The Paradox of Being Fashionably Atypical

Thoughts on a conversation between Freya India and Louise Perry

Empetrisor, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I was listening to a conversation between

Freya India

and

Louise Perry

who were discussing the various pressures on girls and young women. Links are provided at the end so please take a look at that.

I don’t know what it was, but something reminded me that a decade ago, most of these pressures didn’t exist. Back then, who could have anticipated the damage social media would cause and also, how it’s effects would ripple throughout society?

For over two hundred years, women have organised themselves to get more control of their own lives, but historically (and I’ll take correction on this) the oppression was mostly visible. But how do they defend themselves against something so covertly insidious as the monetisation of self-doubt in the guise of self-actualisation?

“Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.”

Fulke Greville

Markets typically respond to demand but some specialise in a particular customer demographic, young women and girls, and what they are selling is not so much a specific product but an aspiration. The demand comes from chronic insecurity, so finding it, or even creating it in acute form is incentivised. Solutions are promised but what is delivered instead is a palliative - the endless maintenance of being fashionably broken.

Quite recently I likened this to injecting someone with venom and then offering to sell them the antivenom. It irks me to be repetitive (it was a comment to a Freya India thread) but I can do no better.

"Podcast Microphones", Bing Image Creator Dall.E.3 (Modified)

Just a reminder that I provide links to the source material at the end of this piece so please check out what they have to say. You may finish with more questions than when you started because they cover a lot of important ground. This is a necessary scoping step towards finding the answers.

So are you ready for some answers?

Adjust your expectations because I don’t have any, but looking at something differently, can sometimes help.

Where’s the Paradox?

The paradox I allude to in the title can be simply explained. To be fashionable is to be on-trend, but to be atypical, is to be unique. No matter how familiar it is to think of someone’s ‘unique fashion sense’, for ‘fashion’ to be atypical, or, to suggest that being atypical can be fashionable, is a contradiction in terms. You may disagree, but in the way I mean they are mutually exclusive, so please roll with it for now if possible.

Fashion is like one of those revolving bistable optical illusions where what you perceive continuously flips. What was once bold and new quite suddenly looks passé, and somewhere in between in a place you can’t quite pinpoint, it was fashionable. The beautiful can be made ugly and vise versa because everything that seems to matter is situated at the extreme.

Empetrisor, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

We are already innately unique while holding so many things in common with other human beings. It’s fashion that streams us into being less of an individual and more of a tribe member. I could go on trying to make this case but it might be easier for you to park your scepticism for the time it takes you to read this.

By all means call BS later.

Thought Experiment

Let’s say that we have a sufficiently large population to gather data about a particular human characteristic be it physical or mental. We have been very careful to ensure that our measurement scale is appropriate and suitably calibrated. The data is dropped onto a chart and a Normal Distribution emerges. The gif below is borrowed from an engineering application but it is still a good illustration of the point, but for reasons that are unlikely to be interesting, it’s a better analogy than it may at first appear¹.

Encik Tekateki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The most common measurement will land at what will eventually become the centre of the distribution; this is the same as saying that it’s the mostly likely place for the measurement of anyone in the population to be. The corollary is that the farther from the centre the measurement lands, the rarer the measured characteristic is in the population.

Chris53516 at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The most exceptional are so because they are the least likely and in a distribution they are to be found in the extreme right and left tails. For example, elite athletes and psychopaths are outliers in their respective distributions of sporting ability and empathy.

Many athletes will gather to compete at a sports event in a prominent fashion, but what makes them uncommon is that amongst the general population, their level of performance is rare. Social media is like an arena where all the extremes are so loud they appear to be normal. Yet as touched upon in the previous paragraph, being exceptional is not always good, particularly when the aspiration is to have a trendy diagnosable condition.

This brings us back to the paradox. For example, people who are neuro-atypical should be by definition in the minority. If it becomes fashionable to have that diagnosis, some ‘neurotypicals’ might feel pressure to get it. Is that too far fetched?

From the podcast I also learned that girls and young women are being coached online about what to say to their doctor to harvest prescriptions - a script for a ‘script you might say. But where does that come from? On this point, Freya India describes the social media trend where people produce selfies with their medication, viz. #postyourpill. She argued that this is one example of how medications, typically SSRI’s, have become glamourised under the pretence of mental health awareness.

Whereas it’s fashionable to talk about being ‘made whole’ by medication but that seems to be more about identity than awareness. What barriers are left to be torn down?

As Louise Perry said:

“… but normalising is the wrong word because we’re so beyond that at this point […] the idea that we’re destigmatising this just seems mad to me, because since when is this stigmatised, at least among this generation… ? ”

Louise Perry, The Ugly Face of the Beauty Industry - Freya India/Maiden Mother Matriarch 49

Perhaps the real social contagion is that people want to migrate to the atypical to be notable. The problem is that for any individual, the most natural and stable position for them to be themselves, is likely to be somewhere less visible.

Statistically, this suggests that most people who are motivated by social media to identify as being atypical, are not. This must result in a tension between the authentic self and socially-induced aspirations. The painful internal conflict becomes self-fulling, because hey presto, all the symptoms of being atypical are suddenly there.

It’s healthy to want to distinguish oneself in sports because part of the process it to become fitter, but anorexia and other mental illnesses should not be competitive, yet they seem to be so. The notion that self-realisation is the natural biproduct of being fashionably atypical is frankly horseshit.

The pair criticise the trend of deliberately adopting ‘masculine’ behaviours to be a ‘badass’, mentioning that outlets like Cosmo, claim it’s liberating for women to cheat on their partners. I think it’s meant to be a preemptive act of self-defence or some such notion. I am not sure what sort of message it is to suggest that females are to be empowered by being less female and adopting more male characteristics.

This is where it gets complex because we can compare our physical and mental characteristics with others in a practically inexhaustible number of dimensions and each one is an opportunity to be unhappy. The desire for extremes leads to an accelerating spiral of unrealistic expectations and where does that leave someone who has staked their happiness on achieving them?

Let’s say the probability of achieving a particular goal is 1/10, meaning there is only a 10% (0.1) chance of being satisfied with the outcome - it seems enticingly achievable - it is just over one standard deviation. But what if, instead, an individual’s sense of wellbeing depends on simultaneously achieving five equivalently unlikely independent goals, e.g. to be atypically thin; fashionably-flawed; medicated; visible on several spectrums and a badass?

Aspiring to be someone that is unlikely to exist even with considerable intervention is precarious and unlikely to lead to genuine fulfilment. The probability of achieving all those objectives would be the product of the individual probabilities, i.e. 0.1 ^5 = 0.000001%. Why would someone set themselves up for almost certain failure (or perhaps what might be considerably worse) the partial achievement of unhealthy goals?

I have taken some liberties with my example and you don’t want to know where the numbers were pulled from, but it’s a crude way to show why the expectations placed on young females, quickly become impossible to manage.

Could it be, that if people succumb to social pressures and try to fit certain arbitrary ideals, they become destabilised by the abandonment of their authentic selves?

Remember, this is all built on a contradiction, that to be on-trend it is necessary to be off-trend. Perhaps it’s a self-reinforcing loop because it can never be reconciled. It’s unrealistic to engage in a series of unwinnable fights with the expectation of winning them all.

I quite like the idea of being OO7, but only when watching a James Bond film, because there is nothing I am prepared to do to make it feel any more real than that. I am just average and not committed enough to put the work into becoming a psychopath. Call me an under-achiever if you like.

Links

Freya India’s related Substack Article

Louise Perry’s related Substack Article

And on YouTube:

1. This gif relates to the dimensional control of production items with the median point being the target. The dimensional tolerances that are acceptable to the market are represented by the Lower/Upper Specification Limits (LSL/USL). This ensures that the item is suitable - satisfies Fit, Form and Function (FFF). The Lower/Upper Control Limits (LCL/UCL) represents the tolerances achievable by the manufacturing process - at a cost. The objective is to ensure that items produced at the outer limits are statistically rare without undue onerous use of resources. Yet imagine if the market demanded a standard that sat within the LCL/UCL bounds; something that could not be realistically achieved by the production technology without a massive amount of needless rejections and waste. That is what unrealistic standards do to the human beings bearing the brunt of this.