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.
Uhm, you probably have highly deficient testosterone levels if Megan is fat by your estimations. She is fine (emphasis on fine as in AAVE slang usage of the word fine).
This. Same with Ice Spice, who is herself certainly at least overweight, but is nonetheless very attractive, even with that horrible ginger-afro weave. There's a reason she blew up like she did, and why she's seduced several actual celebrities, as opposed to a certain other popstar whom I'll get to in the succeeding paragraph.
Lizzo really does stand out as being particularly unattractive due to her extreme weight and unpleasant personality, but she has a fairly legit musical background by the standards of popstars, so much as I dislike the trends she represented, it's not as though she just became famous purely to offend against objective beauty.
Lol I like how the negative examples you listed are both black women, while the perfect example of beauty just happens to be white. Saying it without saying it.
Richard, Have you ever have "had" a curvy black woman? Much/most of the male world prefers the curvy--probably-more-muscle--black woman style body to the white, skinny European ideal.
But not to take anything away from Sweeney--she's definitely hot and beautiful! But I might point out her best feature is a feature more prominently found on black women than on white women.
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.
It's ridiculous, though. Some people are born beautiful and some are ugly. That's just the way it is. Women need to learn how to be secure in themselves. I'm 5 ft 3 in. I'd like to be 5 ft 7 in. But, I'm not. And, I shouldn't be allowed to say all models should be 5 ft. 3 in. because the clothes wouldn't be as beautiful, maybe. My point is that the women who want to do these things should be allowed to do them without other women lecturing them. Because, you are right. This is a fight between women. And, some of them want their competition knocked out.
Yeah, men just don't have as much of their self worth wrapped up in how they look, because society judges men more by other traits. Hanania is right that to a certain extent this is just reality we should accept, but you can easily take it to extremes. If you want to have women participating in society you need to respond to their needs as much as you respond to mens.
Women do participate in society. If men only had a society just for them? It would not look anything like what ours does. If women only had a society just fir them? It would look very close to what we have now.
20 years ago I had one girlfriend who liked video games, the only girl I’ve known that I’d actually consider a “gamer”. She liked the sexy female characters and wanted to “be” them. She had no real politics though.
Women like to associate with pretty women. Taylor Swift is much more popular than Lizzo.
I think what you’re describing is just a feminist mind virus. It’s not natural behavior but women are more capable than men of being convinced to revolt against their nature due to being infected by a diseased high-status ideology.
I think much of what was going on was that the feminists of Gamergate were obviously "social scientists" and they wanted to create a new line of work, feminist issues in videogames, that would allow them to write articles, papers, and even get hired as advisors by videogame companies, basically, they wanted to use videogames to make money.
It was all very dishonest. The real issues at hand (Feminists wanting to expand their market into videogames, and female insecurity at women hotter than themselves) were avoided completely, and the solutions provided were awful (make the female characters ugly, homely, average looking, and cover their body in "tacticool" uniforms).
I don’t know that it’s about making money exactly (as I pointed out elsewhere, the video game industry has a reputation for poor pay due to the oversupply of young men who want to work in it).
I think there’s a toxic feminine impulse that we might call “nagging”, or “longhouse”, just plain being upset if men are having too much fun without them. For a certain type of woman that we all hope our friends don’t marry, identifying an area where men are having too much fun and trying to make it less fun is self-actualizing work.
Oh come on. You could have fun rendering all the hotels and exotic places and Franco and Bardem. The point is women don't like those sorts of videogames nearly as much. They prefer written fantasies like romance novels.
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.
That's their point. Movie stars in the 40s didn't look like Dwayne Johnson. Carey Grant and Jimmy Stewart didn't have muscly bodies and chiseled chins.
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.
Yeah but the 19th century was farely unique in this regard. In my experience reading and listening to cultural intelligentsia from Europe they are more accepting of the sexual dimension of social life as an acknowledged expectation whereas I feel in the U.S. it's attached to taboo social conditions. There is less of a feeling of natural transgression as opposed to social transgression of manners.
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.
After having watched the British "The Office", I was disappointed at the US show's decision to have hot people play Jim and Pam. It's like they'd missed the whole charm of the show - those characters were supposed to dumpy, regular people, working in a dumpy, regular office!
That’s true not on me of British TV but also European TV in general, I think. I watch a lot of it, and it always strikes me how the women in those shows look much more natural and normal than the women in American TV shows and movies.
Over there, they don’t seem to have gone through the Hollywoodization and Barbification that Americans have. There isn’t the idolization of the big boob blonde bombshell, that’s an American thing.
European prefer more small breasted women, they consider big boobs vulgar snd smaller boobs, more elegant and sophisticated.
Just as they prefer a more classic and elegant clothing style.
The flashy, blonde starlet that is the American model of sexiness just doesn’t cut it in Europe, despite the fact they are more relaxed about sex and nudity in advertisements and on the beach for example and consider Americans puritanical.
Some more cultural differences I’ve noticed between European and American shows.
In crime shows a lot of the plots in European shows have to do with families and children, rather than sexual jealousy, infidelity, etc. in American shows. The importance of parent child relationships is very much present in European shows, much more than in American shows.
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.
"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.
"How much one “sexualizes” women is among the most important cultural differences based on class and ideology that exist within American society. Think of blue collar men putting up pictures of scantily clad women in their workspaces. Law school was the first time in my life I was exposed to upper-class American culture, and I remember a guy once being shocked when I started graphically talking about a woman’s body. Where I grew up, that’s how men bonded! Appreciating women’s bodies too openly is coded as lower class and more conservative, and this is reflected in things like how people dress, what kinds of cultural products they consume, and which politicians they identify with. No voter will ever tell a focus group that he likes the fact that Trump is always talking about how women look, but stuff like this is part of both his appeal and the aesthetic revulsion he invokes among elites."
I think this touches on trend that has been the case throughout time.
Aristocratic men tend to be more effeminate. Not the men that built the present aristocracy but there sons sons.
Interesting point. My guess would be that masculine men look for feminine women, and get them, but at least some genes get expressed in both sexes, so you get a regression to the mean on both sides.
That and the alpha males get the hottest women, but those tend to have mood disorders, so you get kids with mood disorders and the dynasty declines.
You get the occasional smart guy who wants a smart woman for dynasty purposes, but then the kids get autism. So it's not clear what the optimal strategy is.
I think its way more about signally like a peacock. Lower class men have to be masculine; signaling protection if not full provision. The aristocratic class is so far a head that it shows they are beyond the need of masculinity.
Yes. Being short in stature, slight in frame, or unable to grow a beard is genetic, but effeminacy in how you comport yourself is much more of a socially-conditioned choice, and one that can flip.
But he "flipped" with surgical and chemical assistance. Also the "slight in frame," effeminate-looking boy can lift weights and even get pharmaceutical assistance for bulking up.
One thing that’s odd is that, to my knowledge, talent is a dime a dozen in the video game industry, because every nerd programmer or 3D artist wants to work there as a first choice and is willing to pay dues to do it (they only go to work programming database software because they couldn’t get a job doing something more fun). So you would think they could easily just fire any mentally ill staff that are forcing them to make strange business-unfriendly decisions.
" 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?
I read about these. Waves 1, 2, and 4 are anti-heterosex.
Raunch feminism was definitely a thing in the late 90s and 2000s, but women never enjoyed sleeping around quite as much as men and figured out they were being used, thus causing the current backlash. (A similar thing happened in the 70s after the 'free love' 60s and led to the second wave.)
The influence of leftists all flows down from the government-media-academia cultural dissemination complex, with media and academia being pseudo-governmental entities. Companies support leftist crap because these people, who are above them in status and oftentimes in legal authority, tell them to.
Government hates nuclear families and other forms of naturally coherent communities and thus often supports ideologies which attack these things in favor of radical individualism (a state of affairs which leaves nothing in between the individual and the government).
lol most feminist arent anit porn, they hate sexualization but love porn, the feminist that were againts boos in media are very pro porn actually and the media listened to them cb they are the majoruty of feminist, feminit that built their personality about the male gaze usuaully end in media, mot feminist in 2014 were cherrign the women fighting gamergate so spare me this so called diversity of opinion
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.
He wouldn't have said it if she were dancing in a MAGA hat. Trump doesn't have serious beliefs about anything that doesn't personally affect him. He doesn't actually have an ideology.
I love women’s bodies. But these ridiculous NFL Super Bowl half time shows are offensive. My wife can be very sexy and sexual with me alone, that doesn’t mean I would find that appealing in public.
Trump didn't like Rihanna's 2023 Super Bowl performance. It's absurd he didn't. It was a great performance, and Rihanna is ultra hot and talented! I think he doesn't really GET black popular music. . . Has Trump ever mentioned sleeping with black women?
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.
"having them sell pictures of their butthole on OnlyFans...." !!! lolol
for the young and left, transgression is the first commandment (it's actually more of an ingrained reflex at this point) and they are as much controlled by the traditional Old World gods (faith family order country etc) as any religious fundamentalist, they are just programmmed to perform disobedience instead of its opposite.
they can never stop dancing on the grave of the our old, traditional hierarchies, it's all they have and know.
The me too thing seems pretty inconsequential to me, being mostly a shallow opportunity for grifting and hitting convenient targets. To the extent that it did anything, it's just a further extension of the general tendency to discourage normal heterosexual relations, since now if a girl gives you a blowjob and regrets it later she can decide it was rape (I think this happened to Aziz Ansari, not sure if I'm spelling his name right).
Definitely didn't make lefties any more puritanical about things like gay sex or "sex work," though.
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.
Like billionaires who lavish massive contributions on universities whose departments despise capitalism and billionaires. I'm looking at you, Ken Griffin.
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.
Meg is not fat lol
She’s not now but she def was
Uhm, you probably have highly deficient testosterone levels if Megan is fat by your estimations. She is fine (emphasis on fine as in AAVE slang usage of the word fine).
This. Same with Ice Spice, who is herself certainly at least overweight, but is nonetheless very attractive, even with that horrible ginger-afro weave. There's a reason she blew up like she did, and why she's seduced several actual celebrities, as opposed to a certain other popstar whom I'll get to in the succeeding paragraph.
Lizzo really does stand out as being particularly unattractive due to her extreme weight and unpleasant personality, but she has a fairly legit musical background by the standards of popstars, so much as I dislike the trends she represented, it's not as though she just became famous purely to offend against objective beauty.
Lol I like how the negative examples you listed are both black women, while the perfect example of beauty just happens to be white. Saying it without saying it.
Richard, Have you ever have "had" a curvy black woman? Much/most of the male world prefers the curvy--probably-more-muscle--black woman style body to the white, skinny European ideal.
But not to take anything away from Sweeney--she's definitely hot and beautiful! But I might point out her best feature is a feature more prominently found on black women than on white women.
If you think Megan thee Stallion is fat and anywhere near the same league as Lizzo, you are delusional.
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.
It's ridiculous, though. Some people are born beautiful and some are ugly. That's just the way it is. Women need to learn how to be secure in themselves. I'm 5 ft 3 in. I'd like to be 5 ft 7 in. But, I'm not. And, I shouldn't be allowed to say all models should be 5 ft. 3 in. because the clothes wouldn't be as beautiful, maybe. My point is that the women who want to do these things should be allowed to do them without other women lecturing them. Because, you are right. This is a fight between women. And, some of them want their competition knocked out.
Yeah, men just don't have as much of their self worth wrapped up in how they look, because society judges men more by other traits. Hanania is right that to a certain extent this is just reality we should accept, but you can easily take it to extremes. If you want to have women participating in society you need to respond to their needs as much as you respond to mens.
Well, not all men. Gay men at least have the decency to appreciate other men for their looks. That was part of the point of Dorian Gray.
Women do participate in society. If men only had a society just for them? It would not look anything like what ours does. If women only had a society just fir them? It would look very close to what we have now.
Except that the women would be living in huts (per Camille Paglia's treatise).
This doesn’t ring that true to me.
20 years ago I had one girlfriend who liked video games, the only girl I’ve known that I’d actually consider a “gamer”. She liked the sexy female characters and wanted to “be” them. She had no real politics though.
Women like to associate with pretty women. Taylor Swift is much more popular than Lizzo.
I think what you’re describing is just a feminist mind virus. It’s not natural behavior but women are more capable than men of being convinced to revolt against their nature due to being infected by a diseased high-status ideology.
I think much of what was going on was that the feminists of Gamergate were obviously "social scientists" and they wanted to create a new line of work, feminist issues in videogames, that would allow them to write articles, papers, and even get hired as advisors by videogame companies, basically, they wanted to use videogames to make money.
It was all very dishonest. The real issues at hand (Feminists wanting to expand their market into videogames, and female insecurity at women hotter than themselves) were avoided completely, and the solutions provided were awful (make the female characters ugly, homely, average looking, and cover their body in "tacticool" uniforms).
I don’t know that it’s about making money exactly (as I pointed out elsewhere, the video game industry has a reputation for poor pay due to the oversupply of young men who want to work in it).
I think there’s a toxic feminine impulse that we might call “nagging”, or “longhouse”, just plain being upset if men are having too much fun without them. For a certain type of woman that we all hope our friends don’t marry, identifying an area where men are having too much fun and trying to make it less fun is self-actualizing work.
Oh come on. You could have fun rendering all the hotels and exotic places and Franco and Bardem. The point is women don't like those sorts of videogames nearly as much. They prefer written fantasies like romance novels.
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.
Chalamet is not at all masculine like Sweeney is feminine. We've had Dwayne Johnson in big movies all this time!
Robin Hanson thinks leftists aren't that interested in inequality generally
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/unequal_inequalhtml
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/explaining-unequal-inequality-aversionhtml
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-grabbing.html
That's their point. Movie stars in the 40s didn't look like Dwayne Johnson. Carey Grant and Jimmy Stewart didn't have muscly bodies and chiseled chins.
Carey Grant and Jimmy Stewart didn't have access to PEDs.
Men shouldn’t be allowed to vote
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.
But Sydney Sweeney and Taylor Swift have broken their power, so payback time is over.
Do not confuse a single advance with victory.
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.
How old world do you mean? The Victorians would like a word with you about the scandalous prevalence of visible ankles in modern life.
Yeah but the 19th century was farely unique in this regard. In my experience reading and listening to cultural intelligentsia from Europe they are more accepting of the sexual dimension of social life as an acknowledged expectation whereas I feel in the U.S. it's attached to taboo social conditions. There is less of a feeling of natural transgression as opposed to social transgression of manners.
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.
After having watched the British "The Office", I was disappointed at the US show's decision to have hot people play Jim and Pam. It's like they'd missed the whole charm of the show - those characters were supposed to dumpy, regular people, working in a dumpy, regular office!
That’s true not on me of British TV but also European TV in general, I think. I watch a lot of it, and it always strikes me how the women in those shows look much more natural and normal than the women in American TV shows and movies.
Over there, they don’t seem to have gone through the Hollywoodization and Barbification that Americans have. There isn’t the idolization of the big boob blonde bombshell, that’s an American thing.
European prefer more small breasted women, they consider big boobs vulgar snd smaller boobs, more elegant and sophisticated.
Just as they prefer a more classic and elegant clothing style.
The flashy, blonde starlet that is the American model of sexiness just doesn’t cut it in Europe, despite the fact they are more relaxed about sex and nudity in advertisements and on the beach for example and consider Americans puritanical.
Some more cultural differences I’ve noticed between European and American shows.
In crime shows a lot of the plots in European shows have to do with families and children, rather than sexual jealousy, infidelity, etc. in American shows. The importance of parent child relationships is very much present in European shows, much more than in American shows.
It has been interesting to observe e.g. Olivia Colman's stardom from the US. (Every degree of fame earned, from what I've seen.)
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.
"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.
"How much one “sexualizes” women is among the most important cultural differences based on class and ideology that exist within American society. Think of blue collar men putting up pictures of scantily clad women in their workspaces. Law school was the first time in my life I was exposed to upper-class American culture, and I remember a guy once being shocked when I started graphically talking about a woman’s body. Where I grew up, that’s how men bonded! Appreciating women’s bodies too openly is coded as lower class and more conservative, and this is reflected in things like how people dress, what kinds of cultural products they consume, and which politicians they identify with. No voter will ever tell a focus group that he likes the fact that Trump is always talking about how women look, but stuff like this is part of both his appeal and the aesthetic revulsion he invokes among elites."
I think this touches on trend that has been the case throughout time.
Aristocratic men tend to be more effeminate. Not the men that built the present aristocracy but there sons sons.
Interesting point. My guess would be that masculine men look for feminine women, and get them, but at least some genes get expressed in both sexes, so you get a regression to the mean on both sides.
That and the alpha males get the hottest women, but those tend to have mood disorders, so you get kids with mood disorders and the dynasty declines.
You get the occasional smart guy who wants a smart woman for dynasty purposes, but then the kids get autism. So it's not clear what the optimal strategy is.
I think its way more about signally like a peacock. Lower class men have to be masculine; signaling protection if not full provision. The aristocratic class is so far a head that it shows they are beyond the need of masculinity.
Yes. Being short in stature, slight in frame, or unable to grow a beard is genetic, but effeminacy in how you comport yourself is much more of a socially-conditioned choice, and one that can flip.
Exhibit A: Bruce Jenner.
"Exhibit A: Bruce Jenner." Ha ha.
But he "flipped" with surgical and chemical assistance. Also the "slight in frame," effeminate-looking boy can lift weights and even get pharmaceutical assistance for bulking up.
"You get the occasional smart guy who wants a smart woman for dynasty purposes"
Obama and Michelle?
One thing that’s odd is that, to my knowledge, talent is a dime a dozen in the video game industry, because every nerd programmer or 3D artist wants to work there as a first choice and is willing to pay dues to do it (they only go to work programming database software because they couldn’t get a job doing something more fun). So you would think they could easily just fire any mentally ill staff that are forcing them to make strange business-unfriendly decisions.
" 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?
I read about these. Waves 1, 2, and 4 are anti-heterosex.
Raunch feminism was definitely a thing in the late 90s and 2000s, but women never enjoyed sleeping around quite as much as men and figured out they were being used, thus causing the current backlash. (A similar thing happened in the 70s after the 'free love' 60s and led to the second wave.)
"How did the most anti-sex, anti-beauty feminists get enough power for the media to start listening to them?
They got high up into management to set policy.
The influence of leftists all flows down from the government-media-academia cultural dissemination complex, with media and academia being pseudo-governmental entities. Companies support leftist crap because these people, who are above them in status and oftentimes in legal authority, tell them to.
Government hates nuclear families and other forms of naturally coherent communities and thus often supports ideologies which attack these things in favor of radical individualism (a state of affairs which leaves nothing in between the individual and the government).
lol most feminist arent anit porn, they hate sexualization but love porn, the feminist that were againts boos in media are very pro porn actually and the media listened to them cb they are the majoruty of feminist, feminit that built their personality about the male gaze usuaully end in media, mot feminist in 2014 were cherrign the women fighting gamergate so spare me this so called diversity of opinion
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.
He wouldn't have said it if she were dancing in a MAGA hat. Trump doesn't have serious beliefs about anything that doesn't personally affect him. He doesn't actually have an ideology.
I love women’s bodies. But these ridiculous NFL Super Bowl half time shows are offensive. My wife can be very sexy and sexual with me alone, that doesn’t mean I would find that appealing in public.
Trump didn't like Rihanna's 2023 Super Bowl performance. It's absurd he didn't. It was a great performance, and Rihanna is ultra hot and talented! I think he doesn't really GET black popular music. . . Has Trump ever mentioned sleeping with black women?
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.
"having them sell pictures of their butthole on OnlyFans...." !!! lolol
for the young and left, transgression is the first commandment (it's actually more of an ingrained reflex at this point) and they are as much controlled by the traditional Old World gods (faith family order country etc) as any religious fundamentalist, they are just programmmed to perform disobedience instead of its opposite.
they can never stop dancing on the grave of the our old, traditional hierarchies, it's all they have and know.
I do think the me-too movement moved a little bit toward the puritanical direction, but Richard is exaggerating the extent.
The me too thing seems pretty inconsequential to me, being mostly a shallow opportunity for grifting and hitting convenient targets. To the extent that it did anything, it's just a further extension of the general tendency to discourage normal heterosexual relations, since now if a girl gives you a blowjob and regrets it later she can decide it was rape (I think this happened to Aziz Ansari, not sure if I'm spelling his name right).
Definitely didn't make lefties any more puritanical about things like gay sex or "sex work," though.
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.
Like billionaires who lavish massive contributions on universities whose departments despise capitalism and billionaires. I'm looking at you, Ken Griffin.