[calidude]

Who Runs the Girls?

Quote:

A FEW years ago, I attended a party at a nightclub in the meatpacking district of Manhattan with about 10 young women, most of them models, and two club promoters, men whose job was to bring beautiful women to exclusive parties. Beyoncé’s hit single “Run the World (Girls)” boomed, and the girls danced to the beat, singing, “Who run the world? Girls! Girls!” One promoter joined in, with his own twist on the chorus: “Who run the girls? Boys! Boys!” The men high-fived, and everyone laughed.

Many of the models who walked the Fashion Week runways this month in New York, London, Milan and, starting this week, Paris, are the same women who pass through these clubs. The fashion shows and the international circuit of V.I.P. parties — Miami in March, Cannes and St.-Tropez in May and July, August weekends in the Hamptons — serve as case studies in an old debate. Does the celebrated display of female beauty and sexuality empower or exploit women?

V.I.P. night life is an industry run by men, for men, and on women, who are ubiquitously called “girls.” The girls are brought in to attract big-spending clients from among the young global elite, willing to spend thousands of dollars on alcohol. Hence the V.I.P. party is sometimes half-jokingly described as “models and bottles.” The girls are seen as interchangeable; one club owner calls them “buffers” because rows of them frame his Instagram party pictures. They are recruited through friends of friends, scouted on the streets of SoHo, with its clusters of fashion agencies, or tracked down at model castings.

During the week I was a sociology professor. But during my weekends and summer vacations, I became one of these girls. In exchange for showing up at their parties, the promoters let me study them. I was what they call a “good civilian” — close enough in physique but not as valuable as a fashion model.

Girls rarely pay to be in V.I.P. nightclubs, but neither are they typically paid to be there, accepting instead gifts and perks like free drinks and even housing — no small thing for fashion’s underpaid work force. Clubs and promoters will pay to fly girls from New York to Miami, or from Prague to Cannes. Most girls don’t see promoters as exploitative, but as friends, something the promoters foster by treating them to lunch or games of bowling.

As anthropologists remind us, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Gifts are given with expectations of reciprocity. Friendships mask what would otherwise look ugly: the exchange of women’s bodies for money.

The promoters are handsomely paid, upward of $1,000 per night for those who regularly recruit high-fashion models. Girls also give the promoters access to powerful men, whom they often see as potential investors in their entrepreneurial dreams, which range from opening their own nightclubs to brokering business deals.

This is a system of trafficking in women. It is, of course, consensual, and a far cry from anything like sexual slavery. But, in an anthropological sense, it is not so different from the tribal kinship systems studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss, in which men exchanged women in order to forge alliances with other men, while women were cut out from the value that their own circulation generated.

Consider a contemporary example: Greek life on college campuses, where women circulate among fraternity parties. The best frat houses are those with the best-looking girls at their parties. In exchange, the girls get free beer. This system is not without risks. In a five-year study, the sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton found that working-class women who joined the frat scene faced greater risks of sexual assault and academic derailment. The more popular they were at frat parties, the worse their financial and professional futures looked.

Why do women consent to their own exploitation? Flattered egos, of course, play a role. When I interviewed a 21-year-old fashion merchandising student, she explained: “I love the whole aura in New York. I love the vibes. I love like, the exclusivity.” She was keenly aware of her value to her male friends in the night-life scene: “But I always wonder, if I wasn’t, you know, skinny, if I wasn’t attractive, would they really be friends with me? Probably not.”

Beneath the glamour is an unbalanced economy in which girls generate far greater profit for men than their free drinks are worth. A successful nightclub in New York City might make $15 million to $20 million a year.

In 2013, I spent a weekend in the Hamptons at a nine-bedroom mansion shared by a few Manhattan businessmen who aimed to host at least 20 models each weekend during the summer season. They called it “model camp.” That weekend, I attended a nightclub, a pool party and a house party hosted by the chief executive of a private equity firm. One of the men explained to me that girls were “currency,” assuring him a steady stream of invitations to exclusive parties and visits from important businesspeople.

I did meet some exceptional women who joined the party in search of opportunities, such as a 24-year-old model who was looking for an internship in finance through the connections she made in nightclubs. “If you have a head on your shoulders,” she told me, “it’s a great way to meet people who work a lot and have money.” Similarly, a 28-year-old marketing professional with an Ivy League education loved having the “most interesting, amazing conversations in the world” with politicians and venture capitalists at V.I.P. dinners. But while girls can certainly meet important people at these events, they are generally in a weaker position to leverage these connections.

The unequal ability of one person to capitalize on another is a classic case of exploitation. Imagine that the Hamptons businessmen hold meetings with the private equity C.E.O., in part because I softened their introduction. In two years, perhaps their investment fund will be cranking out profits, while I’ll be turning 36, and no longer welcome at the party. What may seem like an agreeable quid pro quo looks different in the long run, when women age out of the system without any returns on the time they invested. What’s really troubling is that no one even sees it as a lost investment, in part because it feels so good.

When it comes to women, popular culture confuses pleasure and power. Sure, girls may run the world, but men run the girls. And the girls don’t seem to mind all that much.

Ashley Mears is an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University and the author of “Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model.”

The professor mentions she's about to turn 36 which was two years ago, so now she's 38 but her looks have held up so WB. She looks better in this video, and she used to be a model.

[Easy_C]

I have a number of thoughts on this article, but also note that there is an extremely high level of game being displayed by a lot of the players involved. Worth asking: do you think any one of these people is worried about "flakes" or is complaining about how terrible and worthless western women are?

[C-Note]

I think she's giving about as honest an assessment of the situation as she can for someone in her position. If she said, "What I saw validated the evolutionary psychological concept that women are mainly valued for their looks and fertility and it looks like this will be so for the immediate future," she would be ostracized by her academic peers. So, she has to give that third to last paragraph to appease the party line. But, reading between the lines of what she's saying, she appears to understand how it works and realizes it's not going to change.

[General Stalin]

This article is red pill as fuck.

I also think the industry she is putting under a microscope can be used as an analogy for modern feminism and gender dynamics as a whole.

Women are sold feminism and the you-go-gurl independent bossbitch lifestyle just like these young models are sold the fun and exciting high-fashion party lifestyle. In the end, they lose out and wasted all their young years on hedonistic less fruitful endeavors but are convinced it was worth it because it was "fun."

[Belgrano]

Ashley Mears Wrote:

The unequal ability of one person to capitalize on another is a classic case of exploitation.

In two years, perhaps their investment fund will be cranking out profits, while I’ll be turning 36, and no longer welcome at the party.

...women age out of the system without any returns on the time they invested.

What’s really troubling is that no one even sees it as a lost investment, in part because it feels so good.

Lovely ovaries you got there, should have used them, eh?
How come they only ever realize that when it's too late.
Try telling her younger version "It's a trap, fuck your feelings, use your brain! Settle down and start a family!".
Yeah, I wonder how that would have went.
Well, at least she's got a degree and some nice memories to share with her future cats.

Another article about her:

Quote:

Later, she spent hours of her limited free time as a sociology student at the University of Georgia driving to Atlanta for fittings and department store gigs, prepping for shoots, and waiting on call for jobs that could happen at a moment’s notice, all for annual earnings of around $5,000, less than she might have earned at a conventional campus job. It didn’t bother her at the time. “I thought I was going to be a huge success and I’d travel the world and it would be very glamorous,” she says.
(...)
And she spent about six months after graduation working in Asia, pulling in approximately $50,000 in 2002 – slightly more than the typical recent college grad at the time earned in a full year and far more than her peers working in New York (models, she says, often go to Asia to “cash out”).

However, model does seem like a pretty shitty job indeed:

Quote:

Models are utterly dispensable, in Mears' telling: They labor at the mercy of inscrutable bosses, lousy pay, and punishing physical requirements. And for most of them, that's how the job will remain until they retire at the ripe old age of, say, 26.

Like actors and musicians, models work in a winner-take-all market, in which a few people reap rewards disproportionate to their talent, and everyone else scrapes by. This trend has become more exaggerated since the '90s, Mears writes, as the market has become glutted with young women from around the world, leading to greater turnover and plummeting pay rates. Would-be models are "scooped up, tried out, and spit out in rapid succession," she writes.

Through interviews, Mears investigated the financial state of the (unnamed) small modeling firm she worked for in Manhattan. * She found that 20 percent of the models on the agency's books were in debt to the agency. Foreign models, in particular, seem to exist in a kind of indentured servitude, she writes, often owing as much as $10,000 to their agencies for visas, flights, and test shoots, all before they even go on their first casting call. And once a model does nab a job, the pay is often meager. Mears herself walked runways, sat for photo shoots for an online clothing catalog, modeled for designers in showrooms, and went on countless unpaid casting calls. During her first year of research she worked mornings, evenings, and weekends around her graduate classes and earned about $11,000.

Why do so many models operate against their own economic interests? Mears details how, in the fashion world, there is typically an inverse relationship between the prestige of a job and how much the model gets paid. A day-long shoot for Vogue pays a paltry $150, for instance, while a shoot for Britain's influential i-D magazine, which Mears calls "one of the most sought-after editorial clients for a model," pays absolutely nothing, not even the cost of transportation or a copy of the magazine for the model's portfolio.

The alternative to high-fashion poverty is to be a "money girl," working for catalogs and in showroom fittings, jobs that pay well and reliably. The best-paid model at Mears' agency, for instance, was a 52-year-old showroom model with "the precise size 8 body needed to fit clothing for a major American retailer. She makes $500/hour and works every day." But the commercial end of modeling is widely derided within the industry as low-rent, as mere work without glamour. Once a model has done too many commercial jobs, she is thought to have cheapened herself, and it's exceedingly difficult for her to return to high fashion.

So many models operate against their short-term interests, hoping that by investing time now they will hit pay dirt later in the form of fame and a high-paying luxury ad campaign. The catch is that there simply isn't much time to invest; the older a model gets, the more she "exudes failure," Mears writes. She quotes a 23-year-old model who'd been instructed by her agency to say she was 19: "They said it's like when you go to the grocery store to buy milk, which milk carton would you want, one that is going to expire tomorrow or one that will expire next week?"

The funny thing is that even though Mears knew the odds were against her, and despite her academic ambitions, she, too, found herself drawn in by the fantasy that the big time was just around the corner. In her mid-20s, she was ancient by industry standards, but she kept modeling for almost three years after her re-entry into the field, well after she had enough material for the dissertation that would later become this book. Each phone call she got from her booker, ordering her to hustle across town right now to a casting, felt like the phone call that might change her fate. (Which begs the question, if even Mears could be seduced by the industry, what chance does a poor girl from rural Brazil have?)

"It's the lottery," Mears told me recently over tea at a West Village coffee shop. Now 30, still lithe and luminous in that otherworldly model way, she's an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University. "You realize that the probability is slight but the possibility is so enticing."

There are a number of academics studying the modeling life right now. As a subject for scholarly study the topic may seem slight, but then again, there's been an explosion in what might be termed "girly" studies—looking at the work of strippers and Playboy bunnies, for instance—going back at least as far as the popularity of Madonna studies 20 years ago.

"I just got a request to review an academic paper of lap dancers," said Elizabeth Wissinger, a CUNY sociology professor who has interviewed models for her own book on the industry, which she's currently writing.

The title of Mears' book, Pricing Beauty, refers to her scholarly efforts to understand who or what determines a given model's chances of success in a field glutted with gorgeous people. How does this winner-take-all market produce winners? Why does one tall, underweight, astonishingly beautiful young woman become the face of Chanel No. 5, while another languishes, doing minor magazine shoots that pay little and never catapult her to fame? Those in the industry like to imagine that there is something inevitable about the outcome. When Mears asked how they knew what made a winner, industry tastemakers explained that such models had an ineffable quality, a je ne sais quoi, that elevated them above the rest. "You know, you just know!" a stylist told Mears.

"It's like asking the meaning of life," a booker explained.

But as Mears discovers, the truth is that success in high-fashion modeling has a lot more to do with marketing and chance than it does with the ineffable. In a field saturated with models who have the right measurements and the right skin tone and the right "edgy" looks, bookers and casting agents and stylists and editors engage in a merry-go-round of imitation and blind guesswork, with everyone trying to anticipate what everyone else will like. Once a fresh new face is anointed, clients scramble to nab her for shoots and shows, proclaiming that they, too, see that special something. Mears likens the process to "The Emperor's New Clothes."

Becky Conekin, who teaches history at Yale and is studying what the modeling industry looked like in Great Britain during the middle of the 20th century, told me that her work is a "feminist project of recovery"—that taking models seriously is a way of taking women seriously, wherever we might find them. In a similar spirit, Mears' book, which is heavy on both economic analysis and tales of nobody strivers, gives voice to a group of women who are paid to be seen and not heard. Instead of focusing on the rise of the industry's few Coco Rocha-level superstars, she is interested in young women like Liz, whose story illuminates the very bad odds an aspiring model faces. * After dropping out of college to pursue her career, Liz spends years hustling for little pay in high fashion before finally succeeding in shampoo ads. But even then she is without health insurance. When she develops a stomach tumor, she must declare bankruptcy and move back in with her parents in New Jersey. There Mears finds her, at age 27, without a college degree, training to become a yoga teacher.

Mears' own foray into modeling has its own anticlimactic ending, a dismissal from her agency via a casual email (subject: "Hey Doll!!!"), offering little explanation. She gets one last check, for the grand sum of $150.

[Atlanta Man]

She said simple truths with elegant academic language. Also WB.

[greekgod]

Read that article last week. The point about aging out really caught my attention.

The real question is; with the internet being the primary source of information gathering and record keeper for history, will brave women tell their younger counterparts the truth? Or does "having fun" rule the day?

I'll take bets. Give me some odds.

[Serious Sam]

(12-08-2016 03:34 PM)calidude Wrote:  

What may seem like an agreeable quid pro quo looks different in the long run, when women age out of the system without any returns on the time they invested. What’s really troubling is that no one even sees it as a lost investment, in part because it feels so good.

When it comes to women, popular culture confuses pleasure and power. Sure, girls may run the world, but men run the girls. And the girls don’t seem to mind all that much.

This, right here, explains why so many women allow themselves to be gangbanged and shat on in Dubai.

"Sure, it sucked having poop splatter across my face, but at least I got to fly on a private jet, buy expensive clothes, take a picture with a Ferrari, and see another country! YOLO bitches!!!"

[Foolsgo1d]

Women will always fall for this shit as long as there are bags worth 5K+, expensive holidays those "other bitches" aren't getting, alcohol and enough drugs to melt your nose off.

From a point of view where you would have a bit of humanity for these stupid girls you can feel sorry for them but as such, we live in the information age and women shouldn't be clueless as to where this game leads.

Don't hate the player, hate the game ladies.

[Kona]

(12-08-2016 03:34 PM)calidude Wrote:  

In a five-year study, the sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton found that working-class women who joined the frat scene faced greater risks of sexual assault and academic derailment. The more popular they were at frat parties, the worse their financial and professional futures looked.

Way to go democrats because you know that was a govenment funded study. A couple of sociology bitches sat around and thought up "let's follow the popular girls" give me a damn break.

Aloha!