As IF Times

link Video – Kate Upton and the Rise of the Curvy Customer – WSJ.com.

Years ago, a business associate remarked that the Hong Kong women were all so stylistically  avant garde.  When asked why, the retort was that they were all getting breast implants to make them look curvier.  This was an odd observation to me because I had never known that curvy women had ever NOT been in fashion.

I tell this story because it illustrates the difference between what’s considered fashionable and what’s considered attractive.  As we know, the two can be poles apart.  Of course, different cultures will dictate distinct preferences as well.  In the African Masai culture, women with elongated necks are considered attractive.  In asian cultures, big feet on women are unappealing.  In many cultures, thickness is an attractive trait of otherwise ugly men…thickness of wallet that is.  In modern western culture, preposterously large breasts on an otherwise slim body are considered attractive in women.

For decades, western culture has been coerced to believe that a thin, almost boyish profile was the ideal for fashionable women.  This has  much to do with the fact that the fashion industry is dominated by gay personalities and so their tastes become our tastes.   In the extreme case, ‘heroin chic’ was the look desired for many runway models only a decade ago.  Even now, women still strive to attain a weight profile more resembling that of a 12 year old boy than a normal female.

Growing up,  it was Farrah, Raquel and Sophia, not Twiggy or Kate Moss that jump-started puberty in young boys.  To this day, women can aspire to be like Gwynneth, but speaking for all men, Christina Hendricks would likely be a more ideal dinner date.  The linked article implies that women are now accepting the ‘curves are good’ paradigm espoused by Kate Upton.  While you’d have to be awfully nearsighted to mistake Upton for a boy, she is hardly Rubenesque by any stretch.  Women may finally have come to realize that men are generally attracted to curvy women…at least straight men.

Perhaps the tyranny of the boyish look for women is coming to an end.  And this is a good thing.  Women can’t do it and men don’t like it.  To be candid, we’re talking curvy here,  not completely round.  That’s another discussion.  Now if we could only do something about tattoos….

link NBAs Jason Collins says U.S. ready for openly gay player – ESPN.

Dateline: San Francisco:  Local hairstylist Federico Assange says he has gotten ‘incredible’ support since coming out as the first openly straight hairstylist in this liberal city, known for its predominantly gay hair salons.   Assange hopes that his revelation will make it easier for other straights to follow his path.

Assange sat down for an interview that was aired by ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday, one day after the veteran hair stylist revealed his sexuality in a first-person story posted on Hair Illustrated’s website.

“I think, I know, in my personal life, I’m ready, and I think the country is ready for supporting an openly straight hair stylist,” Assange told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

“I hope that every stylist makes a decision that leads to their own happiness, whatever happiness that is in life,” Assange responded. “I know that I, right now, am the happiest that I’ve ever been in my life.”

Assange said he went through something akin to a 12-step program while deciding to come out, dealing with emotions such as anger and denial.

“But when you finally get to that point of acceptance, there’s nothing more beautiful than just allowing yourself to really be happy and be comfortable in your own skin,” Assange said.

Dozens of San Francisco stylists sent messages to Assange after the story was posted Monday, many doing so through social media. The support didn’t stop there, with President Barack Obama also calling to offer his support.

“It’s incredible. Just try to live an honest, genuine life, and the next thing you know you have the president calling you,” Assange said. “He was incredibly supportive and he was proud of me, said this not only affected my life but others going forward.”

While Assange thinks that the world is ready for an openly straight stylist, former icon Vidal Sasoon said Tuesday that  he doesn’t think the fashion and hair industry is ready.

“I don’t think the fashion world is ready, there’s too many gays in the salon rooms and, you know, gays play around too much,” he told NBC Style Radio.

Asked by Stephanopoulos what his story could mean to youth who style hair and are worried about their futures because they are straight, Assange offered a simple piece of advice.

“It doesn’t matter that you’re straight. The key thing is that it’s about great hair,” Assange said. “It’s about working hard, it’s about sacrificing for your client. It’s all about dedication. That’s what you should focus on.”

link Gwyneth Paltrow Named Most Beautiful Woman by People Magazine – The Hollywood Reporter.

How sublime is that?  On top of a successful and lucrative career, Miss Paltrow is named as the world’s most beautiful woman.  Out of approximately 3.5 billion contenders on the planet, she is the pinnacle of pulchritude.   Sneering observers should note that this is no marginal feat.   The odds of being struck by lightning is reported to be 1 in 1,000,000.   The odds of winning a Powerball lottery is 1 in 175,000,000.  A web search reveals that the odds of being struck by a meteor is only at 1 in 250,000.

So to be that person who defies all mathematical odds to be the absolute most beautiful woman is truly a miracle.  And, what are the odds that she lives in the U.S.A. and is a film actress?  In fact, what are the odds that more than a handful of the last so-named people, such as Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansen, Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, Julia Roberts etc, also live and work within the same 10 square miles of real estate and are also in the film business?  People who don’t understand math cannot comprehend the truly astronomical odds of this occurrence.  Odder still, it happens every year.

We don’t know who sits on the selection committee at People magazine, the undisputed arbiter of this award, but surely they must all be bleary eyed because of having to judge the 3.5 billion possible contenders every year.   I suspect that over the years however, they  have determined that since many of the winners were right from their own backyard, they’d just refine their search to exclude 99.99% of the world’s women and just look out their windows.

According to an O.Hooge, who oddly happens to live here in B.C., the odds of anyone even being born is almost zilch, specifically:

“…If you go back 1 million years or 40 000 generations (each generation is considered 25 years), your chance of being born is at most 1 in 1.8 x 10⁴⁰³¹⁶⁷ or 18 with 403,166 zeros after the 1.

In other words your chances of existing is essentially zilch, even if we were considering this possibility only a short 250 years ago. Right now you do exist, so the actual chance is 100%, but the predicted likelihood in the past of you being born would be essentially zero…”

Be that as it may, Miss Paltrow is indeed lucky enough, at least statistically, to be immortal in terms of human history.  And we are lucky to be here when it happened.