Duck Face

I learned something last week from a bunch of young people and I can’t believe that I’ve never heard of it before.

I am talking about the duck face, an expression that is used by people, usually females, to appear sexy. I know that some women do this, but I have always called it the trout pout.

The idea that the woman concerned seductively pushes out here lips as if she is about to kiss you. The young man who pointed it out, showed me numerous examples, mainly on his dating phone app, Tinder, with most women standing there holding a phone, having taken a selfie in the mirror, from above while shaping their body such that they appear to be thinner.

He moaned about it because having looked at so many duck faces, he couldn’t actually tell how attractive the women really were.

What has happened to the world?

In the past, photographs of women used to show them with an attractive natural looking smile on their faces in a largely natural pose. Personally I would like to see a woman smiling or laughing in a natural pose than to see her pouting her lips with her hand on her hip and her legs crossed in a kind of surreal posture that looks like a human teapot.

If I were young, free and single I wouldn’t want to date a woman whose only photo made her look weird. Imagine meeting her in a bar based solely on a duck face photo; I probably wouldn’t recognise her unless she pouted and then I’d expect her first word to be “QUACK!”.

I blame the cult of celebrity.

Many actresses use the trout pout and the same pose when they are on the red carpet at some stupid award ceremony. In fact, it’s not just photographs. A lot of actresses pout at every opportunity when acting in a movie or a TV programme. Imagine a scene in a restaurant and the leading man is chatting to his leading lady. As she listens to his romantic words, she pouts like a trout as listens – after all, she has to look good, doesn’t she? I would love it if a waiter came up at that point and said “We have two specials today; duck bill and trout lips”.

Worse, it seems that celebrities are taking this a step further and actually "enhancing their lips”, making them plumper by injecting them with an expensive and horrific chemical to do this. One of the main reasons, I believe, is an attempt to make them look younger and more seductive, particularly as they get older.

I’m sad about this because I always believe that people of both sexes should grow old gracefully. The problem is for female actresses as they get older, they are overlooked for parts as film makers choose younger and more attractive women in their place.

This is ridiculous.

The only ugly people you see in films and television series are bad guys or evil people. There are a couple of American television shows that I watch regularly and everybody in them is totally attractive – even the older people.

We seem to be losing the realism. Why can’t characters be portrayed by real people?

Don’t get me wrong, there are some ugly actors, but the latest trend seems to be that the actors portraying ordinary people have to be beautiful people.

No wonder young women are resorting to pouting their lips to look like Donald Duck.

When I was a kid, I did briefly want to be an actor. I appeared in a couple of junior school plays, in particular, Sleeping Beauty where I played the “handsome prince” and had to kiss Clare Bloggs (name changed to protect the poor girl’s identity) during rehearsals and in front of her parents. I also played the Griffon in Alice in Wonderland where I had to dress up with wings and feathers.

I thought I was a good little actor – I was only nine or ten at the time – and had delusions of being the next Laurence Olivier. Sadly as I got older, I realised that I wasn’t a beautiful person and would probably have faced numerous rejections for looking like a strategically shaved orangutan.

The Plastic Mancunian auditions for the part of Jack Reacher

This is just another thing I will change when I become President of the World.

I will make it illegal to pose with a duck face, make cosmetic surgery illegal and also ensure that ugly actors and actresses get key parts in films.

I mean – look at Tom Cruise, a man universally considered to be a good looking actor. He is a very good actor and I love a lot of his films but there is one part that I genuinely laughed at when I heard he was playing it. I’ve read a couple of novels by Lee Child when on holiday. He is the man who created Jack Reacher, an ex-military policeman. They sound cheesy and they are – but they are good reads for travelling or a holiday as long as you can stand his writing style (which isn’t brilliant) and can suspend your disbelief. Lee Child describes Jack Reacher as a huge man, 6ft 5 inches with a 50 inch chest who looks like he can literally tear a man in half. Yet the actor chosen to play him is Tom Cruise who is not huge at all – at 5ft 7 inches he is almost a foot shorter. Tom Cruise is almost 5 inches shorter than I am!

Dwayne Johnson might not be as good an actor but at 6ft 5 and built like a brick shithouse, he would at least look like a Jack Reacher type fellow.

I’m sure there is a parallel universe out there where I am a successful Hollywood actor or maybe President of the Earth.

And in either of those places I can promise you this; I will not have a duck face!

How Times Have Changed

When I was a young man, in those dim and distant days when I found myself desperately seeking female companionship, womankind had me in their clutches. They had power over me and I was a slave to them.

I fancied any woman who would talk to me and the more beautiful the woman, the more enthralled I was.

Sadly, in those days, society dictated that it was the man that had to do the chasing. It was the man who had to ask the woman for a date or make his desires clear. And that was why women had power over me. They had the ability to twist me around their little finger.

And they were cruel, dear reader.

I remember one occasion when my so-called mates goaded me into asking a woman out.

“She fancies you, Dave. It's obvious,” they would say, goading me into action by appealing to the optimist in me. “Shall we come with you to give you moral support?”

Being a fool – and too blindly in lust to realise that the gorgeous target of my affections was fancied by just about every other male in the vicinity – I marched over to her with my “friends” behind me. She was with her mates too.

In order to protect her identity, let’s call her Alison.

“Hi Alison,” I said with a smile.

“Hi Dave,” she said smiling back. Yes – she smiled – that means she must like me.

“Can I ask you something?” I said summoning up all the courage I could muster.

“Sure,” she said.

“Can we – erm – get together? Will you go out with me?”

In my imagination, she stood up, threw her arms around me and said “I’ve been waiting for you to ask!”

In reality, she said “WHAT? With YOU???? You must be joking!”

She laughed.

Her friends laughed.

My “friends” laughed.

I ran away looking like a complete arse.

Don’t get me wrong; she genuinely liked me – but because I was funny. She wouldn’t have even entertained the idea of anything more than just friendship.

Bless her, she later found me and apologised and asked if we were still friends. Of course, still being enthralled by her, I agreed. But our relationship had changed.

This was the story of my love life around that time.

Thankfully, something changed and all of a sudden women decided that it was time to turn the tables. I guess they became fed up of waiting for guys to ask them out. I don’t know when it started – I just noticed that women were actually marching up to guys and asking them out on a date.

And then it happened to me. My ex-wife W basically took control and made her feelings perfectly clear. Many years later, my beloved Mrs PM did exactly the same.

In fact, over the years, I have been approached a few times, and had to let the poor woman down gently in the nicest possible way (realising how painful such rejections can be).

I for one am really glad that it happened and it marks a significant power shift in the way women behave.

I had an interesting chat with Mrs PM’s mum the other week. When we go to the pub with her and her other half, she refuses to go to the bar or pay for any meals we have in restaurants because, in her eyes, it’s the responsibility of the man. Mrs PM is a modern woman and we share most of the responsibilities.

“Why are YOU going to the bar,” Mrs PM’s mum says.

“Why not?” says Mrs PM.

It’s the same at home. Mrs PM’s mum does all the cleaning, washing, cooking etc. and accepts that role. She even packs both suitcases when they go on holiday, selecting all of his clothes and everything else he needs.

And she accepts this without question. In fact, she positively revels in it.

There is no way I would let Mrs PM choose or pack my clothes for me. Besides, she wouldn’t do it.

Not all women have embraced the power shift. Mrs PM has friends who still want the man to chase them. She calls them “princesses” presumably after fairy tale princesses who are swept of their feet by handsome princes.

When I cast my mind back to the time when I desperately wanted to be that prince, I recall being let down almost every time, sometimes cruelly.

I used to think that I wasn’t “prince” material and I considered myself, with the aid of Captain Paranoia, to be a hideous villain who would never get the girl.

Of course, these days, the whole concept of dating has changed. People do not have to humiliate themselves by marching confidently up to a member of the opposite sex and asking them out. The internet and social media has revolutionised the dating game.

You can join a dating site and now even get a smartphone application to help you. Take Tinder, for example. This app allows you to find other people within a certain distance of your location and matching certain criteria and, if you like them, you simply tap a heart icon if you like them and a cross icon if you don’t. Obviously two people like each other then they can arrange to meet.

I wish there had been something like that around when I was about eighteen years old. It would have protected me from being humiliated and having my poor heart shredded by a female friend who had no desire to take our friendship further.

Unbelievably, there is also an app called Binder that allows you to dump people too if you are too scared or too much of a coward to do it yourself.

This is the kind of message you get:

If there had been an app like Tinder around when I was young and single, I wouldn’t have been told to “Piss off” when I resorted to desperate chat up lines.  

In fact, I would have been equally concerned by a crass app like Binder because in those early days I can only imagine my poor heart being destroyed by a text message.

At least I wouldn't have received it in front of a group of people, I guess.

Anyway, I for one am glad that times have changed and that there is more equality when it comes to relationships.

After all, we are in the 21st century now, and not in the 1950's.