Short Posts 9/28/16: The Shimmy Song, Fashion Magazines And What Online Writing Is

1.  This is the Hillary shimmy song.  

Mind you, that shimmying could always be an early sign of leprosy or hoof-and-mouth disease or some other menacing malady.  At least if we believe right-wing long-distance diagnosticians.

2.  An interesting video showing what's left when two women's magazines are denuded of their ad pages.  And of course fashion and beauty advice and even health advice is sold to women on the wider platform of You Are Not Good/Pretty/Healthy Enough, because that is the platform which works.  The industry needs to keep women insecure* but not so insecure that we just go "what-the-f**k, I'm not perfectible, so I'd rather go and enjoy life as I am."

I'm more curious about the poses the models must take in the ads, because those poses are oddly passive, oddly similar to a broken doll tossed across the floor by an enraged (but rich) child, while at the same time the eyes of the models are often half-shut, empty of life, and the lips of the models are slightly open, swollen, as if after some fairly strenuous sex.  Or the few cases where the model appears to be leaping or running or turning pirouettes; all that while walking on stilts.

What are the subtexts in all that?

3.  I have stumbled into some financial insecurity, so I have Googled various types of extra jobs, including online writing (which I'm doing here, essentially for nothing, because I'm a very stupid goddess).  The sites specializing in free lance writing jobs are wonderful places!

Minimum wages are an unheard concept, people should want to write a 6000-word article for the grand total of thirty dollars, and expect someone else's name to be attached to the piece once it is finished, after a month's work.  One job would have required ten blog posts a day, at five dollars per post, with pictures and all!**

Then there's the site where the home page, intended to lure both clients and writers to the site, has truly awful clunky and grammatically incorrect writing.

Now that is a truly bizarre labor market, though it's true that many, many people today write for nothing, and are glad to get into print.  So why would the clients pay for the milk when the cow itself jumps into the oven and turns it on?

That can make a goddess gloomy.  But then I cheered up immediately, because I Googled economic writing jobs, thinking that the extra expertise would up the pay a little.

And it does.  But, my friends, I found that the quickest way to make money in that sub-market is to solve college students' economics homework problems for them or to write their term papers.  Somewhat unethical, wouldn't you say?

Still.  I think I will become a ghost-writer, hovering ominously in the background of the articles while going "BOO!"

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*  Insecurity is also used in marketing products for men, but the role of insecurity in the marketing for women is much more central.

**  The clients or customers appear to have absolutely no idea how long writing takes or how much research is required for it to be any good.  To rely on a market where many on the supply side are willing to work for zero pay doesn't correct this problem, because ultimately those who give it away for nothing will die of overwork and hunger.  And what you get when pay five dollars per post is a post worth less than five dollars.  That's just basic economics.