Amanda Mannen at Cracked has written on why getting MAD at magazines for photoshopping hot girls to be even hotter is stupid. There’s some feminist crap in there, but the points themselves aren’t too bad. The final one though brings up a good point, then stops dead before reaching something really interesting.
The uncomfortable truth is that most of us don’t actually want to eradicate cultural standards of beauty — we just want them changed to include us.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was familiar with Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism. That’s not the part I want to talk about, simply an interesting observation. Here’s the meat:
This isn’t the same as in entertainment, which serves a completely different function. The chief complaint about sexy ladies in those media is that that’s all they’re there for … or at least it’s presented as their most important quality. We run into problems only when we’re taught that a) “hot” is the most important thing a woman can be, and b) we do not meet that standard. How insane is it to propose as a solution to that dilemma, “Well, let’s just change the standard”? You might as well be trying to prevent tornadoes by removing the Earth’s atmosphere.
Here she identifies the superficial problem, women in the media are judged by sexiness and sexiness alone, and she identifies that changing the standard to include fatties and uglies doesn’t change the fact that the standard of ‘hot’ itself is corrupt.
She then goes on to blame this on the media and advertisements.
But, as the Last Psychiatrist was fond of saying before he disappeared, if you’re watching it, it’s for you. The media, however much I rag on it and however much of a sewer it might be, doesn’t exist in a bubble. Even more so, advertisements don’t. Advertisements have to actually have people who identify with them to be effective.
In other words, if people didn’t already value ‘hot’ to the exclusion of other virtues the media wouldn’t be able to use ‘hot’ as the sole standard.
This is where her thinking stops. Why do people, particularly women, accept that ‘hot’ is the standard to which they should aspire?
As I’ve pointed out before this is the new hedonism, how sexiness has become the greater good, especially for women. This is not going to change, because ‘hot’ is the only value left.
However much some feminists and some MGTOWs rage against it, men and women want to be together with each other. They want to love and be loved. This is natural, this is good. To attain this love, attraction is important. Men are attracted to the feminine, women are attracted to the masculine.
Our society has been working to destroy the feminine in women and the masculine in men. As well, society actively lies to both men and women about what the other sex finds attractive. The traditional lovely, feminine virtues that women used to use to attract a man: kindness, joy, peacefulness, chastity, submission, vulnerability, motherliness, cooking, housekeeping, etc. have been maligned by feminism and replaced with repulsive traits of rebellion and argumentativeness (disguised as moxie and independence). Meanwhile, the traditional masculine traits that men would use to attract women have been beaten out of them through public schooling.
Once inner beauty has been destroyed, what does a woman have to offer a man? How can she find love? Men aren’t attracted to degrees, they aren’t attracted to over-exaggerated work titles, they aren’t attracted to argumentativeness or rebellion. Meanwhile, she can’t find it by being lovely, because being lovely is anti-feminist, which is evil. The only thing she has left to attract a man are her looks and her vagina. So, the woman try to be hot, so her looks and her vagina can land a man. She has to make up her lack of inner beauty, her lack of loveliness, with sexuality, hotness.
Hence, why the media focuses on the standard of hot. Women want to be hot, because they want to find love and their other paths to love have been taken from them. If people want advertising to change, they have to change the values consumers hold. As long as women value hot the media will sell them hot.
Hot is the standard and will remain the standard for women to find love as long as feminism reigns for it is the only standard men find attractive that is not in itself intrinsically antithetical to feminist values.
Spot on FN.
Sexiness and “hotness” are the only currency women have because they’ve been told to sell all the others, or throw them away. If women want to be valued for more than being hot, they need to become feminine again. Because those traits are the other thing about women that men value.
I would also add that as marriage has been systematically dismantled, women lost much of their value beyond sex. Sex is about the only thing bringing men and women together, anymore.
The Shadowed Knight
This irony, that since feminism men (and women) only seem to assess women for sex toy potential, is initially universally denied by feminists, but when pressed they double back and suggest its in fact the patriarchy, and we know what that means: we need more feminism.
Double down girls, accelerate!
@ Shadowed Knight
“I would also add that as marriage has been systematically dismantled, women lost much of their value beyond sex.”
And the rise of big daddy government and fem-centric social and economic engineering has cost men much of their value to women beyond sex.
“Sex is about the only thing bringing men and women together, anymore.”
Yep.
“Advertisements have to actually have people who identify with them to be effective.”
Um, not quite. The recent movement in a lot of advertisements away from what might be called “normative” scenarios is interesting. I really don’t want to go into too much detail here but if you observe a lot of advertising you can soon spot people (couples especially) whose lifestyle and preferences do not match I think the majority of the population. It is as if the ad makers want everyone (or their own limited social circle at least) to think they are with it and ‘cool’ and socially on message.
Unfortunately, I don’t and I suspect there are a lot of people who don’t either. But advertising is rarely as good as it thinks it is. The old adage of ‘Fifty per cent of my advertising works and fifty per cent doesn’t; the trouble is I don’t know which fifty per cent’ ought to be more like 5 per cent works and 95 per doesn’t, and if it keeps imagining I am like some of the strange folk in their ads the figure will have to be revised to 1:99
Hit the nail on the head, FN. To the point, it is interesting to note that I do think some moderately less attractive women do make up for their looks by trying to act a bit more like an actual girl rather than a feminist wack-job, at least among more conservative groups of people. Perhaps not by a concerted effort, but maybe they just trend that way as they see it tends to get them more interest from men.
@greytop:
Case and point: The Coca-Cola multiculti super bowl commercials. All that did is anger some people and no one else cared. The thing is, many of these companies are so established that their advertising hardly affects the bottom line. No one stopped buying Coke because of that silly ad. All it did was advance the leftie agenda to a small degree. I hardly see companies that are actually trying to break into the market go with such advertising, but the established companies are using it to push a liberal agenda that they have gotten on board with for whatever reason.
Important points. I could see a slightly more polished version even getting facebook shares
Great post. The grim irony is that for all that hotness has been elevated to a supreme virtue for women trying to attract men, they often fail spectacularly at it. Walking around the big city where I live I sometimes get irritated by how so many of the women could be respectably attractive, but completely fail due to factors that are totally under their control. When it comes to pure looks, given the low standards prevailing almost any woman can punch far above her weight just by 1) not getting fat, 2) growing her hair out long, and 3) wearing skirts/dresses/heels instead of yoga pants, flip flops, huge bug-eyed sunglasses, and skinny jeans (maybe the least flattering clothing item of all time, makes legs look like overstuffed sausages). Adding any feminine sweetness on top of that is pure gravy.
Also note that for lots of women, when they are trying to look sexy for a night out at the club or whatever, they usually just crank the trashiness up to 11 with outfits that would have made a hooker blush just 20-30 years ago. Looks that are subtle or that tease without showing outright are completely beyond them.
Not entirely sure why this is, but I assume it has a lot to do with the fashion industry being run by hateful old shrews and gay men who know very little about how to make women look appealing to straight guys. There’s also a big element of trend following, where deliberately wearing ugly-but-fashionable items shows one is up-to-date on what’s “in” this season and implicitly hot enough to “pull off” unflattering looks (even though that’s usually not the case).
The post shows in some ways your age or lack there of. Women like the ones you described have never existed (the June Cleaver type) it’s just a series of trade offs. Hotness only works for temporary relationships to a point. It’s a woman’s coldness and broken emulation of male traits that’s a real boner killer. Might as well pay a pro who ironically will act feminine since they know that’s what pays.
It’s no mystery why women dress as terribly as they do. Women try to compete with other women over various body-parts, ie. hair, legs, butt, “boobs” which I put in quotes because that’s girl venacular…, face, eyes, feet, “tummies” or hips… So, they have clothes and accessories that display each of these features even if that features of theirs isn’t that good, they feel that they must compete. ie. “female empathy”. Their female friends lie to them out of niceness and flattery, enough times until they believe it, so that some fatty ends up still stuffing herself into those tight jeans. That is to show her healthy gameness or, in other words, competitiveness to the other women so to demonstrate how she isn’t too nice or a pushover.
Women would be literally naked if we let them. Please, don’t overestimate their innate goodness.
A.J.P.
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You know, I think this is part of a larger problem of disconnected communities. There’s really no way to make a community come together without a need for survival. When you give people all the comfort and security they could ever want, they lose the ability or desire to struggle. I think the same goes for intersexual relations. Men have made many ways to fulfill their fleshly lusts (pornography, prostitutes, and soon VR sex), and women have cuckolded the entirety of America through Big Daddy government. There is now no need to get married beyond the needs of children to have a stable, two-parent household. Hence, there is now no selfish reason to struggle or strive toward what God has commanded us (be fruitful and multiply) to do. Such is the way of things in the land of do as you please.