DejaNews Article
Rating:
;
Genre=Reference;
Pages=1;
Characters=2,991;
I was interested in how much web sites depend on the text. So I looked at some foreign-language web sites where I couldn't read the text at all -- chinese and japanese ones, mainly. I could usually tell which buttons would get me to Email, those tended to be in distinctive spots. A lot of the time I could guess which ones were links to other sites. That was about it. I could hardly tell what was going on at all. Most of the graphics were useless to me, I didn't find conventions that helped me, it was mostly context-free.
But one japanese website appeared to have a lot of pictures of women wearing leg casts. It was about 80% on the left leg. It was mostly cute young japanese girls but some older european women too. A lot of them looked like they were being seductive on camera. But they were all wearing plaster casts. They mostly wore very short skirts that showed the tops of their casts. It seemed peculiar. So I went to the link section and tried some of their links. One appeared to be places in japan you could buy materials to make plaster casts. Another was a canadian website featuring, of course, more women in casts.
The canadian site had a full explanation. They thought women in casts were sexy. They walk different. Or they glide along on crutches. These guys aren't particularly interested in women with broken bones, they think of plaster casts as fashion accessories. They had sections on buying medical supplies in the US and Canada, how to find "models", the esthetics of various forms of plaster cast that are now hard to find, etc. Plus of course lots of pictures of women wearing casts.
At first I was surprised. Then it made sense. Casts provide all the criteria for a good fetish -- they're easy to see. They're distinctive. And they make the woman who wears one somewhat more helpless and harmless. It make perfect sense in hindsight, I'd just never thought to predict it.
Now I wonder what new things will show up that way? Things that nobody wore 50 years ago, that didn't exist 50 years ago. All I can think of on short notice are beepers, which aren't very good.
I read something that claimed men have a critical time when they get imprinted on women. It was supposed to be at about age 5. They had the supporting evidence that there was a big blip in the number of men who had rubber fetishes in britain, precisely among the men who were 5 years old when the british government issued neoprene gas masks and capes to civilians around the start of WWII. If we had something new, we could test that idea some more. Ideally something transitory. All I can think of are hula hoops. There was about a year that women hula-hooped, getting ready to do the Twist or something. There are probably a bunch of men of one particular age who'd really like to see women swinging hula hoops, but there aren't any more hula hoops.
I dunno. It bugs me that I haven't come up with anything better. Any ideas?