A study in the June issue of Pediatrics shows that obese children are more likely to be bullied than those with slimmer waistlines. Other reasons children are bullied: “being unpopular, being lesbian or gay, and being socially inept.” I wish there were something funny to say about this one, but sometimes there just isn’t.

Will Oldham Stars In Very Funny Long-Form Beer Commercial

This video is eleven minutes and five seconds long. But it is very much worth that amount of your day. It is essentially a commercial for Dogfish Head beer, which people who like beer with strong beer flavor seem to like a lot. (I prefer beer than tastes more like water myself, but I am a philistine from New Jersey.) But the video comprises three of the my favorite things in the world: Louisville singer/songwriter Will “Bonnie Prince Billy” Oldham, footage of industrial processing plant machinery, and jokes about robots taking over the world from humans. It’s pretty great, have a look.

You all know the story: A multileveraged American industry goes into a slump. Traditional stateside sources of capital dry up, and distribution networks get lubricated with foreign investments that don’t bear close scrutiny. Balance sheets become wooze-inducing, and at the end of the day, a globe-bestriding empire shrivels into a mere vanity project, as international markets turn away in abashment and horror. We speak, of course, of the ultra-high end fashion world, where the fetishized handmade franchise of “couture” appears to be in its death throes, according to an absurdly solemn cover story by Nancy Hass in the Wall Street Journal magazine.

The once-exclusive preserves of custom foppery-known as ateliers, in the fashion industry’s preferred Old World argot-are shuddering to a virtual standstill in the global recession. And what’s worse, Hass notes, is that as couture’s traditional American and European client base plummets, an army of New Money arrivistes are moving into the resulting vacuum. Behold the brutal social revolution: “The blue-blood ladies who lunched and hosted benefits” are no longer the principal engines of couture demand, Hass writes; that privilege now falls to “new-world billionaires-from the Middle East and Russia.”

And “for this very monied class, it’s less about the luxuriousness of wearing exquisite handmade-to-order creations,” she proceeds to sniff, “and more about conspicuous consumption and making museums out of their closets.” Meanwhile, the once-stalwart US doyennes of dosh who might have continued stoking couture demand in the West just opt for high-end ready-to-wear fare. “Couture isn’t necessary, even to promote a brand,” comes the chilling testimony of onetime couture prince Oscar De La Renta. “Customers are smart. They know a $10,000 wedding dress will look the same as a $1 million wedding dress. Maybe it will not be finished the same way inside, but who will know?”

Here in consensual reality, most readers will instantly recognize Hass’ heavy-breathing alarmism as the very definition of a distinction without a difference-as though the Western “blue-blood ladies” of yore possessed fortunes that were magically quarantined from the resource plunder and crony capitalist intrigue that make up contemporary cash empires in Russia and the Middle East. Nevertheless, Hass labors heroically to puff up this shift in market demand as a Meaningful Sea Change of the first order-indeed, as the death of an art form. And certainly her sources are puffing along in chorus; the handful of design houses that keep a couture line going expend nearly as much collective effort on rhetorical pretense as they do on hand-stitched frills. Here, for instance, is onetime Bergdorf Goodman director-turned “luxury consultant” Robert Burke, marveling at the purity of the couture-purchasing heart, even as the new generation of swarthy philistines throngs to the ateliers: “You can’t underestimate the undying dedication of a small group of people to an underlying art. Couture is more than a transaction for the people who make it and buy it; it’s a piece of history.”

Amazingly enough, the undyingly dedicated members of the global disaccumulation set share this same Homeric self-regard. “If I didn’t put it up there with painting or sculpture, I don’t know if I’d be able to do it,” confides the Monaco-based couture gadabout Leona Kornej. (One wonders, by the way, how this sort of credulous quote-stringing might have played out if some hapless editor dispatched Hass to get to the bottom of “this whole Scientology craze.”)

There are of course countless other problems with this kind of doe-eyed trend spotting. Just for starters, it makes no sense to bewail the new Russian and Middle Eastern couture hordes as an alien vanguard of “conspicuous consumption,” when the man who coined that term, Thorstein Veblen, devoted an entire chapter in his Theory of the Leisure Class to explaining how couture-style fashion is intrinsically an exercise in conspicuous consumption, regardless of the ethnicity of its partisans. “Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure,” the irascible, jargon-happy economist wrote. “It not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relatively large value, but it also argues at the same time that he consumes without producing.”

This goes double, he continued, for the frantic effort to produce elegance in female attire, since the frenzied tides of changing fashion stoke a perverse demand for ever more pointless and unappealing forms of novelty. By Veblen’s account, the fashion system is a uniquely tortured effort to mimic the appearance of useful innovation beneath a broader mandate of “conspicuous waste” and “futile expenditure” that is “inherently ugly.”

As Veblen theorizes it, the end result is less a scheme of improvement than, well, a pyramid scheme:

We find that in all innovations in dress, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretence…. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our attention as to become unbearable, and then we must take refuge in a new style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste allows is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change of fashionable attire.

Jargon aside, it’s hard to imagine a better summing-up of the recursive race to the aesthetic bottom that is so fastidiously swathed beneath the elaborate draperies of the atelier world. (Though do not get us started on Thomas Carlyle.) Once you’ve digested the real Veblen stuff, Hass’s admiring descriptions of the actual content of the couture world takes on a strikingly different cast-as in her opening vignette, which asks its reader to savor the alleged disjunction between a vulgar scenemaking Russian actress and the refined display of “John Galliano’s floor-sweeping dresses inspired by 19th-century riding costumes” that she’s checking out in Paris’s couture-week Dior show. In lieu of the piece’s organizing fable of conspicuous-consumption declension, Hass might well have opted for Oscar Wilde’s terser description of the horsey fox hunt: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”

It’s hard, in any event, to see how we’re supposed to be mortified that the high-fashion world might forsake such aristophilic excess in favor of the Hollywood-themed repurposing of Versace’s lapsed couture brand that Hass describes with faintly concealed horror: “Black-clad members of the [Versace] staff led visitors, including Kanye West’s companion, Amber Rose, around the dozen or so dramatically lit mannequins as waiters served cappuccino and petit fours. At a low table at the end of one room, representatives of a French cellphone company demonstrated a joint venture with Versace, $5,000-plus phones adorned with marble inlays in some of the fashion line’s signature shades, including aqua and pink.” Cellphones at least meet some minimal standards of utility, which is a good deal more than one can say for the high-waisted plum-shaded gunnysack we’re urged to admire on a model apparently sporting spike-heeled Timberland work boots in an accompanying photo of “Valentino’s Garden of Eden-inspired” spring-summer couture extravaganza. (Presumably because Adam and Eve would have preferred their unashamed nakedness to this sort of by-the-numbers mock fashion severity.)

In another of the piece’s CEO testimonials, Fabrizio Malverdi, who heads up Givenchy Couture, pulls a long face for Hass over the precious dying breed of gullible Western couture patrons. “These kinds of people you can’t reach except for the couture,” he observes with a rueful shake of the head. “And once you lose the ateliers, you lose this. You can’t get it back, you can’t recapture it.” We can only hope.

Chris Lehmann is probably wearing some horrid common dungarees right now.

Although The Correct Term Is “Grindcore,” Not “Death Metal”

Pretty sure Rachel Sontag’s piece on finding love during the time of unemployment is the first time Pig Destroyer has been mentioned in the Times’ Styles section.

No, I don’t know what the impetus for replacing The Simpsons’ theme song with the perpetually disheveled pop star Ke$ha’s ode to Autotune and staying out all night “Tik Tok” this week was, either. (Perhaps it was a consolation prize for her losing out on the live-action Smurfs movie’s Smurfette role to Katy Perry?) But points for having smooth-voiced criminal Snake Jailbird lip-sync one of the yodel-y bits of the chorus, which just seems so right. [Via]

What a weekend, full of bombs; first Jay Leno, then a Nissan Pathfinder? NO BUT SERIOUSLY FOLKS. And I mean, what an oil slick, hey? Home-rigged accelerants and explosives dousing the ducklings of Times Square, while the mayor watches telepathically. AM I RIGHT? Unlike every other Broadway bomb, this one everyone wants credit for! Hi-o! And what thanks do ya get when you help out the kind people of Gotham City by keeping our tourists away from a bomb? You gotta eat a very fishy salt-free, low-cal meal with Mayor McAntiCheese’s terror deputy Patty Harris! Oh, we kid, she’s great people. And at least we’re not subject to changes in regime during a local disaster! (Hey, anyone remember when Giuliani wanted to cancel the elections due to terror?) Well, let’s be careful out there-and keep an eye out for suspicious white balding 40-something men!

Boston-Area Water Main Break Makes Monday Even Grosser

A water main break in the Boston area over the weekend has left some two million people without clean water until at least Wednesday. The city has ordered residents to boil any water that might be used for drinking or cooking or performing basic ablutions (although showering is allegedly OK), and bottled water is selling at a premium at some not-as-ethical shops. School’s still open, though!

The break — which is in the process of being fixed — has caused Boston-area sales of bottled water to spike, and coffee to be a precious commodity — particularly on a gray Monday morning. From an unnamed employee of a large coffee chain who, yesterday, took to Maine in order to take a shower:

A lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts shops in the affected towns are just closed. Most Starbucks are open but only serving food, bottled drinks, and cold milk. And [instant coffee base] Via. For the most part people were great about it, and many of them were satisfied when we told them Cambridge is unaffected. Those Frappucinos in the glass bottles were the most popular items, as were the Doubleshots in cans. There were some people who didn’t quite understand why we couldn’t make coffee, even after reading the sign that said we couldn’t make any water-based beverages… I guess they needed their coffee. I hope this will be over soon! Half of the status updates I read from my friends yesterday were about lack of access to coffee.

Meanwhile, people are heading to Cambridge, where iced coffee has taken on the qualities of “liquid gold.” “Think about the North End — no pasta!” chimed in another food-minded friend.

And now, the obligatory embed of the song that everyone probably thought of upon hearing this news:

And now let us bring Sex Offender Week to a close. Did you enjoy talking about manhood and TV and the music and the bros? Well, don’t run off yet, here is one parting thought on the matter of contemporary gender relations!

“The last few decades have left us so profoundly disoriented about the most urgent personal matters — gender roles, sexual norms, the possibility of creating lasting romantic relationships, not to mention absolutely everything to do with family structure — that it’s no surprise to find people embracing a theory that promises to restore order.” -William Deresiewicz, “Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism,” The Nation, May 20, 2009.

The basic features of the male sexual character are concisely enumerated in Uncyclopedia’s exquisite description of Bertrand Russell. “He liked sex. Lots of sex. Sex with women, Sex with men, Sex with animals, Sex with your mum, sex with a tree, sex with a surfboard. If it had a hole or could be straddled, he was on it or in it.” *

Bertrand Russell was a Nobel-prizewinningly priapic proponent of Free Love, and he had enough theories on the subject to choke a horse. These theories mainly involved a lot of “freedom” to engage in heaps of free-lovemaking, for he was an eye-crossingly randy devil who married four times and had an unbelievable number of lovers. Though it must be said that Russell did not fare quite so well in the courts of Venus in practical terms as he did theoretically. His first marriage to Alys Pearsall Smith started to unravel when he went out on his bicycle one day in 1901 and decided he didn’t love her anymore. They didn’t divorce until twenty years later, by which time the old goat had boffed a zillion other women, including but not limited to Lady Ottoline Morrell, Helen Dudley, and Lady Constance Malleson. Several of Russell’s lovers went crazy, unsurprisingly. Reflecting on the mess when he was nearly eighty, he wrote, “[W]hat a failure I have made of my life, as a husband & as a father. I have tried to think the fault was other people’s but the repetition seems to show that it can’t be.” Then he got married again.

In what can’t have amounted to much spare time, Russell also co-authored Principia Mathematica, went to jail for conscientious objection, founded analytic philosophy, met and was appalled by V.I. Lenin, nearly died of pneumonia in China, and told his protégé, Wittgenstein, to put down that poker at once.

The reality but rarely fits the theory of a person’s love life; the reality is a very, very difficult business to control, even if you have a mind as fine and agile as Russell’s. The body has a way of betraying us. We’ve very often observed that the men’s bodies, especially, are forever getting the better of them; this is true even in our own enlightened age, as illustrated by the Facebook exchange just yesterday between my 22-y.o. nephew Max and our cousin Lou:

Max: Women who listen to hip-hop are sexy.

Lou: At your age, women who breathe are sexy.

Max: You make a valid point!

Men! They simply cannot control themselves; we know this. It’s the overarching, undergirding lizard-brain reality of men, especially the younger ones. If they had their druthers, every female that would stand still for long enough would have her skirt up over her head, there is no question. The gay ones are just the same, except with trousers. Men really are not generally built for the deep, “meaningful” variety of love, let alone for monogamy, at least not until a terrific quantity of oats has been sown. I don’t say that men don’t want a lasting emotional connection; they do; they’re just too overwhelmed by their physical imperatives to think about anything else. This is why it has traditionally been up to the women to Say No.

Saying No to a new partner is not too difficult for women; Science calls this relative difference between us the Coolidge Effect, and it is a real, measurable difference. Saying No is also easy for female hamsters, and also rats, and pretty much every other species that has been tested, including hermaphroditic pond snails.

The underlying reality, then, is that the gentlemen always want to and we do not always want to; and how to alter that, by means of mere theories?! Why try to alter it, even? What is wrong with all those fun things like at least holding hands first and poetry and getting to know someone’s sense of humor, and maybe even waiting for ages and being well and truly pursued? I ask you. There is something in it for all parties to wait for the dial of anticipation to turn up to eleven, instead of just giving in when it has only reached an anemic two.

There are a number of ways in which a man might induce a woman to say Yes. The pleasurable, sporting methodology here involves raillery, wit, chocolates, flowers and the composition of fruity poetry and/or songs. A softly-strummed guitar may appear on the scene. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine. Breathless phone calls that last half the night, etc.

The unpleasant, unsporting method of getting a woman to say Yes is to appeal to her political duty. A more drably uninspiring rationale for love can only be found among those Christian sects that go in for the “temple garments.” In any case, it’s all the same thing! Even the Mormons make a duty of sex for women; in their case it’s wifely procreation we’re supposed to feel all dutiful about, rather than gender politics. Make no mistake, however, there are all kinds of institutionalized coercion. If you want to complain about male hegemony, here you go! They’ll use literally any pretext available to get you to take your clothes (except the garments, which by the way won’t stop ‘em) off.

The requirements of this newfangled “performative” sexuality are totally intruding on a valuable cultural preserve: the art of courtship. We are all of us winding up with less romance; is there anything of value that we are getting in exchange?

The new swiz works as follows. It is exactly like the “free love” of Russell, exactly like the bra-burning 1960s and exactly like the “liberated” 1970s. The current thinking likewise requires women to divest themselves of all their antiquated notions, and pants, and thereby “free” themselves to couple according to “their own wishes.” By this reckoning, it is the duty of every enlightened female to put across in order to show how enlightened she is. She won’t submit or succumb, perhaps she will even aggressively pursue. And because banging a lot of guys is a demonstration of enlightenment, the traditional blandishments are no longer required in order to get girls into bed. Also de rigueur for girls is a lot of noise about the condition of their own libido, which evidently makes them not unladylike or blabby, but “equal.” Any woman with the slightest bit of restraint is going to be yelled at for being a dowdy, outmoded essentialist. An enemy of the state, practically. And meanwhile, no romance for anybody.

Cui bono is the question we must ask. And the answer is almost always: the men. They bono. Believe me, I am happy to see the gentlemen getting all the love they can, provided they are kind, candid and pleasant in their ways. But we women are being hoodwinked, and surely it is only fair to say so. It seems we’re being had (again!) and in more ways than one.

* They are kidding, but still.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and

Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

Here is the bizarre story of a time that a second-guessing, hyper-cautious newspaper blog ate itself and then pooped itself out.

In a just-released study from the University of Bonn, a nasal spray containing the neurotransmitter oxytocin made 24 “healthy males” confronted with photos of children crying and hugging cats reach “significantly higher emotional empathy levels” than their 24 placebo-snorting brethren. The study recommends the spray for use in treating schizophrenia and other diseases, but you just know that some sort of self-proclaimed dating expert is going to start marketing the stuff for her own capitalistic devices. Or at the very least a screenplay.