The assault on the world’s beleaguered male majority continues, at least in the tiny minds of the readers of lady-hating internet garbage fire Return of Kings. The latest insult to all that is male and good?
Regular RoK contributor David G. Brown answers that question loudly and clearly in the title of a recent post:
His evidence? Two non-white women he doesn’t think are super hot won state-level contests in the Miss America and Miss World pageants: Magnolia Maymuru, an Aboriginal woman who won the title of Miss Northern Territory, Australia in the Miss World pageant; and Arianna Quan, a Chinese-American woman who won the Miss Michigan title in the Miss America pageant.
As Brown sees it, both of these “winners’ (he puts the words in quotes)
are so unbelievably plain and even ugly that the “beauty” in beauty pageant should have been removed from the contests they each entered.
Actually, for what its worth, the Miss America pageant already has removed the word “beauty,” famously referring to itself as a “scholarship contest,” while Miss World likes to talk about “beauty with a purpose” and the charity programs their contestants support. But most people think of them as beauty contests because, well, that’s basically what they are.
The real point here is that Brown is complaining that these pageants, to some limited degree at least, reflect the diversity of the real world, a complaint that seems especially ironic when applied to the Miss World pageant, given that every single country in the world contains some portion of people who are not white, and that in many countries these “minorities,” as Brown calls them, are actually, you know, the majority. Shocking, I know. While the Miss World pageant started off with all-white winners, it has awarded numerous women of color the crown since the 1960s.
Racists may think of the US and Australia as “white countries,” in which white men should have a lock on political and industrial power and white women should have a similar lock on beauty pageant crowns, but the world is a bit more complicated than that.
Nearly a third of those living in Australia’s Northern Territory are indigenous Australian people. Meanwhile, there are 18 million Asian-Americans living in the US, nearly 6% of the total population. God forbid one of them win a pageant title once in a while.
Now, to be fair, Brown’s complaint isn’t that women of color have been winning beauty contests; it’s that “ugly” women of color have been winning beauty pageant titles. So how exactly does he determine “ugliness?”
On the street, neither of these girls is going to turn heads. Another test, whether women would want to look like them or straight men would want them, would also result in very few takers.
Has he done some sort of scientific poll to test either of these propositions? Nah. He’s just taking his own preferences and projecting them onto the world around him.
Brown insists that he’s not being racist, because, as it turns out, some Chinese people think Quan is ugly, too! An article on Shanghaist (discussed in a Roosh V forum thread I couldn’t bring myself to read) reports that “the reaction from Chinese netizens [to Quan’s crowning] has been overwhelmingly negative with many writing in to criticize her looks.”
Brown is quick to use these Chinese critics as, yes, a shield to protect himself from accusations of bigotry. “In the case of Quan, the biggest criticisms came from her ancestral homeland of China,” he writes.
Chinese netizens need not fear the kind of racism accusations that would be leveled at white Americans questioning whether she deserved the Miss America title for one of America’s most populous states … .
But from the comments Shanghaist quotes it’s clear that the issue isn’t Quan’s deviance from some universal Platonic ideal of beauty; it’s that she looks too “American.”
“She’s ugly AND she isn’t Chinese,” one Chinese commenter wrote of Quan, who was born in Beijing. “This is probably the American standard of beauty,” wrote another. “She looks exactly like Mulan in Disney.”
Yep. Chinese people can be parochial bigots, too.
As for Maymuru, Brown is convinced that political correctness is cowing potential critics into silence.
Media coverage of Maymuru’s crowning was ecstatic, namely because, in the words of many racial quota-leaning commenters, “it was about time” that an Aboriginal Australian won such a title. Few online respondents dared to call her unattractive due to the near certainty of them being labeled as racist bigots.
Brown has no need to worry on this front. The author of such lovely previous posts as 3 Reasons I Will Never Apologize For Being White, Only White Countries Are Expected To Let In Hordes Of Illegal Migrants, Why Isn’t Anyone In The Establishment Talking About Jewish And Asian Privilege? and The New Star Wars Movie Spinoff Reaffirms Disney’s Hatred Of White Males has already made pretty clear how he should be labeled.
@Handsome Jack & Axecalibur
Yeah but they’re ugly minority women, ruining the perfect standards of beauty of western civilisation by winning beauty pageants, or something.
Also, while I do not claim to know or understand the “regular” standard of beauty (plus I always thought Plato was full of shit, which made for interesting times in philosophy classes), I’m pretty sure Magnolia Maymuru and Arianna Quan do conform. Pretty sure that the whole RoK rant never even was about beauty, just the “minority” part.
@John
Who even knows at this point. A nice thing about the internet, and globalized modernity in general, is that the heirarchically approved standards of beauty are widening (puns). More varied shapes, sizes, styles, other S words. Ideally there wouldn’t be such standards, but this’ll hafta do for now. That said, I’m not sure Ms Maymuru in particular fits within the standards. She’s tall and thin, check and check. But she doesn’t really look like the other contestants, and the name of the game is, as you pointed out, conformity. There is a certain beauty in rebellion (and how sad is it that her daring to look like she does could be considered a rebellious act), but it’s not quite the same type of ‘regular’ beauty. I think. Just spitballin…
^Word
Off-topic, but there are not one, not two, but three movies coming out which the alt-right is pretty much contractually-obligated to vow to boycott and write a clutch of sniffy articles about. The first, Loving, concerns the Loving v. Virginia case, by which interracial marriage was decriminalized in the US. The second, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, was revealed to have another female protagonist plus a lot of non-white characters in its trailer. The third, Hidden Figures, concerns Katherine Johnson, the female African-American mathematician who calculated flight trajectories for Apollo 11. Check out these movies’ comment threads on YouTube and IMDB – they already contain just exactly the whines you’d expect them to contain.
@mrex:
No, not to you and I, but it does in the bizarro world of RoK readers. Since they feel a woman’s only value is in her appearance, they think that every time an “unworthy” (minority, overweight, older, etc.) woman is told she’s beautiful, she starts thinking she’s all that, possibly even attracting romantic partners, and it just totally shoots their pussynomics supply-and-demand theories all to hell. (I think there’s an element of jealousy there, too…if the so-called uggos have a better chance of getting laid than they do, what does that make them?)
Being the final judge of attractiveness (and hence, worth) is really the only leverage they think they have over women. They don’t want a woman’s sense of her own attractiveness to come from any other source but them. Certainly not from within.
The tragedies that befall PUAs!
Every day, it’s something new. Women of color winning beauty contests. Women who take 20 minutes to eat pancakes. Women who are fat. One particular woman who seems likely to win the US presidency.
It’s so bad that Roosh has been muttering for a year or so about the need to take up arms against feminists.
How do they find the strength to go on? How do they make it through a single day without collapsing on a curb, bursting into tears, and refusing to move until the universe starts going their way for once!
@Axe
“Ugly” is one of the most common adjectives to attack women, even if it has absolutely zero relevance. The old street harassment patterns (women are beautiful until they walk past the harasser without answering to the advances, at which point they become ugly) tend to show it, but you also see it in the abuse constantly thrown at, say, feminist writers, among others.
A woman who’s not white DARES to win a beauty pageant ? Even in this case, “ugly” is not a statement of whether or not she should have won according to RoK douches, it’s just the generic attack word, kind of a welcome card to the “If what you did pissed off the worst people in the world, then you did it right” club.
My thought is that the RoK moron probably does find them attractive (not that it matters, of course) but decided they were ugly to, err, “prove his point”, like they do for any other woman. Weaponized delusion ?
Granted, I could be wrong, and even if I’m right it doesn’t change anything to the fact that his boner or lack thereof is not actually a relevant indicator of who or what has a claim to beauty, as has been said above.
@Kat
The universe is much better at going its own way than MGTOWs, it seems.
I don’t think pictures of two random women put across the point you were driving.
@ Kat
Rubberized chicken as a comfort food.
and an almost unshakable devotion to Trump.
I’m always a little surprised when I’m reminded that big beauty contests like Miss World are still around. Even if I were an MRA, I think my reaction would be “meh, who cares who wins those things now”. When I was a kid, those things were still televised, and made front page news, but who could even name the current Miss World nowadays?
@Handsome Jack
My first comment was really two different parts. The one you quoted was the reply to you and Axe, the rest was just my own personal take on the topic. And yeah that wasn’t clear, sorry about that.
For what it’s worth though, I don’t think pictures of random women are irrelevant to what I assume was Latte Cat’s point : disproving the “minority = ugly” part of the RoK rant.
Then again this is me posting in the middle of my 37th hour without sleep, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d missed the point entirely on multiple things, along with being unintelligible. Turns out you don’t get used to insomnia : you grow older, and you can’t cope with it as well as when you were a teen x_x
Eh, as much as I get Latte Cat’s point, responding to comments about Aboriginal women with a picture of a black woman seriously smacks of “They all look the same.” I know I did a serious double-take at it before realising what they meant.
Won’t the UN look into the injustices these PUAs have suffered?
Amnesty International — can’t they start a letter-writing campaign?
Human Rights Watch — won’t they defend PUAs’ human rights?
Their pain tears at the heart.
Kat, maybe we could have a hunger strike? I’ll skip lunch. Well, maybe have some fruit, but that’s basically starving.
@abars01
Maybe this time they can claim to take 15 million dollars in revenue for all those films, or would it 5 million split evenly between the three films as the MRA demo tends to stay a constant to dwindling number so they have to split the effort? Or maybe they’ll focus more on one like Rogue Force one, but that would take effort away from two historical dramas about minority rights and achievements.
@John
Possible, but…
Exactly
Condolences
Look, guys, I get that your baton-twirling skills leave these gals in the shade, and you’re TWICE as congenial as Miss Michigan, but the rules say you have to be a girl, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
(Interestingly, I recall a rash of articles and blog posts a few years ago griping that Muslim women were winning these things because politically correct agenda. This ranged from Pam Geller claiming that Rima Fakih winning g Miss U SA was a Hezbollah plot to, of all people, Daniel Pipes, who you’d think had more gravitas, or thinks he does, solemnly writing about how all these Muslim beauty queens were clearly part of, you know, some kind of beauty pageant affirmative action. It was weird.)
@Moggie
Yes! To call attention to the cause, I won’t eat brussels sprouts or kohlrabi.
PS: It’s only very recently come to my attention that Moggie means “cat” in British English.
One of the things I keep noticing amongst internet regressives is an obsession with finding some universal, objective standard to judge tastes by. The people complaining about this story, for example, believe that female beauty isn’t just a matter of taste, but is something they can definitively make statements about.
Similarly, Gamergaters keep talking about “objective” reviews, Scott Adams talks about being unbiased and unemotional, Less Wrong / the alt-right discuss being “rational”, and so on.
It’s almost as if a subjective world is one that’s too difficult for them. This is weird, seeing as they’re the ones who have superior intellects and we have only our ladybrainz/mangina-brains.
@Sinkable John:
My sympathies on the insomnia. A lack of sleep is extremely debilitating to me, so my hugs if you’re suffering from it.
I am still suprised how narrow and warped these guy’s idea of beauty is. It is like it was lifted from a bad sitcom. I always tell myself it can’t be. Surelly they find more women attractive than the cannonized HB10s? And time and time again they prove me wrong. Very few women look like the type they deem acceptable (and they only deem these girls acceptable up until the moment they open their mouths and make these men’s genitals cold again with being humans with icky toughts and stuff)
My question is ; how did this “cult of one acceptable beauty” come to be in these internet circles. I don’t want to blame porn and the media ,bc that seems too simplistic.
Are they really only attracted to these type of women, or they just lean into the ideology, and trow around their version of evolutionary psychology a lot.
I know that I am probably an outlier, bc 1, I am bisexual 2, I prefer people of any gender who are not conventionally attractive and/or gender nonconforting. (this doesn’t make me enlightened or more progressive, this is just the way I am)
(I still think that David Suchet in the role of Poirot was the hight of male beauty, and I will fight for it)
I don’t have by itself a problem with thoses bozos having very restrictive beauty standard.
But in addition to very restrictive beauty standard, they have two other problems : they want to bed a woman who is in thoses standards without any effort from their side, and they only judge women on their beauty.
It’s the combination of all three that is ugly. They feel they are entitled to have every woman be in that super narrow beauty criteria, and each of theses women be open to casual sex, but only if he feel like it.
Also, half of them don’t even try to be good looking, the other half try to attein a masculine power fantasy instead of trying to have quality women feel attractive.
I don’t know if you’ve read any articles about Trump’s obsession with beauty pageants. It’s even been reported that he has used his power and influence to harass women into sleeping with him in return for entry into the top flight contests like Miss America etc.
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/23/trump_didnt_make_miss_universe_degrading_beauty_pageants_have_been_harmful_to_women_since_they_began/
*le sigh* I know what you mean, Unsinkable John. Sometimes it happens online too. I personally got that on FB (is it me or is FB the new Tinder?). I was “‘ very pretty, beautiful, had “sexy lips” until I told him to mind his own business when he asked me a nosy question when I told him that I planned on being a bartender. Then he told me to f**k off and that I was an ugly, selfish girl.
Enough about me though…condolences on the insomnia
@Maxi: My idea of male beauty skews more towards Vincent Price, but Suchet was a truly terrific Poirot, wasn’t he? And whoever took care of his mustache to give it this form deserves an award:
I think there might be a tiny grain of truth in the idea of universal beauty. I can’t think of any culture with any kind of design motif that doesn’t incorporate some sort of flower symbol as decorative ornament. Basically, we all think flowers are pretty, though we may have different taste in flowers.
I’m willing to buy that ‘fitness’ plays into the universal beauty thing for humans, but even that has contrary examples (heroin chic, consumptive ‘beauty’, etc.) I don’t think that we understand fully how attractiveness is driven and it certainly varies a lot from individual to individual and is influenced a lot by society and culture and fashion.
But this guy is a nasty piece of work if he thinks his eye is the only eye. However, he’s right (inadvertently) about something. Some of the women he’s referring to would not have been considered attractive enough by a judging panel to a ridiculously constrained standard of beauty even 20 years ago. Women were treated like dogs at Crufts. Your dog may be a beautiful setter, but if it doesn’t conform to the breed ‘standards’, it won’t win. Yes, the beauty standards have been widened, and I’m sure that’s definitely to the good.
I still think beauty pageants kinda suck though. When I looked through at the picture of Magnolia someone linked, I was really judging her as I was kind of encouraged to do by the whole system. She is a lovely looking person, but my immediate thought was “ugh, her arms are too skinny” and I could wrap that up in “She’s being encouraged to starve herself concern”, but her arms might be perfectly serviceable and I’m just judging her harshly against my own standards of ‘beauty’ as the whole system encourages us to do and is no doubt influenced by my own internalised harsh concern about my arms (I think they’re way, way too fat and ugly and I do my best to conceal them.)
@ rugbyyogi
When Iwao Takamoto was asked to design Scooby Doo he consulted with a Great Dane expert and got the list of all the characteristics that a prize winning Great Dane was meant to have. He then drew Scooby to be exactly the opposite. Hence the bow legs, bent back etc.
I love that. I think that’s why Scooby is one of my heroes.
(I’m guessing also that one of the prized characteristics is being able to talk properly?)