Smart, funny, and original piece that connects many things I’d never thought about but makes perfect sense. One thing to add: there is a race angle to this story too. During 2014-2021 you had female rappers being extremely sexual in a masculine way (bragging about sex, aggressively alpha), and this was widely celebrated as progressive and good. You also had a culture that seemed to feign or at least exaggerate the attractiveness of fat black women (Megan thee stallion, to some extent even Lizzo). Sweeney is the opposite of all these trends - sweet, soft, feminine, and conventionally beautiful.
I think this is more about women specifically than about wokeness in general.
Men don't suffer any issue from watching an 80s movie with shirtless Schwartzenegger, Stallone or Van Damme, or even a modern one with the guy who plays Thor. Even the very out of shape ones don't suffer in any way from that experience, just think of Marvel movie fans.
Women are different, and they have a greater tendency in my experience for feeling insecure or uncomfortable when watching hot women with terrific bodies in movies or videogames. It lowers their self esteem or something like that.
What happened with Gamergate was simply women trying to get into a male nerd hobby, and being bothered by that which does not bother men.
This phenomenon was constantly mentioned around Gamergate, and the feminists admitted it was real, but their explanation was that Schwarzenegger is a "male power fantasy" so men don't have a problem identifying with him, but the same did not apply to hot women in videogames or movies or comics, and would begin talking of objectified women and the "male gaze" or things like that, and would propose redesigns that made the characters a lot less sexy.
I don't think their case was ever very convincing. I guess Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love would be a female power fantasy, travel around the world, 5 star hotels, Michelin restaurants, do yoga and vague Buddhism that doesn't demand anything from you, fuck James Franco and Bardem and dump them with no hard feelings, but it's not very good material for a videogame.
Well written article. But it conflates a few things. First, it's less that blonde breasted women are back and more that the conventional movie star has returned. It's not just a feminine thing. Timothee Chalamet is the closest Hollywood has to a recognizable male lead with no superhero movie affiliations in nearly two decades.
Second, leftism is about equalization of disparities. When these disparities are tangible and shareable eg money, they clamour loudly for its redistribution. But when they are either intangible or irreducible eg intelligence or looks, leftists instead clamour not for the redistribution of the asset itself which is impossible but the benefits they confer. So although it's impossible to make less beautiful women more naturally beautiful, they insist they must receive equal or even greater amounts of media attention to even out the score.
Three, the aesthetics of conservatism is cool again. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are the 21st century Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, tradwives making family breakfast is popular content on TikTok, relationship content is ubiquitous on all short form algorithmic content platforms. America will never be a truly conservative nation( its "conservatives" are hardly conservative either) but there's a marked return to more traditional media and lifestyles. Considering the insanity of the last couple of years, it's enough respite.
You know who hates attractive women the most? Other women! Now that more obese and unattractive women have realized there's special privileges for being a victim, they have used this to wield power over others. It's their payback time for being overlooked by men.
The Left couldn't help manifesting the Puritanical sexual culture that runs to the bone in American life. I remember as a young Catholic teenager I was always baffled by the message that being sexually attracted to a woman degraded her, and when I left my hometown to go to a university on the coast I ran into the same attitude despite the culture of promiscuity. I've always much preferred the old-world intellectualist attitudes toward sex which treat it as a normal function and aspect of life and not some weird, clandestine form of violence.
I don't watch a lot of British TV, but one thing I have always appreciated about what I have seen is that the actors who portray normal people really look like normal people. They have noticeable flaws and imperfections. A, say, entire hospital full of doctors and nurses who are all improbably hot is so distracting in how unrealistic it is, and these shows are watched primarily by women (Grey's Anatomy, for example). It's like watching obvious 28-year-olds play high school sophomores. Or the Friends apartment. Extremely noticeable unrealistic things annoy people. Although I feel like we are coming back to appreciating at least a little more of it, collectively wanting to see those examples of what social and familial stability and normalcy looks like again.
I can appreciate that art elevates reality to its ideal form and that's never going to change, but I would like to see at least more butch lesbians with a fucked up perms in police dramas, and no hot chicks with no muscle mass who do nothing but chain smoke and drink but somehow easily take down 250lb men in heels with their styled hair down. It's just so laughably hard to watch.
"Most of them don’t go as far as the alphabet soup people would like and seek to eliminate the categories of male and female clothing completely. Most women, even leftists, don’t want to look like men, but if they take feminism seriously enough, they are uncomfortable with looking too different, or making their sexuality too noticeable lest it signal that they are seeking the male gaze or distract from other traits they consider more valuable"
Insiders in the games industry have leaked that it's not about cis women but trans women and maybe some hr women. Female characters in games didn't start getting ugly until the trans stuff really came to floor. It's not even about trans women as a marketing demographic but internal employees, to some degree hr and consultant groups.
I have an academic acquaintance. I made a mildly boob related sexist comment. He quickly pointed out he didn’t see women that way. A few years later he and I were in Mexico having coffee. A drop dead gorgeous curvy Mexican woman in a white dress, clingy, walked by. Of course I noticed her. I smiled. But he? His eyes and tongue nearly fell out of his face. He was leering like an 18 year old. It was weird. But…she was not of his social status. He is a tenured prof. She is Mexican. So he got to let loose from his twenty years of pretending. Kind of disgusting in a way.
" People often overgeneralize about their political opponents, and I’m comfortable acknowledging that not everyone on the left is or has been anti-boob."
There's enough diversity of left-wing opinion on this topic that it has it's own Wikipedia page, "Feminist Sex Wars." To what extent sexuality, especially female sexuality, is objectifying and bad vs empowering and good is a highly divisive topic in feminism.
My question is, how did the most anti-sex, anti-beauty feminists get enough power for the media to start listening to them? If I was a media executive and wanted my company to look feminist, I'd try to pick a school of feminist thought that aligned with what I wanted to do anyway. I'd make media with tons of sexy people and reference the works of sex-positive feminists to justify my policies if someone criticized me for it. Why on Earth would anyone choose to listen to sex-negative feminists when there is an alternative? Was it some sort of unholy alliance between sex-negative feminists and the conservatives at the other end of the horseshoe?
There will always be a market for lowbrow humor and scantily clad women. I don't know why groups, whether left or right, pretend the existence of this stuff will immediately distort the brains of young people so they can no longer distinguish between stupid TV and whether they should respect women.
Fantastic Al Bundy references here. Not ashamed to admit I loved that show growing up.
Doesn't Trump have a problem with attractive women's bodies? He thought Beyonce's half time show was 'inappropriate', 'suggestive' and didn't like seeing her 'thrusting' her 'so and so'. Now maybe he doesn't find her attractive, but then we should also stipulate that he stands for an attitude that *does* have a problem with other women's bodies. Needs to be mentioned for a full picture.
While it is true that there are some feminists who are just anti-sex in all cases, I think this is an older type of feminist that has fallen out of favor, and today's left can still be very much in favor of naked women depending purely on the context. If evil Conservative White Men are looking at a pretty blonde reporter on Fox News that's bad. But if you change the context to OnlyFans and "sex work," lots of these people will now be all in favor of "sex positivity" and what have you.
I would guess that almost 100% of MtF trans leftists are pro-porn, and to the extent that anyone wants to ban porn, it's exclusively coming from right wingers. The rest of the right wing who don't necessarily want to ban porn would rarely if ever come out and pretend that it's any kind of an active good, even if they watch it regularly in private. And so forth and so on.
The coherent threads in woke with regards to sexuality seem to be anti-family and pro-degeneracy (i.e. pro-sexual deviancy in basically all forms). Women who just put a bit of effort into their appearance and generally act like normal women are thus bad. Wokes want them to be something weird that will make conservatives mad and not have a nuclear family, whether that's cutting them up and making them into a "trans man" or having them sell pictures of their butthole on OnlyFans. The important outcomes are no intact families and doing something that your conservative parents who you still resent wouldn't approve of.
Well done. Only thing I'd add to all the commenters and anyone reading this is not to let yourself slip into complacency. The PC crowd had a setback in the mid-90s and everyone went back to sleep. It's up to us to financially support media and people we like. (Yes, I have a subscription to Richard under another account.) I've stopped watching movies and TV with subscription services, and get books from authors with left-wing politics secondhand. When they go woke, drive them broke. Boycotting is an old left-wing tactic the right could stand to adopt.
As Brian Niemeier says, don't give money to people who hate you.
Smart, funny, and original piece that connects many things I’d never thought about but makes perfect sense. One thing to add: there is a race angle to this story too. During 2014-2021 you had female rappers being extremely sexual in a masculine way (bragging about sex, aggressively alpha), and this was widely celebrated as progressive and good. You also had a culture that seemed to feign or at least exaggerate the attractiveness of fat black women (Megan thee stallion, to some extent even Lizzo). Sweeney is the opposite of all these trends - sweet, soft, feminine, and conventionally beautiful.
Now, this is the Hanania content I'm here for.
I think this is more about women specifically than about wokeness in general.
Men don't suffer any issue from watching an 80s movie with shirtless Schwartzenegger, Stallone or Van Damme, or even a modern one with the guy who plays Thor. Even the very out of shape ones don't suffer in any way from that experience, just think of Marvel movie fans.
Women are different, and they have a greater tendency in my experience for feeling insecure or uncomfortable when watching hot women with terrific bodies in movies or videogames. It lowers their self esteem or something like that.
What happened with Gamergate was simply women trying to get into a male nerd hobby, and being bothered by that which does not bother men.
This phenomenon was constantly mentioned around Gamergate, and the feminists admitted it was real, but their explanation was that Schwarzenegger is a "male power fantasy" so men don't have a problem identifying with him, but the same did not apply to hot women in videogames or movies or comics, and would begin talking of objectified women and the "male gaze" or things like that, and would propose redesigns that made the characters a lot less sexy.
I don't think their case was ever very convincing. I guess Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love would be a female power fantasy, travel around the world, 5 star hotels, Michelin restaurants, do yoga and vague Buddhism that doesn't demand anything from you, fuck James Franco and Bardem and dump them with no hard feelings, but it's not very good material for a videogame.
I’m very pro-boob. At least on women. Not so much on men.
Well written article. But it conflates a few things. First, it's less that blonde breasted women are back and more that the conventional movie star has returned. It's not just a feminine thing. Timothee Chalamet is the closest Hollywood has to a recognizable male lead with no superhero movie affiliations in nearly two decades.
Second, leftism is about equalization of disparities. When these disparities are tangible and shareable eg money, they clamour loudly for its redistribution. But when they are either intangible or irreducible eg intelligence or looks, leftists instead clamour not for the redistribution of the asset itself which is impossible but the benefits they confer. So although it's impossible to make less beautiful women more naturally beautiful, they insist they must receive equal or even greater amounts of media attention to even out the score.
Three, the aesthetics of conservatism is cool again. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are the 21st century Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, tradwives making family breakfast is popular content on TikTok, relationship content is ubiquitous on all short form algorithmic content platforms. America will never be a truly conservative nation( its "conservatives" are hardly conservative either) but there's a marked return to more traditional media and lifestyles. Considering the insanity of the last couple of years, it's enough respite.
You know who hates attractive women the most? Other women! Now that more obese and unattractive women have realized there's special privileges for being a victim, they have used this to wield power over others. It's their payback time for being overlooked by men.
The Left couldn't help manifesting the Puritanical sexual culture that runs to the bone in American life. I remember as a young Catholic teenager I was always baffled by the message that being sexually attracted to a woman degraded her, and when I left my hometown to go to a university on the coast I ran into the same attitude despite the culture of promiscuity. I've always much preferred the old-world intellectualist attitudes toward sex which treat it as a normal function and aspect of life and not some weird, clandestine form of violence.
I don't watch a lot of British TV, but one thing I have always appreciated about what I have seen is that the actors who portray normal people really look like normal people. They have noticeable flaws and imperfections. A, say, entire hospital full of doctors and nurses who are all improbably hot is so distracting in how unrealistic it is, and these shows are watched primarily by women (Grey's Anatomy, for example). It's like watching obvious 28-year-olds play high school sophomores. Or the Friends apartment. Extremely noticeable unrealistic things annoy people. Although I feel like we are coming back to appreciating at least a little more of it, collectively wanting to see those examples of what social and familial stability and normalcy looks like again.
I can appreciate that art elevates reality to its ideal form and that's never going to change, but I would like to see at least more butch lesbians with a fucked up perms in police dramas, and no hot chicks with no muscle mass who do nothing but chain smoke and drink but somehow easily take down 250lb men in heels with their styled hair down. It's just so laughably hard to watch.
"Most of them don’t go as far as the alphabet soup people would like and seek to eliminate the categories of male and female clothing completely. Most women, even leftists, don’t want to look like men, but if they take feminism seriously enough, they are uncomfortable with looking too different, or making their sexuality too noticeable lest it signal that they are seeking the male gaze or distract from other traits they consider more valuable"
Insiders in the games industry have leaked that it's not about cis women but trans women and maybe some hr women. Female characters in games didn't start getting ugly until the trans stuff really came to floor. It's not even about trans women as a marketing demographic but internal employees, to some degree hr and consultant groups.
I have an academic acquaintance. I made a mildly boob related sexist comment. He quickly pointed out he didn’t see women that way. A few years later he and I were in Mexico having coffee. A drop dead gorgeous curvy Mexican woman in a white dress, clingy, walked by. Of course I noticed her. I smiled. But he? His eyes and tongue nearly fell out of his face. He was leering like an 18 year old. It was weird. But…she was not of his social status. He is a tenured prof. She is Mexican. So he got to let loose from his twenty years of pretending. Kind of disgusting in a way.
" People often overgeneralize about their political opponents, and I’m comfortable acknowledging that not everyone on the left is or has been anti-boob."
There's enough diversity of left-wing opinion on this topic that it has it's own Wikipedia page, "Feminist Sex Wars." To what extent sexuality, especially female sexuality, is objectifying and bad vs empowering and good is a highly divisive topic in feminism.
My question is, how did the most anti-sex, anti-beauty feminists get enough power for the media to start listening to them? If I was a media executive and wanted my company to look feminist, I'd try to pick a school of feminist thought that aligned with what I wanted to do anyway. I'd make media with tons of sexy people and reference the works of sex-positive feminists to justify my policies if someone criticized me for it. Why on Earth would anyone choose to listen to sex-negative feminists when there is an alternative? Was it some sort of unholy alliance between sex-negative feminists and the conservatives at the other end of the horseshoe?
There will always be a market for lowbrow humor and scantily clad women. I don't know why groups, whether left or right, pretend the existence of this stuff will immediately distort the brains of young people so they can no longer distinguish between stupid TV and whether they should respect women.
Fantastic Al Bundy references here. Not ashamed to admit I loved that show growing up.
Ugh this piece is so good it hurts. So glad you’re not a corporate lawyer somewhere in Connecticut.
Doesn't Trump have a problem with attractive women's bodies? He thought Beyonce's half time show was 'inappropriate', 'suggestive' and didn't like seeing her 'thrusting' her 'so and so'. Now maybe he doesn't find her attractive, but then we should also stipulate that he stands for an attitude that *does* have a problem with other women's bodies. Needs to be mentioned for a full picture.
While it is true that there are some feminists who are just anti-sex in all cases, I think this is an older type of feminist that has fallen out of favor, and today's left can still be very much in favor of naked women depending purely on the context. If evil Conservative White Men are looking at a pretty blonde reporter on Fox News that's bad. But if you change the context to OnlyFans and "sex work," lots of these people will now be all in favor of "sex positivity" and what have you.
I would guess that almost 100% of MtF trans leftists are pro-porn, and to the extent that anyone wants to ban porn, it's exclusively coming from right wingers. The rest of the right wing who don't necessarily want to ban porn would rarely if ever come out and pretend that it's any kind of an active good, even if they watch it regularly in private. And so forth and so on.
The coherent threads in woke with regards to sexuality seem to be anti-family and pro-degeneracy (i.e. pro-sexual deviancy in basically all forms). Women who just put a bit of effort into their appearance and generally act like normal women are thus bad. Wokes want them to be something weird that will make conservatives mad and not have a nuclear family, whether that's cutting them up and making them into a "trans man" or having them sell pictures of their butthole on OnlyFans. The important outcomes are no intact families and doing something that your conservative parents who you still resent wouldn't approve of.
Well done. Only thing I'd add to all the commenters and anyone reading this is not to let yourself slip into complacency. The PC crowd had a setback in the mid-90s and everyone went back to sleep. It's up to us to financially support media and people we like. (Yes, I have a subscription to Richard under another account.) I've stopped watching movies and TV with subscription services, and get books from authors with left-wing politics secondhand. When they go woke, drive them broke. Boycotting is an old left-wing tactic the right could stand to adopt.
As Brian Niemeier says, don't give money to people who hate you.