The "why" questions are sort of pointless. Cultural favorites always change over time, without any particular purpose or motive. But those favorites don't necessarily reflect what most women or men actually want. They do influence some youngsters.... positively among the conformist types and inversely among the non-conformists (who are really conformists to a deliberate opposite.) Which fashion is more powerful among today's youngsters, Barbie or Goth? Both are forms of conformism, but the latter was designed specifically to be anti-Barbie. Here's a long quote from Virginia Postrel in the latest Reason mag, which has several thoughtful articles on this same subject: "A week after the Taliban lost control of Kabul, [a photographer] took a picture of an Afghan widow begging. Anyonymous behind her burqa, she flashes a once-forbidden sign of personality: chipped red polish on her carefully maintained nails. She applied the polish the day after the liberation of Kabul. ..... The Taliban outlawed wearing polish in the late 1990's, punishing some offenders by amputating a fingertip. ..... The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out. "Making special" is a deep human drive -- all the more so when the object is one's own body. By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: "I like that" becomes "I'm like that". The right to wear nail polish, seemingly the most trivial of matters, is in fact a vital freedom, part of the very freedom to create oneself." (My comment: This association of rights with beauty will, of course, irritate Western feminists who basically agree with the Taliban's idea that adornment is evil.)

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