tone it down

For the moment, let's turn our focus on the notion of a person being "attention-seeking."  This is the concept we draw on when we sigh "he just wants attention, ignore him", or sneer "shut up, you attention whore."  We might describe Lady Gaga this way, or Louis Spence, or a small child--anyone shrill or grating.  It's a catch-all term of abuse for anyone whose behaviour is outré in a way that people consider otherwise unjustifiable.  This is a term of discipline, meant to evoke shame.

This first started niggling at me when I was seventeen.  My high school's yearbook committee had planned a page devoted to photos of couples kissing (which was dumb), and administrators had excised a photo of a pair of my lesbian classmates from the final product while preserving the rest of the page (which was dumber).

The message was clear: the school didn't see our relationships as valuable or meaningful in the same way as our heterosexual classmates, but rather as obscene. The administrators advanced two arguments in their defense: first, that the young ladies involved would benefit from not having a permanent record of a relationship they might later characterize as a youthful indiscretion (a courtesy not advanced to a straight couple who had vowed on the page that they would be "still together ten years from now" but who had broken up between the taking of the photo and the yearbook printing); and second, that any further debate over the fairness of this decision would distract other students from their important studies.

Naturally, we organized a kiss-in.  That is to say, we called up the local newspaper and tv news and told them that all the high school students would be kissing each other in a variety of gender permutations out on the school lawn one afternoon.  The form of this protest was considered.  It held up as ludicrous the idea that being photographed kissing your girlfriend might be shameful, and demonstrated that failing to value us queers as students was going to be more distracting than just treating us like everybody else.  It referenced the golden era of American protest, and it had a hook to draw in the media (hot teen sex lawn).  We did get a good amount of coverage, and although we had to add our own lesbians to the yearbook that spring, they made damn sure to acknowledge the existence of queer students in the following years.  It was also, incidentally, the first time I ever kissed someone.  A successful protest all around, I would say.

So it was with some dismay that I read a letter in the paper (an early form of online commenting!) the next day, admonishing the editors for deigning to attend the protest, grousing about all the "giggling bisexuals" on the local news, and generally complaining that it was clear that all the protestors wanted was attention.  Well, yeah.

The more I considered it, the more of a mystery it became to me.  Attention seems like such a Maslovian need--would we sigh "ugh, what a food whore" when we see a starving man?  "She's only doing that because she's looking for a sense of security and belonging in a group."  Attention is how we understand ourselves to have a reciprocal social connection with others.  Not being attended to frequently by people in your life fucks with your sense of self.  Ask a homeless man, charged with the task of soliciting permission to survive from every passerby, how dehumanizing a lack of attention can be. 

Then I started looking at whom the epithet was directed--first, children and reality show subjects.  Second, trolls and bullies.  And thirdly, women in the public eye, queers of all stripes, and people of color who complained of institutionalized racism.  People it's not applied to include parents, reality-show creators, the owners of sports franchises, and straight men in general (hard to be attention-seeking when your gaze is constantly subjectified). 

So.  The framework that's being encoded in the pejorative use of "attention-seeking" is that some people have an excessive desire for our finite attention, like small children, and that ignoring them will serve both to punish them for their bad behaviour and to help them grow up into strong, capable straight white men who dress conservatively.  This is untenably paternalistic, and I reject it.

There is, however, one instance in which I support the diabolization of attention-seeking, and, spoiler warning, it's when corporations do it.  I am profoundly annoyed whenever I see a corporate blog post end with an exhortation to "join the conversation!" or "tell us what you think!"  It's a lazy and useless attempt at online community-building, one which attempts to shunt all the work of fostering a discussion space onto commenters.  Moreover, it's one part of a creeping systemization of creatives working for free (not, as I wrote initially, "pro bono") to make profits for corporate stockholders--regard the ads you see regularly nowadays which ask you to produce content for more advertising campaigns, presenting this as a fabulous creative opportunity rather than a pure scam.

It's really getting to the point where capital is in such a strong negotiating position that it can demand years of free service from a worker before paying him, that he may prove a faithful and uncomplaining employee.  We can fight this, but we need one thing.  Workers of the world: get attention.

let's pretend I have a tumblr

Lately I've been feeling a little like it was time for another of the periodic stylistic shakeups that we go through in our lives, so I started outlining the kind of themes and roles that I aspire to in my dress, based on Russell T. Davies' essay about pretending.  Davies, you may recall, is the creator of the initially warmly welcome (but later deeply mortifying) David Tennant series of Dr. Who.  [EDIT: Actually the man from that link is a different Russell Davies. My apologies for accusing him of responsibility for Love & Monsters.]

I thought I'd say a bit about the things I pretend from day to day.  A couple of sartorial constraints inform my choice of fantasy roles: I like to keep a lot covered (if only technically); I tend to wear browns, greens, and golds; I like flat-soled, lace-up boots and long coats; and I'm quite messy and disorganized.  And I want to be desirable--not necessarily desired, but maybe like an acquired taste.

Hippie
In truth, I am a bit of a hippie--I'm pacifistic, left-leaning, and my standards of personal hygeine are relaxed.  Only the passage of years and the development of the internet prevent me from really joining any kind of social movement.  "Hippie" as a style, though, covers a lot of ground.  Let's say it's round wire-frame glasses, flowing cotton prints, Indian influences, hair, and sandals.

Witch
My first association with a witch these days is Anthy from Revolutionary Girl Utena.  Anthy is Ishtar, re-interpreted as a devil in a newer patriarchal myth structure, but to my mind a witch isn't so much a force of nature (a la S6 Willow) as a woman who leverages a bit more personal power and fearsomeness than would generally be considered acceptable to get what she wants (a la Granny Weatherwax).  I find this image of the unregenerate scary spinster to be somewhat romantic.  So: Fluevog witch boots, black dirndl skirts abbreviated to the low calf, that whole 19th-century librarian vibe.

Amy Pond
The newest Dr. Who makes the next-newest Dr. Who look shameful and silly.  One of many reasons for that is the character of Amy Pond, who is some kind of goddamn sexual tyrannosaur.  Did you see the Comic Relief special?  The contents of Amy's panties nearly caused her men to become permanently lost in time and space.  That's not even mentioning the power of Pond's crack or her Pandorica Box.  On account of being so fucking foxy, Pond basically clomps about in a man's shirt or sweater, a short skirt, colored nail polish, and Converse.  Like the 80s with flat hair. 

Flapper
The meaning of this iconography, like any of the sexualised roles I've listed, is fraught.  There's the romance of the sexual revolutionaries: Louise Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead--but all these women were subjected to terrible abuse and exploitation because of their sex. The twenties was this period of incredible sexual objectification and subjectification of women, not unlike today.  Unlike today, the silhouette is boyish instead of hyperfeminine: dropped waist, longish skirts; tight hats with little to no hair visible; sculpted-heel mary-janes or t-straps.

Pre-Raphaelite
Another artistic/fashion movement which was about glorifying and exploiting sexy women in equal measure.  Long cotton-lawn gowns or tunics, tight sleeves.  Velvet if you absolutely must. 

Gunne Sax Girl
It's a sort of 1970s interpretation of the Laura Ingalls Wilder look, with lace and calico aplenty.  Prairie Underground (aside from having the perfect name) is currently producing some fine pieces in this idiom (albeit not in calico).  Occasionally Free People as well.  I can't quite afford either.

memento mori
A bunch of my fashion life has been spent orbiting goth--trying to dress as near as I can without falling in.  It's worth interrogating what it is about goth I find cool, and what it is I find embarrassing.  Goth is a look which is all about details, proportions, lines, with colour taken out of the equation entirely.  For that reason, it's a good place to start a journey into fashion.  And because of that, there's something adolescent and unsophisticated about it, as well as retro in the mortifying way that anything from your early high school years can be.  What I think of goth as being is all about D-rings, but what I want it to be is distressed Victoriana. 

Daria
Sometimes, you just need to look like you're Not Trying.  You can't do the big shop in all your finery.  That's when Daria is my fashion icon.  I hardly need to say, but the look is prescription glasses, longish skirts, sturdy low boots, and sensible outerwear. 

Kabuki
This would be David Mack's Kabuki, the complex pre-Alias tale of a cyberpunk agent's psychological journey.  I used to be a Japanophile, but now Japan and I are just good friends.  Similarly, I used to regard cyberpunk as a dystopian future, rather than the dystopian present and/or a dystopian retro 80s style.  Still, there's a goodly amount of this retro-future-present in my day-to-day style: think Black Milk. Shiny tights, sinuous cyber seams, Japanese influences.

Elf
My elf aesthetic is all about practical gear for the forest, made from the forest.  Legolas or Link.  Pixie hoodies, ragged-edge jersey skirts, pocket belts.

Snake

Snake?

SNAAAAAAKE!
Like Naked Snake and The Boss, I'm about having a camo index of 98% while still sporting military and Red Commie influences. 

Wonder Woman pin-up
This one has very little to do with the rest, but it's been relevant to my life since I moved to Scotland and am trying to live here as an American.  When I'm out and around, I want to be a cheerful, helpful, 1940s American in a smart uniform handing out Marshall Plan candy bars, not Ugly American Neoliberalist.  Coincidentally (perhaps) Wonder Woman is the MAC theme this spring.  There's an absolute wealth of 1940s retro style about, you're probably familiar enough with it.

I feel like I'm honing in on what I like and why, as a result of this exercise. There's a militaristic/anti-militaristic thread, a sort of natural or environmental theme, and the idea of death and decay.  Also anything with a nipped waist.

My beloved, let's get down to business

Can it really be so?  Have I actually decided I have something to add to a discussion of that hyperinflated term, empowerment?  Well, yes, I'm afraid that time has come.  Strap in. 

What put me over the edge this time was watching Music, Money, and Hip Hop Honeys--which I dearly hope will have the distinction of being the only show produced by the BBC to feature a presenter asking a sexual assault victim to explain how her clothes influence rapists and jurors.  What happens in the show is, one of the women (who refer to themselves as 'video girls') gets quite bubbly and animated when she puts on revealing clothing, so the presenter concludes that, far from feeling exploited and unhappy and used while performing sexually, some women find it empowering. 

Then the presenter discovers that most women performing in videos don't get paid, and that they have shockingly unrealistic expectations that they are about to be 'discovered' while gyrating, and that being so discovered would make them super-rich.  She concludes that, while some video girls may feel empowered, the power actually rests with the people making all the decisions that affect their lives, and that this power relationship is not substantially affected by their gyration. 

That seems to cover the ways I generally see "empowerment" used in discussion.  So what I want is to tease out some of the meanings and assumptions when different people talk about empowerment.  I made a chart. 

As Twisty classically pointed out, the term has been co-opted by advertisers, tied firmly into the ideals of consumption.  At some point, "empowerment" was decoupled from the actual substance of power in capitalist society, namely the ownership of money and property, which is handy because open discussions of wealth do not benefit capital.  So the main way empowerment's used today is to describe feelings. 

Now, I am sick to death of empowerment discourse which is about personal feelings and not substantive measures of social power (i.e. money, i.e. redistributing money more evenly among existing humans, i.e. people pissing and moaning about the status quo but if you try and change it suddenly you're a communist).  Personal feelings pay for jack shit. 

Moreover, it seems that people who want to talk about feelings of empowerment are happy to imply that individual empowerment is simply collective empowerment at a smaller scale.  Individual empowerment is plainly not the secret to collective empowerment: I may gain a great deal of personal power by marrying a billionaire, but that does fuck-all for the rights of any group I purport to belong to.

What also tends to happen, as is very much the case in Hip Hop Honeys and in Twisty's worldview, is that empowerment then becomes the disempowered individual's responsibility, neatly removing oppression from the equation.  Anyone who comes to the table pre-empowered--whether by an accident of birth, lucrative work, or bald calumny--will be treated as though power is their birthright, while anyone trying to get somebody's boot off his face will have to prove both faultless and meritorious to be granted the right to occupy the ground he's being crushed into.

Mostly, though, "empowerment" is used to talk about women and sex.  What kind of sex would empower women?  What kinds of acts would sexually empowered women get up to?  What positions would be most empowering for them?  Would it be more or less empowering if the women were very attractive and young?  Would adding additional young attractive women to a sex act make it more empowering?  These questions and so many more like them have been discussed in tedious detail in the media for some reason. 

The position of third-wave feminists, if I may generalize, has tended to be that THEY are deeply afraid of a woman's pleasure, and as such every orgasm amounts to sticking it to The Man, even when you obtain it quite the other way around.  But this association of pleasure with power is problematic.

One of the themes of this blog is that pleasure is, at best, limited in its capacity to change power relationships: there's a lot of pleasure and peace in complying with society's plans for your ilk.  And unlike Homo Economicus, we often do things to get along, or to impress a lady, or to be sociable, or to have self-respect, which may not garner us or our identity-politics group greater social clout.  Making empowerment a stand-alone measure of whether an action is morally positive collapses a bunch of relevant factors into a black-and-white caricature of human lives, emotions, and social relationships, which I guess explains why it's so widely used.  

On Trifles

The problem with humans is that we have a really poor sense of scale.  We have great imaginations and an excellent ability to organize and work socially, so we made things that were too big to see the ends of, things that would last beyond our lifetimes.  We also made things too small to be manipulated by our hands, and too many to imagine the act of counting, and then we allowed a bunch of those things to fly up into the atmosphere and start warming the climate by two to six degrees.  Here too is the problem of scale: two to six degrees sounds quite trivial as a change in external temperature (though by all means try it inside your body and see how that strikes you) and any idea of the effects of that change on the almost infinitely complex global weather system is simply too big to hold in a head.

Now, dealing with shit we can't really comprehend is not like some kind of a product of the modern age; it's always been the case.  The new thing is that now, the stuff we don't understand, we made ourselves.  What we've mainly done about the problem of misunderstanding is create complex heuristics, cognitive fallacies, and general coping mechanisms for getting us by day to day in the world we complicated. 

Often, this just boils down to shifting the blame.  A big systemic snarl that we would hesitate even to begin to approach working out because of how embedded in our lives are in the reproduction of that system (let's say, the inhumane practices of factory farming) can be safely substituted with a manageable but ultimately trivial example in which we have little stake (say, the production of foie gras). 

I'm talking here about cooking fires.  People, typically rural people, in India and the rest of Asia and Africa, burn animal dung, wood, or coal to cook their food, and this creates a certain amount of smoke which goes in the air and contributes to various things including climate change and poor respiratory health.  The extent to which cooking fire smoke contributes to poor respiratory health is non-trivial; prolonged smoke inhalation demonstrably causes excess deaths, and as we're talking about 3 billion people whose households use solid-fuel cooking fires, this is a lot of deaths.  The extent to which cooking fire smoke contributes to climate change is, of course, disputed, but to appeal to the scientific consensus, it's probably around twenty percent of the global emission of black carbon, half as much as either diesel engines or forest fires. My best guess from looking at the data is that cooking smoke might account for up to five percent of total anthropogenic global warming, but as many of the aerosols produced by cooking fires are atmospheric coolants as well, it's hard to say.  

So, obviously, what we see is a global push to build [to sell] a better stove under the banner of fighting climate change, with health concerns an afterthought.  Besides the misapprehension of the scale of the problem--both the health problem and the contribution to climate change--there are other proximate causes for why we live in a world where trivial things are taken seriously and serious things are trivialized.  To fat warm Western audiences, climate change is still scary in a sexy way, like a serial killer, rather than scary in a deadening, heartbreaking way, like cancer.  And of course descriptions of new tech are more exciting than exhortations to be more austere.*  And then there's feminism. 

When I said that it was "people" who burn solid fuel on cooking stoves, I ought to have said that enough of those people are women as to cause asperity in your interlocutor if you were to mention in conversation that some of the members of this group were also men.  In fact, let me mention at this point that I figure I am broadly in favor of doing away with that kind of gender-neutral language in discussions of real-world populations that skew heavily to one side or the other, on the grounds that it encourages assumptions of gender neutrality where none exist--let's make the cutoff, say, 85%.  So we would have said "the people in Congress" before the 2010 elections, but "the men of Congress" after, for example.

Returning to the subject of cooking fires--the whole thing just puts me in mind of Ruth Schwartz Cowan's tremendous writing on how developments in domestic technology changed expectations for women's lives, leading to the second shift and all that.  Western women have been through the change from solid-fuel-burning stoves to electric or gas ranges; it was accompanied by the construction of infrastructure to support a power grid and natural gas lines into people's homes.  This stove stuff is pretty much an attempt to deliver the endpoint without that worryingly complicated "progress of society" project in the middle there.  While I have my own reservations about, you know, society, I find that mildly distasteful, much like the idea that I'd have to hear about how it relates to climate change in order to give a shit about a large-scale public health project.  I really want to be appealed to for my fellow-feeling for other humans (woman and child humans! the easiest humans to feel sympathy towards!) rather than a climate change rationale which is at once more self-interested and more bullshit.


*Usually.  Austerity and self-mortification also have their proponents, such as fitness fanatics, or vegans.  Is that unfair to vegans?  I was just reminded of how much I hated cooking out of Isa Chandra Moskowitz's recipe books, is why I ask.  Obviously I get most of my fake meat and a fair amount of my chili recipes from vegans, so I don't really buy the party line where vegan cuisine is bland and unappealing, but for fuck's sake, you'd never learn that cooking out of Vegan With A Vengeance.  And Bragg's Liquid Aminos is a terrible glutamator, it tastes like fucking tamari. 

goddess sizes available at no extra cost

I'm a bit paranoid, now--the catalog for dippy neopagan fucktarts, The Pyramid Collection, has a paisley-print article of clothing on every page.  Is this pattern now associated with moon-addled cat-fanciers, rather than LSD-addled George Harrison-fanciers?  I object strenuously. 

It is not necessary that everyone like everyone else

Occasionally I'm gripped with anxiety--would Nabokov have liked me?  Would he approve of how I spend my time? 

Then I think on the man a bit and relax.  No, he would not have liked me.  My thighs are huge. 

I got arms that long to hold you

Where I'm going I'm pretty sure I'll still need eyes to see, but--sadly? I don't know--I doubt I'll need a lot of the other body parts I collected over the years. A number of the more portable ones are already packed away, but those pictured here must remain in my room or, in the case of the torso, be stealthily abandoned in a distant public area after dark.

I decorated these when I was younger and worse and had fewer
Sharpies, so, you know, sorry you had to look at them.

Glass head appears courtesy of Pier 1.

Barbie leg at left for scale.

A keychain and...not sure why that has a safety pin. Punk rock!

Some human hair.

My closet.

Okay, so why do I have these? I'm more into skulls these days, but I think it had to do with wanting to seem dangerous, yet clever and sexy, like a serial killer. I never felt like other people regarded middle-class pacifists as sufficiently dangerous for my taste. But I also surmise that my motivations had something to do with the suggestion in Killing Us Softly that women are often depicted as disembodied parts rather than full people.

I saw Killing Us Softly 3: Son of Softly once in a college sociology class, and once in a college feminism class, and once before that in a context I don't remember.  It begins with Jean Kilbourne relating how she, a simple young woman working in the advertising department of a medical journal, happened to invent the idea of "taking ads seriously" in the 1970s when she started pinning sexist ads up on a big board in her home and then asking her friends to assist her in rendering a critical reading.  I can't really fault her for promoting a DIY approach to forming a personal philosophy, but I can't help but be irritated by anyone advancing the intuitive, anecdotal I-just-know approach to scholarship that is her stock and trade.  Anyway, she goes on to claim that violence against women is "widespread and increasing", which would have been quite a bold thing to say in 1999 since it would have so drastically contradicted so many reports and studies discussing the dropping crime rates at the time.  I imagine it's just a consequence of not updating your slideshow that often. 

Kilbourne argues, over clips of leggy women voguing as cameras follow them at a low angle, that "over and over again, just one part of the body is used to sell products, which is of course the most dehumanizing thing you can do to someone. Not only is she a thing, but just one part of that thing is focused on." Leaving aside a whole bunch of begging the question there, to what extent is this true, and to what extent does it matter? I guess after giving the whole thing around ten years' thought, I'll go with a) to some degree and b) somewhat. Close-up framing is basically an inevitability in image creation since, oh, ever, but at the very least since Birth of a Nation. And the way advertising works--the constant, increasingly sophisticated attempts to create, shape, and respond to consumer demands while always showing them something memorable--any part of the body that's fair game to show is going to be continually refigured and repurposed to make it new. That would probably be well and good if making a display of the perfected aspects of women's bodies weren't of such special interest to this society at the same historical moment when we seem to have reached the maximum tolerable level of equality and autonomy for the distaff and have started trying to shout back the tide.

But to what extent does this sort of compartmentalization and objectification affect women's self-conception, thereby insidiously undermining efforts at equality? When asking a question like this--essentially "is this a cultural construction or are women just like that?"--it's useful to be able to look to men. Sure enough, men are reported to experience great distress when the value of their bodies is abstracted to the dimensions of a single appendage. That level of distress, however, doesn't seem to have greatly affected their overall performance as a gender. It really seems to have more to do with, you know, choice and opportunity and all that, than whether they're humiliated in advertisements.  Because boy, are they ever.

The control of images and words is overly weighted as a tool for equality, I think, because words and pictures are fun to blether about. Controlling them seems quite easy compared to enacting policies to lessen the gulf between rich and poor, which would probably do the most good for everyone involved. But it isn't easy. Words and pictures are always going to break out of restrictions, because that's just the way people do. And I daresay, if political energy is indeed a finite resource (who knows, right? But I bet I wouldn't be so interested in the study of images if it weren't for Kilbourne) that it could be better spent studying to organize than studying to adbust. I understand, however, that my opinion may lose some of its authority when you see that I bought human hair.

Lain will be accompanying me to grad school if I can just
figure out a way to remove her head.

On Being Feminine

Axiom: "One must suffer for beauty."
Corollary: "Whatever is most painful is most beautiful."

Sometimes I do really stupid shit.  In this case, I bought an epilator.

An epilator is one of those devices that people from the future will look back on yellowed period ads for and go "I can't believe they really invented a device made of dozens of rotating tweezers working at great speed to pluck the hairs from people's bodies, and the credulous fools actually bought it!"

I knew--I knew--that I had a historically low tolerance for having my hair torn out by the root.  But reading enough recommendations (while ignoring the ones that said "I wax a lot but this hurt like buggery") and imagining leg hair with softly-tapered, pigmentless tips instead of a harshly-cut end swayed me.

 Hair follicles are amazing little things, tiny organs fed by individual capillaries.  The root of each is filled with dormant stem cells which the body uses to repair itself after an injury.  For this reason they are notoriously hard to destroy, and attempting their destruction is inadvisable even if you would like to be sort of like an egg or a statue.    
 
My main concern was that I would bleed too much.  Generally, I am like the proverbial stone, but I have drawn blood with a home waxing kit before.  My painkiller of choice, ibuprofen, is a noted blood-thinner, so I went to the store that morning and picked up some acetaminophen.  Here's something you may not know about acetaminophen: historically, I have never experienced a reduction in pain after taking acetaminophen. This time was apparently no different.

After a while I got into a rhythm: epilate for ten to fifteen seconds on each leg, wait ten minutes for the pain to subside, and return like a dog to its vomit.  It did get better after a while, both because I had less hair to pull out and because I started getting more able to leave my body during the plucking.  Oh, and I guess I had a beer as well.  

The next night I went back and did it again.  This time, running it over areas whose hairs had been plucked or broken off already, it was bearable.  The sensation of having one or two hairs pulled at once was even sort of meditative.  Running it over areas with more than two or three hairs continued to be excruciating.  But I've kept at it, just tearing out a few hairs each night, like a religious fanatic in a terrible novel about some secret Jesus societies. 

Neither tremendous, crippling pain nor the foreknowledge that I'm potentially endangering my future healing ability are able to prevent me doing something that will make me look, like, 4% better to the only person who ever sees my legs,* my partner, who, as you may recall, already loves me anyway and requires no convincing of my ardour through self-mortification.  I have some kind of brain illness. 

* I guess in retrospect the internet also sees my legs.  That's disturbing to me.  I should really give this more thought.

Taste the Rainbow

Look, if you can't finish a bottle of Urban Decay Primer Potion in under a year, I think a collection like this is sort of overkill.

Almost Rosey

I'm honestly a bit self-conscious about this next thing, but I regard this blog as somewhere between confessional and exorcism, and so it must come out.  My embarrassment stems from how this hits a bunch of anti-feminist stereotypes of women: it was a frivolous expense, on a foolish superstition, for looking pretty.

Okay, so, here goes: I've had my colors done.  It was a birthday present, anyway!  I just agreed to sit through it!

If you're not familiar with this, it's when you pay someone to look at you and tell you what colors would look good on you, often with regard to your "undertones" or "season" (I'm an Academic Autumn).  The practice is rife with stories of people going to several different practitioners and getting entirely different sets of colors, so you'll excuse me if I don't consider it binding.

I feel that I understand colors pretty well, having often drawn circles on white paper with colored pencils and having observed the apparent change in the centres.  I'm aware of your analogous and complementary schemes, so I see pretty much what is happening here.  The first four swatches are meant to be I guess interpretations (for makeup-buying) of my skin color, blush tones, eye colors, and hair. 

This was back when I was not dyeing my hair, on purpose.  The color-picking woman exhorted me to come back if I ever changed my hair, since of course this would shift around the wheel in a way that only an expert could be reasonably expected to compensate for.
(An aside here: After talking for about five minutes over dinner last night about the physical structure of hair and how that affects the way it can be colored, one of my father's co-workers confronted me in a weirdly hostile, contemptuous way about whether "you even remember the actual color of your hair," as though dyeing would make you unfamiliar with that, and further as though not changing your hair would be more moral than having knowledge about the molecular composition and organization of keratinous structures.) 

 Here's my prescribed, non-embodied colors, separated  by hue.  As you can see I am meant to wear almost exclusively green.  I do wear green without remorse, but colors I generally wear happily not represented on this chart include blue, black, gray, brick, navy, gridelin, yellow, and taupe. Yes, even yellow, which if you mention to someone they'll go "Oh, yellow is a hard color to wear."  No it isn't.  You just put it on your body like all the other colors.   It doesn't try to escape or explode or nothing.

A selection of colors from the chart.  Body colors are situated at the confluence of a circle and a line.

The color-woman said I have the eye-whites to wear proper white, but that I should look into getting my teeth whitened.  Instead I have used them for chewing food, removing tags from clothing, and looking that little bit crazy.

Top this

But enough about my body!  Let's talk about my clothes.  The agony and the ecstasy of my sartorial existence has, for a long time, been this skirt.

 Isn't it wonderful?  I love it.  But what to wear it with, bearing in mind that I hate provoking a look of alarm or dismay in the faces of passers-by?  I have made many imperfect attempts at solving this conundrum.  The colors here, as it transpires, are hard to match, especially the brown.  And it mustn't be too elaborate or busy, else I risk looking "costumed", according to various style books.  I don't think I can help looking a bit costumed.

My first real attempts at getting an outfit together were these two sweaters.  The first is just absolutely awful.  I should look into getting it felted and/or cutting it up into something usable maybe.  The second is okay, but largely transparent and if it's cold enough to wear a camisole and a sweater it is probably cold enough to want long sleeves. 

 A brown shirt I'll often wear because it's got a cream and orange fleur de lis and it says Renew Orleans.  Though for all the good that sentiment seems to be doing it might as well say "Grease the earth of New Orleans, that nothing may grow there, lo, unto the seventh generation, when man is ruled by a race of irascible giants."

 I don't know, maybe if I lived at fucking Burning Man.

 This I actually like well, but it is too small and the buttons are snaps, meaning that I will spill forth if I make the error of bending or moving.

Not a bad color match, but a little busy for my taste. 

At least this combination looks intentional, if a bit Autumn Homeless.

Not a close match but DOG.  Also you can see me under-pronating here. 

In the category of "things I also don't know what to wear with or when I would wear them, maybe if I combine them".

No, no.  None of this.

A choli and its matching skirt worn as a wrap top.  Again, the first is probably only suitable for burning a man. 

A recent charity shop purchase.

I can't figure out how to wear this next one, by which I mean I literally cannot determine how to assemble the garment into some wearable form. 

Also obviously it's a weird clay beige color found nowhere on the skirt.  Fuck it, I should just wear a plain green top with this, shouldn't I?  Green.