Fresh from the Men’s Rights subreddit, some thoughts from some dude called atiwywr on cougars, age of consent laws, and Justin Beiber.
So “cougars” are perverse, but pedophilia – sorry, ephebophilia — is natural and good?
The age of consent in most American states is 16.
Complaining that men can’t legally have sex with girls – sorry, “fertile women” – aged 15 and younger: Men’s Rights activism at its finest!
I love it how you pull out strawmen against anyone and everyone who doesn’t conform to the dominant paradigm of this blog. It really makes you look witty, “edgy”, and *intelligent*. I hope you understand the concept(SARACSM).
You can stamp your feet about strawmen all you want, dude. It still won’t change the fact that your entire argument hinges on the assumption that the opinions of anyone other than heterosexual men don’t count.
No, it doesn’t. It hinges on the fact that beauty and sexuality actually can be mutually exclusive. Even when it comes to people.
Except you directly contradicted that point when you attributed the aesthetic ideal in Greek art to the prevalence of homosexuality in ancient Greek culture.
And all this has shit to do with whether or not women find men physically attractive anyway.
Indeed this has nothing to do with the original question of how women perceive men in terms of looks, but you see, Om Nom has nothing to say about that other than “but for me…”. So apparently we’re not going to talk about that any more, since it’s an argument he can’t win.
Nomless: Much of that had to do with the acceptance and pervasiveness of homosexuality in ancient greek culture. And before you pull a strawman and accuse me of being homophobic, such a fact is not a bad thing at all. However, most naked men look nothing like those men depicted in ancient greek and roman statues.
The first is a misunderstanding of how sexuality was seen in Classical Greece/Rome. It was different from the present, and the ideals of beauty weren’t really related to it.
The second… your homophobia, or lack thereof, is immaterial to the first.
The third, also irrelevant. Most naked women look nothing like the abstractions, and selections we have in present art.
What the “women are prettier” crowd are using as their examples are the Heidi Klums, the Kristina Hendricks, the Kate Bassingers, the Marylin Monroes, the Georgina Cavendishes of the world.
These are the people who discount the art of Rubens, who dismiss the Camryn Manheims and the Cass Elliots of the world and say Scarlett Johanssen needs to lose weight.
The sorts who say that women who aren’t slim, and young, and lacking in blemishes, cellulite and who fail to have perfect hair, are “ugly” and not fit to fuck.
Which is, from the evidence, patently untrue.
It’s got nothing to do with you being homophobic, or not, it’s that you hate women (and spare us the plaintive cries that you don’t. If you didn’t you wouldn’t be spouting the drivel which is your stock in trade, and pretending that women don’t like the way men look).
Nomless: No, it doesn’t. It hinges on the fact that beauty and sexuality actually can be mutually exclusive. Even when it comes to people.
So the Greek Ideal had nothing to do with the, “prevalence of homosexuality” in Ancient Greece.
One of the interesting things about wearing kilts is that I get comments. I get comments from men, and comments from women.
The men seem to be impressed (in New York, in the SF Bay Area the are more common, and the comments from men are different; more akin to those of women; and about as frequent†) that I am wearing one, and that it looks comfy.
The women seem to be more appreciative of the look in general; and there is some sense of approbation of me. It’s not the same as being catcalled; I don’t think, but there does seem to be an element of, “that’s hot”. I don’t know if they are abstracting some platonic ideal of “man” into the reaction, of if they like my type.
One of the most pleasant was a woman who called out, “I like your kilt”, and when I said, “Thank you,” added, “Up with kilts,”. She was in her late 60’s early 70s. I saw her, and her companion (a slightly younger woman) eating at the restaurant near the shop I was going to.
† The inference I take from that is men, as a rule, are more prone to thinking they can get away with making an observation. I also think part of it is that they figure any male self-confident enough to wear a kilt is going to be able to take them making a comment.
But that’s my take on it. I don’t know that they share the same sentiments.
Heh, so any man who has an opinion of his own that is not 100% word for word with your Rad Fem ideology automatically neccessarily hates women? Is that the high concept/core premise of your gender politics?
The kilt thing ties in to my observations about flashiness earlier. We’re more likely to be attracted to people if we notice that they exist (all of us, nothing gendered about it). Since kilts are relatively unusual, they draw the eye. Of course that doesn’t guarantee a positive reaction, because tastes vary, but it does mean the man who’s wearing a kilt is more likely to be noticed, including by the women who happen to appreciate his particular type.
Oh, he’s got no excuse.
And I’d put “I like your X” in a different category than “Hey baby!” and similar catcalling BS (YMMV, etc).
Argenti: Well yes, Nomless, like ABNOY, isn’t commenting in a vacuum (and yes, ABNOY, I am saying that based on the totality of your words I think you hate women. You may want to fuck them, but that doesn’t mean you like them).
I put “I like your X,” in a different category too, but the, “Up with kilts,” is a bit of a different thing, as it has a bit of a sexual connotation. I’m not getting catcalled, but I do get looks, and I’ve been laughed at (always by young men in groups. I get to have the different experience of being able to turn and counter them, because they are trying to prove how manly they are, compared to me. If I tell them to laugh, and get it out of their system, I am both deflecting the point of the exercise, and counter-mocking them [in ways they don’t quite understand are happening].
That’s an option not really afforded women who are having their clothing/bodies mocked. Challenging the men who do it isn’t an actual counter, because they don’t see the women as being legitimate beings in their own right, and so they don’t have to react as if they were when their assholishness is called out.
I think that’s what frustrates a lot of the misogynists who come here. They sort of expect to get the same sort of reaction they would get to street harassment, and when they don’t it throws them off their game. The meltdowns are them trying to get the reactions they expect.
I have suspicions it also explains the cyclical nature of the regularly trollish.
See, there you go making assumptions about what men(me in particular) find attractive. I made no references to those models you speak of. I DON’T LIKE SKINNY CHICKS! Cellulite is unattractive but I like voluptuous women with ginormous behinds and bulging thighs but who aren’t morbidly obese. Unfortunately, too many western women think those beanpoles models in magazines are what most guys find attractive, nothing could be further from the truth. Women do not have to perfect to be attractive. Their bodies are much rounder than men’s bodies, which is a big reason why they are better looking overall. 99%(at least) of people on this Earth find male birds to be much prettier than female birds because their plumage is much more vividly colored and more decorative. In birds, the males are the sex that is attractive. But humans, it is the female sex that more attractive.
To sum up, MSN finds women attractive, MSN acknowledges no opinion other than his own, therefore women are objectively attractive and men are objectively unattractive.
@Dracula
If only all those straight women and gay men would go away and stop ruining his worldview.
Also, history didn’t happen, because there was NO TIME EVER ANYWHERE when general opinion held that the male form was more perfect and attractive.
ANCIENT GREECE: didn’t happen.
Also hilarious, “cellulite is unattractive.” Virtually all women have at least some cellulite.
So the abridged MSN is “women are more attractive than men, except for one genetic feature in fat storage that occurs in 90% of women, and like 99% of food-secure women. Those 90% aren’t actually more attractive. My evolutionary model doesn’t apply to them.”
Biology TRUFAX.
What makes you so certain about the MOTIVES behind ancient greek artists and artisans for making sculptures idealizing the male form? With regards to the ancient Romans, I would argue it probably had more to do with their patriarchal worldview that men, not women, should represent humanity as a whole(the Romans were a staunchly patriarchal society). What makes you think that such a motive does not apply to the ancient greeks?
I could ask you the same thing. Are you recanting your previous claim, or just hoping no one will notice that you’re contradicting yourself?
Haha they didn’t just glorify men as the image of society, they also glorified individual men’s bodies. There is a reason that we have like three hundred 3D representations of Julius Caesar’s abs and only a single 2D representation of Cleopatra’s face.
Plato and Aristotled flatly said that men were more perfect in form than women.
Also, have you ever heard or read the summary of any premodern European opera? Pretty much every opera can be summarized as “ladies go crazy for the sharp-dressed man.”
yeah, i love how the premise of omnom’s argument is that we can’t possibly know what those guys were thinking, as if they never wrote that shit down
you think the pretend internet philosopher would be more aware of that
“What makes you so certain about the MOTIVES behind ancient greek artists and artisans for making sculptures idealizing the male form? ”
And what if it is? You really think today’s beauty ideals came out of a vacuum and are logic-based? People are influenced by society in their tastes, duh.
Nomless: There you go assuming that I said all such are the same, and therefore you are.
“What the “women are prettier crowd” are doing describes a group. When they say, “men are uglier than women” they are not saying they like women to look at more than they like men, they are saying (as you do) that women are, “objectively” prettier.
Which means the unspoken archtypes they are using are the famous ones. The one’s we are all told are “beautiful”.
Which leads to those very tropes I referred to above.
Ugh: Not just Ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, Sun King France; aspects of Napoleonic France and Regency England. Renaissance Italy.
None of those happened.
Because, “women are more attractive” in humans.
Me, I figure that, as rational beings humans are going to be more towards both sexes being attractive.
Nomless: What makes you so certain about the MOTIVES behind ancient greek artists and artisans for making sculptures idealizing the male form?
The things they wrote about the perfection of the human form; and it’s ideal state being male.
pecunium — “I put “I like your X,” in a different category too, but the, “Up with kilts,” is a bit of a different thing, as it has a bit of a sexual connotation.” — fair enough, I’d been thinking of “up with kilts” in the generic “up with [thing]” sense, but I guess in the world of up-skirt-photos…yeah, kilts aren’t really [generic thing]
As for the counter-mocking — XD excellent
“I have suspicions it also explains the cyclical nature of the regularly trollish.” — quite possibly…they’re used to women ignoring them because that’s safer than pissing them off, but this is the internet, what’re they going to do, resort to name calling?
re, “up with kilts”, I think it’s a statement of desiring to have the kilt lifted, since the standard understanding of kilts is that they are worn, “regimental”.
It was, contextually, a bit past flirtatious, and into salacious.