GentSense

I’ve been watching The Simpsons online a lot lately, trying to finish off the ones I haven’t seen. In so doing, I’ve become the beleaguered recipient of incessant pop-up ads for online dating venues. Actually, I’m being somewhat euphemistic here; the ads are for hook-up websites — chiefly, sexintheuk.com and benaughty.com — offering “encounters” with scantily-clad bombshells who are, apparently, “online now.”

The funny thing is, all the pictures are of females. Now, there are two options here:

1) I’m getting scantily-clad bombshells because Mark Zuckerberg has told them my IP address belongs to a heterosexual male or because they’ve figured out girls don’t watch The Simpsons, but hunks bursting from fruit-of-the-looms are showing up on women’s computers everywhere.

2) The websites are primarily targeting heterosexual males.

If the second option, why should this be the case? If the sites are actually trying to provide a forum for hooking up, they need both sexes, right? And I find it very unlikely that they have a dearth of men interested in casual sex with the many women they have waiting in the wings. Is the explanation that women are just as motivated to enroll in the hook-up club by seeing attractive females as they are by seeing attractive males? Or perhaps they sign up regardless of whether there’s a visual and of what it is.

Or maybe these websites do not actually provide a forum for hooking up at all but just send you on an ad-revenue-generating clickathon once you sign up.

Needless to say, I find the whole thing rather fascinating. I’m “tempted” to sign up just to find out. But, alas, The Simpsons are on.

I just got back from Munich. It’s a very beautiful city with lots of old and grandiose architecture and statues. It’s a bit like Oxford in that way, except everything is much more ominous than in England. I got the sense that the guys who commissioned the structures in Munich would have had me impaled and put in their sausage if I had made any false moves. I felt very small, whereas even though Oxford’s architecture is certainly indicative of power in the negative sense, it’s also inspiring and uplifting. It makes me feel part of the magnificence rather than subject to it. But maybe that’s just because I go to school here and have, therefore, been let in on what’s happening.

Unfortunately, the first night I was in Munich, I left my cap in a bar. (Those who know me well are now groaning in their lack of surprise.) So the next day I roamed around downtown, looking for a place to purchase a replacement. I was promptly directed to a place called Breiter, who claimed to be the biggest hat shop in Europe. Even if they aren’t the biggest, it certainly made sense for them to pretend; these people had everything: drivers, flats, fedoras, bowlers/derbies, newsboys, ball caps, and tons of women’s hats I don’t know the names of. It was three whole floors of head-covering wonder. I bought a middle-of-the-road, grey driver made by the German company Wegener to replace my navy blue Wigen.

Little did I know that just a few doors down was an even more sublime treat. The next day I ran into it as I was walking from the opposite direction: Hirmer, the (again, self-proclaimed) “biggest menswear store in the world.” It had six huge floors, which looked like department store floors in and of themselves, except that every department was selling men’s clothing exclusively. No women’s or children’s clothes anywhere. I was astonished. I’d never seen anything like it. The manager told me the store is 9,000 quadratmeters, which is almost 97,000 square feet, and he pointed to an area where they’re in the process of adding another 2,000 quadratmeters (21,500 sq. feet). I couldn’t help but think about the declining market for menswear in the States in comparison to its apparent status as a booming business in Germany. The manager said, “Yes, well, in Germany, looking nice is very, very important.” I guess so.

Even though I was crazy about the place, I didn’t buy anything because, after all, I wasn’t really in Germany to shop.

Say “no” every time it’s required; then say “yes” to something else.

I’m an American, but I live in South East England right now and, lately, the press and radio here have been making a lot of noise about the current “drought” in England. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I’ve been hearing.

I have to say, I’m not really sure what they mean by this term “drought.” It rained today and yesterday. It rained two weeks ago. And it snowed a couple times in there somewhere too. Any time I’ve ever lived in an area where they officially declared a drought, the grass was yellow and you could barely go outside. But this is the same-old, crappy, overcast weather England always has; it’s just that you can wear nice shoes a little more often.

I guess building your economy around a wet climate where it’s miserable every other day makes you a little more scared when the rivers go down, but I find it all a little confusing.

Don’t tell people what you’re doing; tell them what you want.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now:

You know, you can’t be a GentSense too long without a LadySense coming along and finding you. This is true in life and now — apparently — in blogging too.

That is to say, there’s a (relatively) new blog out there for people who like this one but also enjoy a bit less testosterone from time to time. It’s called LadySense.

I’ve been reading it the past few weeks to get a feel for how it’s developing. While it’s still a nascent endeavor, its core is about being ladylike in a creative way that keeps you guessing and refuses to let you go away thinking you know exactly what a lady is, as if it were a static, wooden thing. The blog is modern, but classical — in that good and sexy way.

All these things suggest that the women behind the project mean business and that whatever it ultimately becomes, it will be good.

Check it out. Right now.

Biting is better than gnawing and everyone does one of them; some do both, but if you think you do neither, you gnaw.

Recently, I had to fill out a form for some social thing at my college. One of the questions was “If you were a drink, what would you be and why?”

I put “Mulled wine — elegant, warm, and sweet, but with a little spice and a bite.”

I thought that was a good answer.

In the introduction to her book of collected essays A Dedicated Follower of Fashion, legendary fashion intellectual Holly Brubach talks about how she came to write about fashion and why she loves it so much. One comment is particularly enlightening:

For all that these essays purport to be about fashion, I now believe that fashion was merely the pretext (and a good one, at that) for writing about human nature. Clothes are a gateway to vanity, love, greed, snobbery, sex, and other fun subjects. Frankly, I can’t imagine a better beat. [p. 11]

So why talk about clothes? Because clothes are a very human thing; they are important to us, no matter how much we insist otherwise. Because of this, talking about what we wear can only be superficial to the extent that the person talking is superficial.

Now all we need is some more non-superficial people talking.

Trimmed my beard with scissors and a comb today. I’ve done this a couple times before, but it hasn’t gone so well. The first time took forever and the beard didn’t look very “trim.” The second time, I got impatient, hacked into it by mistake, and had to shave it off. Today, I got it perfect: Looks like I did it with electric clippers and it didn’t even take that long.

Feeling especially manly and dignified.