Disruption of the Attractiveness Constant

There is a social phenomenon going right now that is just beyond my comprehension. I speak of the disruption of the Attractiveness Constant.

It seems like young men and women generally have about the same level of attractiveness. Undoubtedly, this is due to fashion trends. Adults don't understand these trends, which is probably the point. Teenage and college age kids, however, more or less understand these trends and follow them or rebel against them. This mass psychology seems to lead to a continuously constant relationship between the attractiveness of young men generally and the attractiveness of young women generally.

For example, during the 80's, there were a couple of trends that seemed to apply to both boys and girls. There was a trend toward bright clothes. For some reason, it was OK for both boys and girls to wear bright pink for a while. There was a trend toward big hair. Guys (myself included) went with hair to their collars in what is now contempuously called the mullet. My hair is pretty curly, so this took a lot of work to maintain. Without frequent haircuts to keep the sides in check, my hair wouldn't have just been long in the back, but would have blossomed into a pretty good imitation fro. Fros weren't cool then, at least for half-Portuguese guys. (They're pretty cool now, of course. You don't get much cooler than Ben Wallace's huge fro.) A lot of girls, on the other hand, wore the big hair with tall bangs. (The Muse, from what I can tell, was the exception. She found her hair groove pretty early.) The result of all of this is that, while we might look back on the 80's as a period of pretty heinous fashion, fashion was about equally heinous for guys and girls. The Attractiveness Constant was maintained.

Judging from pictures you see, it seems that the Attractiveness Constant has been maintained for the last several decades. You look at pictures from when my parents in early-to-mid 60's. My dad was wearing little narrow ties with short hair and my mom was wearing funny-shaped glasses with relatively short hair. Attractiveness Constant -- maintained. Early 90's with kids wearing grunge stuff and long hair? Same for both sexes -- Attractiveness Constant maintained. Check it out in almost any era and it's pretty much the same. 50's? Pegged pants for guys and poodle skirts for girls. Late 60's hippie fashion? Could you tell the difference between guys and girls? (I don't know. I wasn't there.)

In the last couple of years, though, there has been some sort of rip in the space-time continuum or something because the Attractiveness Constant has been disrupted. From my perspective, I began noticing the first signs of this with my youngest two brothers, Intenseus and Guitar Guy, who are now 19 and 16, respectively. For reasons beyond my understanding, they basically stopped getting haircuts and let their hair grow all long and shaggy-looking. Now, beyond the usual brotherly grief-giving, this was no big deal. When my mulle-fro was in full flower, someone my parents knew saw my picture in the newspaper and said his first impression was that I had girl hair. So everyone makes fashion mistakes as a teenager, me more than most. I initially just saw Intenseus's and Guitar Guy's follicle follies as a good opportunity for grief-giving, not the precursors of a strange phenomenon that they actually were.

About a year ago, though, I began to realize the broader implications. I was staying at my parents' house and Intenseus had some of his friends over. His non-girlfriend was there and I was struck by the fact that, while Intenseus had hair billowing out all over, she was normal-looking. At the time, I kind of wrote this off as some sort of oddity of nature, but it got me wondering. Living in a college town as we do, I started noticing that there seemed to be a number of college-type couples where the guy's hair and fashion choices seemed to throw off the usual Attractiveness Quotient that one would expect in a couple. My interest in this strange new social phemonenon was heightened when I went to visit Intenseus at college where he was a freshman. In his dorm, the guys looked like they had rolled out of bed after sleeping for a couple of weeks (maybe they had -- they were in college, after all). Intenseus's hair had gotten long enough so that, when he was facing into the wind, the wind blew it back so that he kind of looked like a lion. (Sorry, Intenseus, it's just the truth.) The girls looked pretty normal to me.

Finally, I was sitting a lunch in town last week and a college-age couple sat down at the next table. The guy was wearing a bad-looking baseball cap with grungy hair flowing out from under it all over. He was wearing one of those kind of tight polo shirts that look like they have been worn in soccer games. His female companion was blond, with her hair pulled back in the usual Brandi Chastain-type ponytail, and was wearing some kind of white tank top. They struck me as being from almost different planets. Yet, there they were, looking totally like a couple. That really confirmed for me that we are living in some kind of strange time where the Attractiveness Constant has been disrupted.

I can't think for the life of me why this has happened. Why has young guys' fashion gone so wrong while young women's fashion seems to be in kind of normal-looking holding pattern? Did Clinton or Bush make it OK for guys to be kind of slobby in some way? Would things have been different if Gore, with his very put-together kind of look, had won in 2000? All of that seems pretty unlikely. Is it because of musicians? No one seems to be quite big enough these days to really influence guys' fashion generally. Anyway, they all seem to wear black (except the Killers, who seem to wear white, and the White Stripes, with their red). TV? On Friends at least, the slobbiest guy, Ross, was the one that always seemed to get made fun of. Movies? Hell, I don't know. Something has gone wrong, though.

What comes next? Do girls get slobbier? Let's hope that the opposite happens, that someone convinces young men that haircuts and clean-looking clothes are good. Let's hope that guys and girls revert to the highest, rather than lowest, common denominator. It seems that there is some hope. Last I heard, Intenseus had gone down and gotten a nice haircut without any complaining by my parents at all.