Transcription
How did we go from this to this and from this to this? At the same time, we talk endlessly about how unfair beauty standards are for women. We blame society, the patriarchy, Instagram, the male gaze. Pick your villain.
And I've spoken before about the mistake we make when we when we put beauty as the highest and the only value. But what gets to me is when the conversation is built on gamma bias. When we inflate female disadvantages and minimize male ones. When the truth is that modern beauty standards hammer men much harder than women.
And while women have a whole entire cultural machine dedicated to making them feel better, soothing, validating, therapizing their insecurities. What are men told? They're told, "We don't want much. Just a little hair, a little muscle, and a little fat. Is that so hard? Is that too much to ask?"
And much of this, I think, is Tinder is the dating apps. It broke women's sense of self. It gives them this incredibly inflated sense of worth because the average woman receives hundreds of times more positive swipes than 90% of males and it creates the psychological distortion. I must be extremely attractive. Look how many matches I get. It discourages then self-reflection, self-development, self-improvement, and the the pursuits of traits that actually sustain relationships.
And it and it sets the stage for this modern beauty hypocrisy. Because these same women who feel overwhelmed by male attention, they are the ones posting these Henry Caval memes. Oh, we don't want much. This is the bare minimum. Can't you just look like this? when he certainly has had pharmaceutical help. He is not a normal guy.
Let's do a visual contrast. Take Audrey Heppern. She is the gold standard of beauty and should be soft, elegant, recognizably human. Now look at what H looked like in Benh her. Strong but no superhero nonsense. He looked like a real man. So back then you had female beauty demanding but attainable and male beauty demanding but realistic.
Fast forward till today and we are shown Florence Pew praise as a resistance hero for rejecting unrealistic standards. She is the picture of beauty. She is the one all the steroid superheroes fall in love with. That's what they're telling us to believe. So, no wonder average women think that Henry Caval is the bare minimum while complaining about the very standards she benefits from.
And then we're told that Kamala Harris's stepdaughter, Ella Mhof, is who is aggressively ordinary, hailed as a fashion itgirl and a style icon. We're told that she is the most beautiful girl in America. So what they've done is that they've turned the absence of beauty into some kind of moral achievement.
And then notice what happens when men dare to say, "Well, actually, this is what we find attractive." Enter Sydney Sweeney. One of I mean, she's the mo one of the most uncontroversially attractive women alive, curvy, feminine, blonde, openly leaning into the sex appeal, and the reaction pandering to the male gaze. Bad for women, problematic. Oh, racist. It's an absurd double standard.
And what this tells us is that female desire is moral, welcomed. And uh male desire is oppressive, suspicious. Men are told that if they don't find this feminist approved icon attractive, they're shallow, fragile, weak men. And if they do find classically beautiful women attractive, then they're reinforcing patriarchal uh violence.
Meanwhile, most average men are rejected so relentlessly. Uh no wonder they turn to to porn in in record numbers. And we bully them for that, too. Now, I'm not a fan. I I think we should treat porn like we treat alcohol or certain drugs. Um, it's not good for anyone, but when women reject men on mass, their loneliness is bound to show up somewhere. At least have the decency to acknowledge the root cause.
So, while women are told, you're stunningly be beautiful. Um, have another piece of pie. Men are told anything less than superhero. And it's the bare minimum. Women get to relax their standards and moralize their insecurities. And uh men get no body positivity campaigns, no love yourself, uh no empowerment slogans, uh not even basic sympathy, just mockery, and they're scolded for letting their sexuality out anywhere at all.
So, while we are endlessly debating beauty standards and their effect on women, what we're really watching perhaps is a power grab, but who gets to decide beauty and whose desires count? Now, anyone who'd look at a picture of of Charlton H would say he has a dad bod and Caval becomes something they expect, something that falls in love with that really fat Australian actress.
So what we are witnessing is two separate beauty markets and that might be why women are so confused. So on the one hand you have the erotic market classic femininity health and the other one where you have the female status market the ideological validation and that's what women reward each other for. And women confuse these two. They tell each other that that when women present as for ideological validation in this in this female status beauty that's the same as erotic beauty and anyone who disagrees should be punished and we've reached a point now where male attraction is treated like an intrusive thought in OCD something to be corrected neutralized sanitized meanwhile male body dissatisfaction has skyrocketed as have these uh body these performance-enhancing drugs and techniques that Andrew Huberman swears by and nobody cares.
No, men are told to hit the gym, level up, get therapy, dress better, you're not entitled to attraction, while women are told unfollow triggers, love your body, you deserve love and affection by default. And then we call the result unfair beauty standards for women. And this gamma bias is the result of a 150 year long war on male sexuality. This is the end point of a campaign to pathize male desire.
And that's where this porn debate really that's that's where they lose me because if you it it all began in the 1830s with Sarah Grim K. Female desire is virtue and male desire is a vice. Sarah Grim K already warned that males were governed by animal passions and Elizabeth Katy Stanton said marital sex was legalized prostitution because male libido was inherently selfish. Francis Willard linked male sexual desires to addiction, vice, and corruption. Charlotte Perkins Gilman called male sexuality primitive and female sexuality civilizing. already done then we saw it male contaminate women uplift. Already for 150 years women's desires have been treated as morally pure while men's desire has been treated as a pathology.
And the second wave feminists they built on this they took it further. Shrew myth firestone said in 1970 she equated male desire male libido with biological oppression. Brown Miller called sexual called male sexuality a collective threat. Dwarkin in 1987 said that male desire is domination. Then McKinnon said that sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism. Desire equals hierarchy.
And if we look at it like this, the madness makes sense. This is why Florence Pew's nipples are political triumphs and why um Ella Mhof's plainless plainness is political art for some reason. And this is really all about controlling men's sexuality. Women are allowed to desire freely. They're allowed to pose things like this. While men, they have to justify their desire morally and they have to somehow live up to women's incredibly inflated sense of self after the dating apps. Um, women who have increasingly become unable to sacrifice to sustain a relationship, endlessly complaining and going through men and relationships like they are apples they pick from a tree. Good or bad, I don't have to do anything. Now, are they happier for it? No. Are they liberated? No. Are they backed by the full academic weight of feminism from from 1830 to till today? Yes.