Buttcracks, Sub-Navel Flesh and Blubber

In "The Tyranny of Teenager Fashion" I wondered why so many teenage girls wear clothing that shows off their worst parts.

A day at the beach prompted my musings. Michael Blowhard recently observed a similar phenomenon in New York City:

In any case, spring has arrived in NYC, and this year the women are once again back in low-slung pants and high-hemmed shirts. Cute! Well, it's sometimes cute. Sometimes, to be frank, there's just too damn much blubber on display. I'm glad women are feeling free to be frisky; I'm also glad that women are feeling freer than they did back in the anorexia years to enjoy sporting flesh and curves. But -- good lord -- there are a lot of young women around who are showing off a lot of excess flesh. . . .

It's one thing to get slinky and sexed-up for a night on the town; it's another to show off buttcrack and subnavel-flesh on a workaday sidewalk. It's one thing to enjoy the jiggle of your own flesh; it's another to waggle your squeezed-into-hiphuggers spare tire in front of a noonday crowd.

I thought of four possible explanations for why out-of-shape teenage girls display too much flesh: the herd instinct forces the out-of-shape girls to wear what the in-shape girls wear, self-deluded girls think they look better than they do, teenage rebellion compels girls to get a rise out of their elders by looking like crap and something about teenage fashion is inherently revealing. None of these explanations convinced me.

Michael has two other explanations.

First, he thinks many middle and upper-middle class girls "live such insulated and safe lives that they're more than a little clueless" about how they appear. I'm not sure I follow that. Many of the women who moved me to write my post appeared to be low or lower-middle class. If anything, higher class means less flash.

His other explanation is good ol' raging hormones:

But from 15-25, we don't seem capable of doing much beyond acting out what our hormones tell us to do. Which makes sense: biology has us in a breeding frenzy. Girls during those years sometimes seem to think that they're just "being pretty" and "having fun" when everything about them is in fact screaming "impregnate me now."

This may explain why attractive teenage girls flaunt their flesh, but it doesn't explain why unattractive girls do it too. If your body proportions are less than ideal, tight revealing clothing only emphasizes your shortcomings. It hardly screams "impregnate me." If raging hormones interfere with normal brain functions so much that girls are unable to appreciate how bad they look, the hormones are making it harder, not easier, for the girl to find a mate and breed. Those aren't very effective hormones.

Neither my explanations nor Michael's explanations convince me. I guess I'll have to conduct more field research.

Comments

[stephenb]

It has to be fashion. Fat girls dress like that because their thin friends do. Because that is what everyone on TV wears. Perhaps that is all the stores sell. Perhaps they are all a bunch of trend whores. Personally, I blame retail. The stores don't stock anything for the modest teenage girl.

[Lynn S]

I linked to this.

Many guys, including myself, find fat girls more attractive than skinny girls. While many guys find a girl with jiggling fat disgusting, many guys find it sexy. In fact, it's estimated that 1/3 of all men in the US actually like fat girls.

I used to think that liking fat girls was weird, but think about this: almost all guys like girls with big boobs, right? And how many skinny girls with naturally big breasts do you see?