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Sheroes who really make a difference

Last night, I caught a half-hour preview show of the new A&E show "Rollergirls", which is a documentary about a bunch of young women who play the aggressive game of roller derby. In the preview, it was established that these women are strong independent grrrls for whom the roller derby is a way to really let loose and rebel against the conventional norms of femininity, or something.

By far the most unintentionally hilarious part was certainly when one of the women said, in all apparent seriousness, that the roller derby sport is for women of all shapes and sizes. As far as I could see, none of the women featured in the show was anything less than highly attractive in the conventional sense. For example, there was not a single "fat and fit" woman competing in the rink. The same phenomenon is evident in other similar media products such as Suicidegirls and the feminist list "The Real Hot 100", neither of which seems to feature one woman who is even fat, let alone obese. The producers of the show "L-Word" also seem to know perfectly well which side their bread is buttered on.

It's an... interesting idea that when an attractive woman puts on punk makeup and piercings, she is striking some kind of blow against the beauty norms. In reality, of course, she will only go on to prove the very solidity of those norms. Our sociobiologal programming tells us what to find attractive and what to find ugly the same way it tells us to taste sugar as sweet and shit as disgusting, and the cultural symbols of don't really change anything on top of that. In the end, objective reality always beats social construction. When a girl has a sexually attractive face and body, she can dress in a burlap sack and put clown makeup on her face, and she will still be sexually attractive. If a woman is an ugly pig, she can put on the best clothes, hair and makeup and yet she will still remain an ugly pig. There is a good reason why beautiful models get paid a lot even after PhotoShop was invented and can supposedly make any woman look beautiful.

But not everyone seems to be able to say these self-evident truths as boldly as I do. Instead, a popular idea that many people pay at least lip service to is that there is a massive diversity in what men consider beautiful and attractive. According to this view, only very immature and stupid men such as myself would consider, say, a Playboy centerfold to be the pinnacle of sexiness, whereas the good and smart men understand that the obese middle-aged woman is the real ideal of beauty. Or something like that. (Cue the profeminist men to claim that this really is what they believe.)

In reality, the preferences of men (and women for that matter) are highly uniform and strongly correlated, and any enterprise that wants to turn an actual profit with a product that relies on its customers considering the people depicted and featured in this product to be attractive must obey this reality or quickly go bankrupt. Talk is cheap, and actions speak much louder than words. In the free market, you get to pretend and posture only for so long, but eventually you have to put your money where your mouth is. Free market has the nasty habit of telling the truth about the real value of all things, and judging from it, it doesn't seem to me that men really value obese middle-aged women that much for their attractiveness. This is not surprising, since for all the talk about how middle-aged women are "beautiful", if the average twenty-year old woman one morning woke up to find out that she had transformed overnight to essentially look like Susan Sarandon today, she would probably shoot herself before nightfall.

Speaking of movie starlets, if men's preferences are highly diverse, then very well, riddle me this: how is it possible that in every single romantic comedy or action movie that I have ever seen, the female lead has been a woman who I, were I single and the possibility came up, would happily have sex with in a heartbeat? How do the movie producers and casting directors know me and what I consider attractive so well? It's absolutely eerie! It's like they're reading my mind! And this doesn't even change when the movie comes from a completely different culture, such as China, India or the other countries of the Far East. Obviously me and the few guys who share my shallow preferences are the target audience of virtually all movie producers, instead of all those wiser and more mature men who consider obese middle-aged women to be the most attractive of all women. Looks like my money is good here, and yours just is not!

But let's get back to reality for a moment. There are some truly "alternative" small niche markets, that's true, but they are small niche markets. If men really were diverse in their preferences, the world would be a very different place than what it is now, instead of every single magazine, movie, TV show and porn site employing women from the exact same ideal attractiveness template. We would see this massive diversity in all media, each media entrepreneur trying to conquer a part of the market that others currently ignore. But for some mysterious reason, this just doesn't seem to happen. This is strange, since few entrepreneurs generally refuse to pick up easy money.

Especially damning to the idea of diverse preferences is the porn market. Since (a) the very purpose of porn is to depict people who are as sexually desirable as possible, (b) porn is bought and consumed in private, (c) the whole question of social acceptability and obedience of cultural norms is moot to start with so the customers don't need to pretend that they like something that they don't, and (d) photos and videos of attractive women can be copied infinitely at essentially zero cost, the conclusion is inevitable. Porn tells us the ice-cold truth about the actual sexual preferences of men who buy it. Many men have a pretty crappy choice in real women, but few men are too poor to buy whichever porn they like best. Each customer can and will get the exact product geared towards what he finds sexy, with thousands of entrepreneurs feverishly competing to fit this ideal to get his money. So where is all the diversity that one would expect to emerge in the free market that caters to diverse preferences? There is a thriving porn industry that serves the 2% of men who are gay, but where is the thriving industry that serves perhaps the 50% of men who find obese middle-aged women attractive?

But perhaps every single media entrepreneur in every field is just plain old stupid, catering to only a small minority of their potential customers and ignoring the rest, tossing away the potential profits there. Hey, it's really quite possible: the modern Hollywood does this very thing by ignoring the mainstream and putting out films about gay cowboys and edgy and transgressive transsexuals, thus earning at best only a tenth in the box office of what they would earn by making movies tailored for the majority preferences and values. (Say anything you want about the Hollywood bigwigs, we can't deny that these people have principles!)

But assuming that there really is wide variation of preferences, surely widening the product line would also widely increase the profits. For example, there could be different editions of Playboy or Maxim or whatelsehaveyou available so that all articles were the same, but the pictorials in each edition were geared for men with particular preferences. There would be one edition for us immature and shallow men, then another edition for men who think women in their fifties are the most beautiful, a third edition for men who think slender women are unattractive, and so on. My God, Hugh Hefner must be a total idiot not to do this already and increase his profits tenfold. Or if not him, some competitor who is eager to become the top dog.

Could it just be possible that Hugh Hefner actually knows something about what men consider sexy and attractive? In effect, he bets millions of dollars each month that his idea of what men find most attractive is at least close enough to what most men really do find most attractive. And he seems to win this bet pretty consistently, which gives his views certain plausibility. The opponents of his view, of course, mainly flap their gums about "social construction" and "unfairness" and other code words that losers love to use to try to hide the fact that they are losing.

By the way, what the hell is it with the narcissistic idea that everybody is immensely beautiful and everyone must therefore behave as if this was even remotely true? People with a healthy self esteem should have no trouble admitting that they don't look anything like what most people would choose to look like if they had a perfectly free choice. For example, I know I am at best average-looking among the men in my age cohort, and it follows from the market laws of the assortative mating process that the same goes for my wife with a high probability. The same goes for most people, and there is nothing whatsover to gain by pretending that everybody is beautiful any more than there would be in pretending that everyone is rich, can play the piano beautifully, etc.

Women seem to be able to understand, at least in some subconscious level if not in actual spoken words, that they really are vastly different in how good they look and how attractive they therefore are to men. But few seem able to grasp and accept that men, especially those men who rank the highest socially and whose opinions therefore matter most, will then treat them differently based on how attractive they are. Women consider this "unfair" and "shallow" and "wrong". Men seem to know their place and be more reality-based in this respect: it's quite rare to see a real-life Fat Bastard proclaiming that he is just as handsome and attractive as any other guy, and demanding that women have to treat him as well as they would treat a truly rich, handsome and attractive man. The equalist message that feminists and other progressives like to spout doesn't seem to stick to most men: and would most women really be happier if it did?

1 comment

Actually, these days, it's not Hugh Hefner picking the girls, it's his daughter. But she understands men well enough, too. Playboy has lost significant market share to other men's magazines, but only because they don't do "spread shots", and even Penthouse does. But the girls in the other men's magazines are generally slender with large breasts, too.

The "Suicide Girls" do have a significant contingent of somewhat curvier girls than most other porn outfits, but tey still have larger hips than waists, and the larger girls also almost invariably have pretty large breasts.

There *is* fat-chick porn, and old-lady porn, but those really are niche markets. (Though a lot of the girls in mainstream porn end up pushing 30 before they leave; it's possible to *look* younger with some effort. It's not possible to remain 19 for 6 years, as some girls in porn claim to.)

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