Memes on Parade

One way to look at the agglomeration of behavior and expectations that make up a culture is to view it is a set of interacting memes: discreet ideas that come to life, propogate, thereby affecting other memes as they do so, and, ultimately, pass into history.

Globalization has not only upset economic apple carts the world over, it has also provided an opportunity to assess the whole notion of memes, by examining how a culture absorbs new idea units.

Especially when it involves sex.

Notions of female beauty vary across societies, and even within the same society over time; the contrast between a 20s flapper and Marilyn Monroe, accomplished within merely several decades is striking.

No more striking, or faster, though, than the transformation sweeping Brazil.

Brazil may well be the most body-conscious society in the world, but that body has always been Brazil’s confident own — not a North American or European one.

For women here that has meant having a little more flesh, distributed differently to emphasize the bottom over the top, the contours of a guitar rather than an hourglass, and most certainly not a twig.

Until some memes invaded, and spread like kudzu.

[That] was before the incursions of the Barbie aesthetic, celebrity models, satellite television and medical makeovers made it clear just how far some imported notions of beauty, desirability and health have encroached on Brazilian ideals once considered inviolate.

The transformation has taken only a generation, going from

... Martha Rocha, a Miss Brazil from the mid-1950s. She finished second in the Miss Universe competition supposedly because her body was a bit too generous in the hips, buttocks and thighs, but since those characteristics were so highly valued [in Brazil], as suggested by cartoons and the popularity of the semi-pornographic drawings of Carlos Zéfiro that circulated, it was the rest of the world whose taste was questioned.

to a proportional inversion:

[Brazilian] Gisele Bündchen, the top model whose enormous international success has inspired the thousands of Brazilian girls who dream of emulating her to enroll in modeling schools and competitions. But very little about Ms. Bündchen’s body — tall and blond, rangy yet busty — connects her to her homeland and its traditional self-image.

This memetic transformation has not stopped at the runway. Girl's dolls have faithfully followed fashion, leading to the near extinction of a "fleshier" plastique to Barbie's top-heavy pneumaticism.

What Brazilians would have once viewed as odd quickly went from nouveau to norm.

Not without cost, it must be said. Anorexia, once practically unknown in Brazil, has claimed six young women within the last year, and diet pills are hurtling out of shops.

As a phenomena, this transformation is interesting enough. However, it begs many questions that the article's author either never addresses, or, at best, implicitly views as a form of cultural colonialism, with The West as the active agent, and brown skinned people as pure, but powerless, victims.

Centrally, Dr. Elisado de Araújo's statement just how far some imported notions ... have encroached commits the sin of passive voice: it eliminates the subject. In doing so, it relieves the writer of having to face the who and the why.

Plunging into Terra Incognita

I shall take up this cudgel, which will require venturing to where monsters lurk, terra incognita: the female mind.

Cue the chord -- is it G-flat? -- portending doom.

For men, deciding upon First Cause is a doddle compared to ascertaining what is going on in any particular woman's brain; indeed, the laybrinthian inscrutability of the female mind is so fathomless as to lend the impression that no woman really grasps what's going on in there, either.

Perhaps, though, peering into the collective female mind, with the calming effect of numbers helping to tame individual vicissitudes that put the zig in zag, just might yield some insight.

Why are trees so tall?

No, this isn't a refresher course in the art of non-sequitors. The facile answer is that trees are tall because they require sunlight to survive. Glaringly obvious, as far as that goes. Go one step further, though. If all trees agreed to be short, then no tree would have to go to the bother, and considerable expense, of attaining great height.

There lies the problem: all trees. Just one defector, and its neighbors have to reach for the sky, and consequently their neighbors, etc.

Just so with women. Being a successful mother -- that is, obtaining sufficiently favorable conditions to allow raising children through prolonged dependency -- is so demanding as to require significant resources and protection from an external source. What's more, since paternity is much more uncertain than maternity, women have to pursue a passive - aggressive strategy in acquiring a mate.

Consequently, women engage in adornment to a far greater extent then men. And like trees, the degree of adornment is driven by defectors.

If all women agreed to forego heels and accessories, none would need them. One defector, though, is all it takes to start the race for the sky. And since the payoff for defection is so great, defectors are a certainty.

Which comes first, the Demand or the Supply?

According to Dr. de Araújo, neither:, “[Brazilian women] want to get thin no matter what, all because of images from north of the Equator. It is a cruel cultural imposition on the Brazilian woman.”

No doubt conducted at stileto point.

This statement perfectly substantiates AOG's assertion that the Left deprives all non-Westerners (although in this case Westerner = Northerner) of any moral agency: the non-Western/non-Northern part of the world is simultaneously noble and passive.

It also highlights the prevalence of self evident intellectual laziness, both among reporters and the reported: in the complete absence of force, just how did this imposition occur?

The good Dr. hasn't a clue, because he isn't asking the right question, and he isn't thinking about how discreet units of cultural information take hold and spread.

Just like trees, all it took was one, or a few women, to act as defectors, thereby garnering for themselves more resources than their non-defecting sisters, who in turn had to join the boobs-race in order to keep up.

Men obviously had to react to this new supply with demand, but just a little examination demonstrates that statement accords to men an active role that is more apparent than real: women continually try new ways to push men's buttons, then home in on the ones that work; in the mating realm, men are puppets, and women search for which strings to jerk.

Why does Barbie trump Ipanema?

In other words, why did these particular memes (or, this particular meme if you wish to consider the several appearance changes as inseparable), so quickly predominate?

There is probably no way of knowing. Guesses verging on "just-so" stories will have to suffice. How about:

1. The halo effect of all things characterizing the more materially successful culture.
   
2. Scarcity value, the same thing that made female corpulence a sign of beauty in times of much less plenty than today.
   
3. Mate selection tends to exaggerate existing gender specific differences
   
4. The prevalence of Barbie images in the popular culture. (This, too, implies more agency than is actually the case, in that it completely begs the question as to why that standard became predominant in the first place: it is an answer that answers nothing.)
   

Memes on Parade: Runway Models as Lab Rats

The replacement of one beauty standard by another amounts to three distinct memes -- breast size, hip-waist ratio and buttock size -- permeating a culture in barely more than a generation. This change in memetic frequency is more than a metaphor for evolution, it is evolution.

The "what" is easy to see. Equally, it seems pretty clear that women, rather than being passive victims, are themselves the active agents. This is ironic, though; being the active agent is not necessarily a barrier to acting against interest. Just as it would be easier for trees to be just tall enough, mutual competition ensures tall enough becomes far taller than necessary.

This demonstration of evolution in action demonstrates how irrelevant either a designer or plan is. Recursive systems have no need for such things. It also shows that the difficulty of explaining the "why" part of the problem is also no reason to look for the Divine. Stuff doesn't need our understanding for it to happen.