Stardate 20020526.1756

(Captain's log): The string bikini has to be the greatest invention in the history of Western Civilization.

Are the young women more beautiful now than they were when I was 20, or is it that my standards have changed? I think it's some of both.

When I was 20, my girl-watching habits were a lot different than now. I didn't watch any woman older than about 24. (They're too old, you know...) Also, I rarely watched anyone who wasn't white. (A lot's changed since the early 1970's, folks.) So the available pool of watchees for me was much smaller.

But it's also the case that my way of enjoying the sight of women has changed. When I was 20 I was, perhaps we could say, a discriminating shopper. Start with a base score for any woman of 9.5 and start subtracting points for each failure or flaw or fault, plus occasionally adding for some particularly good feature. Ooh, she's got acne. Subtract .2 for that. That one has yellow teeth; mark off .1. So it's hardly surprising that in my eyes the world was full of near-misses and also-rans.

Sometime in my mid-20's I changed that. Instead of looking for all the things which were wrong with a given woman I was watching, I'd look for what was right. One has a nice ass; another has nice legs, another has extremely nice complexion. Today I saw a woman who was eminently watchable even though fairly overweight, because she was a natural light blonde, as proved by her blonde eyebrows. (Which means that all her body hair is blonde, and we won't pursue that thought any further.) There is something worth watching on almost any woman (no matter what color she is); true ogres are few and far between. Start at 9.8 and for each woman add a tenth for each good characteristic, and whaddyeknow? Suddenly you're surrounded by "tens". And I was a lot happier, and enjoyed my girlwatching far more. I've never regretted it.

But the women have changed, too. When I was 20, it was the height of the first wave of feminist rebellion against the cruel male chauvinist pig hegemony conspiracy thingie whatever-it-was. Admittedly, there was a lot of that around at the time, epitomized by the Playboy club, which hired stables of bimbos who worked in preposterously silly but very revealing costumes in exclusive and lush surroundings where men who were wealthy could go and be pampered by said bimbos. (I actually saw the outside of the New Orleans Playboy Club once; it was much smaller than I had thought it would be.)

There were a lot of trophy-secretaries, where big execs "kept" (in all senses of the word) some gorgeous babe on staff. Opportunities for women professionally were definitely restricted. OK, there was definitely a problem, though it wasn't my problem. I didn't create it, but I caught the fallout from its solution.

The feminists of my generation pushed the notion that the whole idea of feminine beauty was a male plot, a way of restricting women. "Beautiful" to a woman (some women, anyway) came to be treated the same as "nigger" to blacks. Me and my fellows of that generation learned to become sensitive-new-age-guys out of self defense. One never complimented a woman on how she looked; one would look for ways of affirming her intellectual prowess and her general personhood. Sigh.

I'm a big fan of smart women. I've never gotten heavily involved with any woman who wasn't smart and well educated. But physical attraction is nice, too. Alas, it became a crime. One wasn't supposed to notice it.

So for a lot of women in my generation, it was seen as a blow for the revolution to mask any beauty they might have. Hair would be worn simply, with no styling. Clothing would be grundgy and cheap, to deny business to the international fashion conspiracy. Clothing hung loose, to disguise any curves which might be present beneath them. Sweatshirts and loose denim pants, folks, and absolutely no makeup. Some of us came to suspect that it was all a plot by ugly women to convince their more beautiful sisters to make themselves ugly too.

There was a real problem which needed to be solved, and I'm quite happy that we're well on our way to doing so. The glass ceiling is being shattered, and this nation is no longer wasting half its brainpower by condemning those having both brains and breasts to involuntary bimbo-hood.

But to get that, feminists adopted something of a reflexive attitude: whatever men like must be wrong. Men like beauty, hence being beautiful is treason to the revolution against the cruel male chauvinist pig hegemony etc.

Young women now have a different attitude entirely: men like beauty, so making ourselves beautiful gives us power over men.

Far from being seen as a form of treason, beauty is now seen as a fulfilment of the ambition of feminism. The true philosophical goal of the movement was to free women from having to live up to the expectations of men, and instead to let them to be whatever they want.

The internal contradiction feminism began to face in the 1980's was discovery that some women wanted to be homemakers and to raise children. Some of them wanted to be beautiful. Some of them even wanted to be bimbos! The founders of the movement were aghast. The movement had said, "This, you cannot do." These women answered, "Why the hell not? Why are you trying to replace the male chauvinist stereotype of what women should be with an equally restrictive feminist stereotype? Why shouldn't I be permitted to become whatever I feel like?"

In a sense, t