GentSense

Thinking about Fashion, Philosophy, Culture, and Being a Gentleman

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Lying to Women

There's a difference between lying to a woman and answering the question she's really asking.

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Details

When it comes to dressing well, or attracting women, it's not the details; it's the fact that there are details.

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Extramarital Websites

Speaking of hook-up websites, a while back, the Sunday Times Style magazine ran an article by Clover Stroud on internet adultery forums.

In addressing this phenomenon, I will forgo the usual moralizing about trust, the sanctity of marriage, and so on in favor of a more subtle critique: How dumb can you be?

"Eliza," a five-year user of several such websites, whom the article apparently quotes as an expert, provides the following rationale: "It's a quick way of organising a discreet affair. I'd never cheat with someone my husband knew, and, working alone, an affair with a colleague isn't an option, although I wouldn't take that risk even if it was."

So it's risky to have an affair with a colleague — presumably because you could get caught — but it's not risky to lick-and-stick your picture to a perfectly public bulletin board whose raison d'être is to help you cheat on your spouse?

While some people are probably posting fake pictures (just like on any internet dating venue), not everyone is: Standing over Eliza’s shoulder as she trolls a website, Stroud remarks, “I experience a jolt as I recognise the smiling face of an apparently happily married father of three I know from Oxfordshire.” (All wives of happily married men who have three kids, live in Oxfordshire, and know Clover Stroud beware; it’s not clear whether she’s let the cat out of the bag yet.)

Of course, membership at most of the sites is “strictly limited to married or cohabiting adults,” as Tara Winter Wilson pointed out in her similar (and similarly-titled) piece for the Torygraph a few years ago. We might think, then, that it’s fairly safe to galavant in this way because everybody on the website has a stake in keeping the secret.

Unfortunately for this logic, however, both Wilson and Stroud managed to sign up for accounts without much difficulty so I guess it’s not that safe after all. The only thing it would take for the jig to be up is a spouse (or spouse’s friend) wondering just why so-in-so disappears now and then and logging on to a few of these things. Or — perish the thought — the actual offender leaving it up by mistake.

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Hook-Up Websites

I've been watching The Simpsons online a lot lately, trying to finish off the ones I haven't seen. In so doing, I've become the beleaguered recipient of incessant pop-up ads for online dating venues. Actually, I'm being somewhat euphemistic here; the ads are for hook-up websites -- chiefly, sexintheuk.com and benaughty.com -- offering "encounters" with scantily-clad bombshells who are, apparently, "online now."

The funny thing is, all the pictures are of females. Now, there are two options here:

1) I'm getting scantily-clad bombshells because Mark Zuckerberg has told them my IP address belongs to a heterosexual male or because they've figured out girls don't watch The Simpsons, but hunks bursting from fruit-of-the-looms are showing up on women's computers everywhere.

2) The websites are primarily targeting heterosexual males.

If the second option, why should this be the case? If the sites are actually trying to provide a forum for hooking up, they need both sexes, right? And I find it very unlikely that they have a dearth of men interested in casual sex with the many women they have waiting in the wings. Is the explanation that women are just as motivated to enroll in the hook-up club by seeing attractive females as they are by seeing attractive males? Or perhaps they sign up regardless of whether there's a visual and of what it is.

Or maybe these websites do not actually provide a forum for hooking up at all but just send you on an ad-revenue-generating clickathon once you sign up.

Needless to say, I find the whole thing rather fascinating. I'm "tempted" to sign up just to find out. But, alas, The Simpsons are on.

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The Biggest Menswear Store in the World

I just got back from Munich. It's a very beautiful city with lots of old and grandiose architecture and statues. It's a bit like Oxford in that way, except everything is much more ominous than in England. I got the sense that the guys who commissioned the structures in Munich would have had me impaled and put in their sausage if I had made any false moves. I felt very small, whereas even though Oxford's architecture is certainly indicative of power in the negative sense, it's also inspiring and uplifting. It makes me feel part of the magnificence rather than subject to it. But maybe that's just because I go to school here and have, therefore, been let in on what's happening.

Unfortunately, the first night I was in Munich, I left my cap in a bar. (Those who know me well are now groaning in their lack of surprise.) So the next day I roamed around downtown, looking for a place to purchase a replacement. I was promptly directed to a place called Breiter, who claimed to be the biggest hat shop in Europe. Even if they aren't the biggest, it certainly made sense for them to pretend; these people had everything: drivers, flats, fedoras, bowlers/derbies, newsboys, ball caps, and tons of women's hats I don't know the names of. It was three whole floors of head-covering wonder. I bought a middle-of-the-road, grey driver made by the German company Wegener to replace my navy blue Wigen.

Little did I know that just a few doors down was an even more sublime treat. The next day I ran into it as I was walking from the opposite direction: Hirmer, the (again, self-proclaimed) "biggest menswear store in the world." It had six huge floors, which looked like department store floors in and of themselves, except that every department was selling men's clothing exclusively. No women's or children's clothes anywhere. I was astonished. I'd never seen anything like it. The manager told me the store is 9,000 quadratmeters, which is almost 97,000 square feet, and he pointed to an area where they're in the process of adding another 2,000 quadratmeters (21,500 sq. feet). I couldn't help but think about the declining market for menswear in the States in comparison to its apparent status as a booming business in Germany. The manager said, "Yes, well, in Germany, looking nice is very, very important." I guess so.

Even though I was crazy about the place, I didn't buy anything because, after all, I wasn't really in Germany to shop.

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Naysaying

Say "no" every time it's required; then say "yes" to something else.

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The British "Drought"

I'm an American, but I live in South East England right now and, lately, the press and radio here have been making a lot of noise about the current "drought" in England. Here's an example of the kind of thing I've been hearing.

I have to say, I'm not really sure what they mean by this term "drought." It rained today and yesterday. It rained two weeks ago. And it snowed a couple times in there somewhere too. Any time I've ever lived in an area where they officially declared a drought, the grass was yellow and you could barely go outside. But this is the same-old, crappy, overcast weather England always has; it's just that you can wear nice shoes a little more often.

I guess building your economy around a wet climate where it's miserable every other day makes you a little more scared when the rivers go down, but I find it all a little confusing.

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Communication

Don't tell people what you're doing; tell them what you want.

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There's a LadySense!

I've been wanting to do this for a while now:

You know, you can't be a GentSense too long without a LadySense coming along and finding you. This is true in life and now -- apparently -- in blogging too.

That is to say, there's a (relatively) new blog out there for people who like this one but also enjoy a bit less testosterone from time to time. It's called LadySense.

I've been reading it the past few weeks to get a feel for how it's developing. While it's still a nascent endeavor, its core is about being ladylike in a creative way that keeps you guessing and refuses to let you go away thinking you know exactly what a lady is, as if it were a static, wooden thing. The blog is modern, but classical -- in that good and sexy way.

All these things suggest that the women behind the project mean business and that whatever it ultimately becomes, it will be good.

Check it out. Right now.

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Biting and Gnawing

Biting is better than gnawing and everyone does one of them; some do both, but if you think you do neither, you gnaw.

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I am Mulled Wine

Recently, I had to fill out a form for some social thing at my college. One of the questions was "If you were a drink, what would you be and why?"

I put "Mulled wine -- elegant, warm, and sweet, but with a little spice and a bite."

I thought that was a good answer.

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Why Talk about Clothes?

In the introduction to her book of collected essays A Dedicated Follower of Fashion, legendary fashion intellectual Holly Brubach talks about how she came to write about fashion and why she loves it so much. One comment is particularly enlightening:

For all that these essays purport to be about fashion, I now believe that fashion was merely the pretext (and a good one, at that) for writing about human nature. Clothes are a gateway to vanity, love, greed, snobbery, sex, and other fun subjects. Frankly, I can't imagine a better beat. [p. 11]

So why talk about clothes? Because clothes are a very human thing; they are important to us, no matter how much we insist otherwise. Because of this, talking about what we wear can only be superficial to the extent that the person talking is superficial.

Now all we need is some more non-superficial people talking.

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Beard Trimming, Fifties-Style

Trimmed my beard with scissors and a comb today. I've done this a couple times before, but it hasn't gone so well. The first time took forever and the beard didn't look very "trim." The second time, I got impatient, hacked into it by mistake, and had to shave it off. Today, I got it perfect: Looks like I did it with electric clippers and it didn't even take that long.

Feeling especially manly and dignified.

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Sweater Meditation

I have a favorite wool sweater. I like it because the material feels good on my skin and its shape fits my torso perfectly. It doesn't constrain yet there's no extra room.

I wear this sweater a lot and feel a measure of excitement and pleasant anticipation on mornings when I decide that, indeed, today is one of those days I am going to wear my sweater.

Nevertheless, like all sweaters, mine has what we might call a "renewable shelf life." After so many wears, the whole thing feels limp and the material in the cuffs gets stretched out.

Today my sweater's shelf life has expired. All day, I'm pushing up the sleeves again and again, though occasionally I surrender and let them droop past my fingertips. I'm irritated.

Now, my irritation is mild, mind you -- I'm not homicidal or anything. But I experience myself just a little worse today, and certainly worse than I would if my favorite sweater felt like my favorite sweater. And my mood is just a little worse too.

This has behavioral effects. When I experience myself slightly worse and am in a slightly worse mood, I treat people slightly worse -- or at least not quite as well as I would if I were feeling fantastic. And I don't feel like praying, going to church, doing yoga, meditating, or anything else in that department. I'm also not particularly inclined to notice the transfixing elegance of a flower.

No matter. My sweater's shelf life is renewable. All I have to do is throw it in the washing machine and, Bob's your uncle, it's back to being my favorite sweater.

Except that on this particular day, I do something wrong. I put it in the dryer. That's right, the horror music pounces as I pull it out amid the rest of the clothes, warm, strangely fuzzy, and -- I lift it up to inspect -- small.

Not even finished removing the rest of the clothes, I put it on quickly to see just how bad the situation is. It's bad. The shape no longer fits my torso perfectly or even passably well. If wool weren't so heavy when wet and I knew how to surf, it might work as a wetsuit, but, as it stands, my mornings of excitement about wearing it are a thing of the past.

I'm going to try vinegar and conditioner and Ouija boards and the all the other internet tips I've found, but it looks like I may need a new favorite sweater.

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Which Would You Rather?

In Principles of Psychology, William James says the following about our relationship to clothing:

We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetually shabby and unclean and having an ugly and blemished form always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment before making a decisive reply. [Harvard UP edition, p. 280]

Let's put his point to the test. Would you rather have a fantastic body but be forced to cover it up with dirty, ragged clothes everywhere you go or would you opt for an ugly, overweight physique and an everlasting wardrobe of impeccable quality and style?

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Freudian Slip? - Romney on Criminals in Office

"My view...people who commit violent crimes should not be able to vote, even upon coming out of office."

-- Mit Romney at the Mertle Beach debate; January 16, 2012

Of course, what he meant to say was "even upon coming out of prison."

What do you think, Freudian slip? Here's the video:

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Wikipedia Blackout Survey

How many times did you click on something for Wikipedia during the blackout, forgetting that you wouldn't be able to read it? (Include the first one, where -- presumably -- you didn't know.)

My answer: Four. (For Alexander McQueen, Roger Scruton, Tim Tebow, and Right-to-Work Law)

Respond via the box below or, better yet, reblog with your answer.