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.