway.

So here is my opening statement, my hypothesis, the assumption upon which I decided to purchase the Numèro magazines:

• The range of facial expressions, and posture for that matter, affected by women posing for erotic media tends strongly towards 'demure,' 'seductive,' and 'submissive.'
• In contrast, the range of facial expressions and posture affected by women posing for fashion tends more towards 'confrontational,' 'self-assured,' and sometimes even 'aggressive.'

One obvious observation to make here is that erotic magazines and fashion magazines have different target audiences. Erotic media is primarily targeted at men, presumably men who are interested in sexy women, and so it follows that female models who convey with their body language and facial expression that they 'want' to be with these men who make up the audience will help sell more magazines.
Conversely, fashion magazines are marketed to women, presumably with the idea of selling clothing and cosmetics to these women. And so what's being sold here is a fantasy of self-assertion, strength, and even beauty that the female audience might be able to attain by purchasing the items on sale therein.
Something interesting that follows from these points is that both magazines are selling fantasy; and that beautiful women are the locus, the vehicle, the blank canvas for that fantasy. It's all very aspirational, in a way that feels sort of private and personal and possibly a little bit shameful.

I believe that feminine beauty is a kind of mirror, reflecting back at us a lot of hidden data about the culture we live in as well as our own hidden psychologies.

Can you tell which of the following images came from fashion publications and which came from erotic media?













My guess is that you CAN tell. The facial expressions are fundamentally different. 
(Unfortunately, there are also a lot of other clues in these images which you may have consciously or unconsciously noted, and which made the determination easier. I tried to 'even the playing field' by only using fashion images in which the shoulders were bare.)

If I relax the requirement of having bare shoulders, the following images from fashion publications illustrate the point more clearly, I think.







These facial expressions, at the 'assertive' end of the spectrum, shall we say, are simply not found in mainstream erotic media.

So by now I have spent quite a bit of time thumbing through the Numèro magazines in search of interesting faces and interesting expressions, and I have some data on which to evaluate my original hypothesis. The truth is that the range of expressions on display is really very broad, and encompasses pretty much everything from angry or annoyed all the way to demure and seductive. At first glance, I find the inclusion of 'demure and seductive' to be a bit mystifying, but I might have a sense of why this is... a new hypothesis if you will. Perhaps it is the case that fashion magazines are presenting a broad and inclusive fantasy so that all women can see some version of themselves in that 'paper mirror,' whether they are feeling angry or assertive or romantic or submissive... albeit a better-dressed version of themselves.
Erotic media, for the most part, does not need to bother with this wide range of expression. Men are seeking out this type of media for a narrower set of reasons. (I imagine that there are dark corners in the landscape of erotic media catering to niche tastes, and that a broader range of facial expressions can be found if you look for them.)

So there is a lot more overlap between these types of media than I'd originally assumed, but if you're looking for images of beautiful women wearing any facial expression other than demure and seductive, high-end fashion magazines are a great place to start. I don't regret my purchase.

In a way, this entire 'experiment,' or 'inquiry,' really just serves to underscore the potency and importance of facial expression in terms of its ability to evoke a psychological or emotional response in the viewer. We humans have, after all, evolved over eons to respond sensitively to infinite subtleties in the faces of our peers.
Fashion media, erotic media, and many other kinds of media for that matter are just taking advantage of this instinctual human ability in order to engage us in a fantasy of one sort or another (depending on what sort of media we choose to engage with) and the type of face most often used to sell this fantasy is the face of the beautiful woman. Because, to (almost correctly) quote Peaches, "The girls want to be her, the boys want to be [with] her."

So what sort of facial expression do you respond to? And what does it say about your psychology? Are you looking for someone to show you a 'better' version of yourself? Or just to accept you? To nurture you? To protect you? Or to challenge you? No matter what it is, there's a facial expression just for you, and you can find it in a magazine.

For me, personally... I like the intense faces, the strong ones, the emotional ones. Long-time readers of this blog will already know that. And what does that say about my psychology? Well, I think I sorta kinda might know the answer to that, but hey... that's a bit personal, don't you think? If you want to 'read' my psychology, you'll just have to wait for my paintings.

And speaking of that... there is an interesting question floating in the ether which is "why will I not share images of my paintings in progress?"
The simple answer is that I do not want anyone's opinion, be it positive or negative or anywhere in between.
To once again quote the great painter Andrew Wyeth,
"People only make you swerve. I won’t show anybody anything I’m working on. If they hate it, it’s a bad thing, and if they like it, it’s a bad thing. An artist has to be ingrown to be any good."

*Very slight shift of topic... Another thing I really like about high-end fashion magazines is that some of the photo spreads can really reach the level of art. One can only assume that these magazines have decent budgets for these spreads, and in the hands of visionary photographers or production designers, these photos can be very interesting...









OK, there you go...
That's all I have to say!

5 comments:

  1. this is an excellent piece. i've thought about the 'look' of fashion a lot - (why such disdain in the eyes all the time?), as i always hated it. and that will tell you a bit about my psychology i suppose.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Ethan!
    I think you are not alone in disliking the 'disengaged' aspect communicated by fashion models most of the time.
    See below!
    Cheers

    ReplyDelete
  3. So, in addition to Ethan's response (above), I also received the following response by email, which I re-post here (with permission, anonymized upon request):
    _____________
    Christian,
    My take on the fashion look is that it is 'heroin addict'; detached, disaffected, fuck-it-all. I don't see the assertive or aggressive that you see, so much as the zoned. One interesting variation I can think of is on a soft-core porn site,(https://www.domai.com/updates) where the models smile, look at the
    camera and have a more genuine friendliness, even softness. A very simple schtick; just nudes with nice smiles.
    Most porn models evince nothing friendly or warm, but more the hard, slightly scared, or vulnerable looks. A woman with a beautiful body, well photographed but with a cross or spaced look on her face is much less appealing (to me anyway) than a woman with a (real) smile and an average body with an average photo. So
    who do those fashion photos appeal to?
    Jus' sayin'
    _______________

    So first off, thanks to.... Tom (I'll call him Tom, not his real name) for taking the time to comment.
    If I had to distill my blog post down to a few salient points, one of those points would be that the range of expressions found in the fashion magazines was broader than I'd expected. One thing I observed, but did not write about in the blog, was the high percentage of faces showing almost no expression at all - just blank. I thought of this as a 'mannequin face,' as if the women were just modeling clothes for sale, like a mannequin. I think this is what Tom is getting at with 'detached and disaffected.' I don't have a strong positive reaction to this blank stare, but I don't have a strong negative reaction to it either.
    This is where we get into a second distilled point of my post, which is that these images of women's faces can key into different psychologies for different people. As we've established, Tom doesn't like the blank stare, but I'm not as bothered by it. And here I need to make a new observation, something I didn't mention in the post above but which Ethan alludes to and which is important: IT'S ALL IN THE EYES (and secondarily in the mouth, but mostly the eyes.) Some of those blank stares are DISENGAGED, while others are more ENGAGED. The engaged stares are, to me, pregnant with possibilities. I see depth and emotion and the possibility of shielded vulnerability there....
    And now, If we push a little bit past 'blank stare' into 'disdain' or 'contempt,' we are squarely in the territory that Ethan hates, but I find very compelling. Different psychologies. I see all kinds of things in those angry eyes: a woman who is hurt but hiding it behind an armor of anger, a woman who is genuinely and appropriately angry at the world, and myriad other options that only my subconscious could name.
    So yeah, Tom, I do see something more than just zoned out in a lot of these images. There are three distinct groups of pictures in my blog post above, and in the second group I see a lot of assertiveness and confidence and confrontation. It's all very compelling to me, and so I guess that in answer to your question of who these images are supposed to appeal to, I'd say that I imagine they probably appeal to a lot of women across the wide range of emotional experience, and they also appeal to me, as a man with a certain idiosyncratic psychology, and also as a visual artist.

    Thanks again for your replies, guys!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks Christian, very interesting response. I'll add a few ideas.

    The 'hard' look of women in fashion - not just the expression, but the bodies, uniformly tall and thin, and usually very low on 'maternal' aspects - may have evolved from the tastes of gay men, who are undoubtedly over-represented in the fashion industry, as clothing designers, photographers, photo editors, magazine editors. This isn't I suspect an original theory. A sexual loathing of feminine-ness among the people in the field could easily evolve a standard look that is more 'masculine': assertive in countenance, and broad-shouldered rather than large-breasted in physical shape. I'm not saying that look only appeals to gay men - that these tastes can then affect the culture generally is obvious. But the evolution of the fashion look strikes me as both very camp, and also closeted - it's men creating women who act like men who act like men. I mean that precisely: the fashion women are playing the role of a gay man over-doing it with masculinity.

    And yes, personally, I'm with "Tom." An honest woman who isn't making herself a product - maybe that will be the trend in two generations or so. But today the 'feminine' (the archetypal quality) is not much valued for either sex. Both sexes seem to feel guilty embracing it. Men because it would be an abdication of our power in a society where that's where power resides, and women because it seems politically retrograde.

    ReplyDelete