No Empty Sky

anyway, now that we've established that the ocean has living things in it and the environment is important to that, this is a post about shane hiring a personal stylist. i think it's reasonable to assume we're meant to understand shane's desire for a partner who can dom and his pattern of hiring other people to make decisions about his house and his clothes for him as coming from related psychological places. if someone else picked out his suit for him, he's not responsible for the decision to wear it, and so he can wear it without being paralyzed by the shame associated with actively choosing and wanting it. wanting to look desirable, caring about clothes, having taste– all of these are things that in shane's world are unacceptably unmasculine. so he hires the personal stylist – a socially permissible thing for a straight male celebrity to do – and then says oh i just didn't want to look worse than everybody else, i never really cared about clothes. and ilya sees through this immediately, pointing out shane's implicit desire to invite the gaze ("you have new clothes to show off..."). the personal stylist gives him permission to try things he might otherwise be too afraid or ashamed to try, but the core motivation is still his own desire.