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.
I have believed for a long time now that these people can’t deal with a complex world, so everything has to be labeled “bad”, “good”, “yes”, “no”, “black”, “white”. Otherwise, they can’t function.
@Jenora Feuer:
@Crys T:
Thanks for the education! That’s very interesting.
Weirdly I find the similarities between Afrikaans and German very convenient. (Dutch, on the other hand, just sounds like strange medieval Afrikaans spoken with a weird accent, which places it squarely in the uncanny valley.) The shared vocabulary is very useful.
What I find very difficult is that I don’t speak a language which has cases, so they’re just utterly alien to me. I’m used to verbs conjugating but the concept of a noun declining is odd. It means that I can’t play at making baby-speak sentences until I understand all the theoretical grammar, and I’m a very practical learner so that makes it difficult.
Linguistics is fascinating. I know so little about it but whenever I learn about it, it makes me want to abandon science and run away to become a linguist.
@EJ I did Latin and a tiny bit of Arabic, both ages ago, and I find the idea of cases really hard, too. I can handle fairly complex verb systems, but cases, they do my head in.
@ EJ
Ironically I don’t even know what that sentence means in English.
(Seriously)
English does actually have the remnants of a case system. Specifically, ending a possessive with -‘s is a remnant of the German genitive declension adding -es to the ends of nouns in the case of a possessive, except that we decided to leave out the e. (Which is why there’s an apostrophe for possessives, as they indicate the left-out letter.)
That said, the only other place where English really uses cases is in pronouns.
Nominative –> subject (he/she/it)
Accusative –> object (him/her/it)
Dative –> indirect object (to him/to her/to it)
Genitive –> possessive (his/hers/its)
English is just this weird Danish/Latin/French cross-breed, and a lot of the more complex parts of each of the grammars got thrown out over the years.
What Jenora said. And although I try to have the mindset that grammar should be descriptive rather than prescriptive, I have admit that I *hate* that so many people use nominative case personal pronouns after prepositions, eg “this is between he & I” – AAAAGGHHH!
Yes, I’m a great, big old hypocrite.
@Alan:
As I sort of implied above, noun declining/declension is when a noun or article is modified based on the case (subject/object) of the word in question.
Latin makes this even more fun with cases like the Vocative, used for addressing an object (usually rendered in English as ‘O …’. Which leads to all the jokes about spending Latin classes learning how to address a table.
Aside from the possessive, English doesn’t do that anymore. In German, on the other hand, even the word ‘the’ differs based on male/female/neuter and on subject/object/indirect/possessive, meaning that you could be using any one of der/die/das/des/den/dem depending on context.
Oh, and I agree with EJ. Linguistics is fascinating. A combination of history, applied psychology, and multiple attempts to set up official systems derailed by actual people going off and just doing what made sense for them.
History is where you get things like the names of meat in English often being the French name of the animal. Beef == boeuf, Pork == porc, Pullet/Poultry == poulet, all based on the English nobles having spent their time at the French courts…
My German teacher is also of the descriptive rather than prescriptive school of thought. She’s recently read that apparently colloquial German is abandoning a lot of its case system complexities, and is therefore apparently not sure what to teach me.
Given that she’s a huge Wagner and Goethe fan, however, I suspect that I’m going to be taught the old form of things.
I’m from Michigan and I’m proud to have Arianna Quan representing my state in the Miss America Pageant, so much so that I wrote about her crowning and reign and wished her well in Atlantic City next month.
https://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2016/06/miss-michigan-on-diversity-and.html
I approve of her message and I hope she wins.
As for Brown, I’m glad our host reads him so we don’t have to!
@Ellesar
I’d appreciate if you’d refrain from
A)denigrating a woman’s looks. A woman unrelated to the controversy at hand, no less. Even as a means of refuting assholes, it’s not OK and is entirely unnecessary.
B)calling a woman who’s spent the better part of this year trying to make domestic violence accusations stick ‘conniving’ and ‘spiteful’. Not helping
Please and thank you
@NelC
Thank you! Yeah, I had thought that Mapplethorpe was a likely-ish contender for the photographer – it totally sounds/looks in my mind’s eye, as it were, like it could maybe be one of his, but I’m not very good at image searches! I’ve just had another look adding Lyon’s name, but maybe this pic wasn’t a very popular one – for whatever reason I can’t see it anywhere. Eh, no matter – it was just a thought, and I appreciate the help!
I competed in pageants in my early 20s, and I can say that there is a lot more to them that goes on behind the scenes than what we see on tv.
On the whole, I think the pageant directors are making an effort to select winners based on personality, talent, poise, and ambassador skills rather than on physical beauty. However, I think pageants with amateur and bias panel of judges are still evaluating women on how good these women look walking across a stage. That’s why it still seems like pageants are still all about looks rather than anything else.
It doesn’t surprise me that people like this feel entitled too see women on stage that are pleasing to the eyes. It’s not right, but it’s reflective of a history of how our culture views women.
@ jenora
I really appreciate your efforts in trying to educate me, but I’m a lost cause :-). I’ve basically got the same look on my face as my dog when I tried to teach her tricks “Look it’s simple. No, don’t just eat the biscuit! On your nose first. Do you need to see the YouTube video again?”
As for the beef/cow thing, my understanding was that it arose from the fact that the people who farmed the animals were poor Saxons but the people who got to eat them were posh Normans. #classwar1066
If you want another linguistic thing, some people spend a lot of time arguing about the difference between ‘unlawful’ and ‘illegal’. But they’re actually completely interchangeable. Just one’s from the Norse and the other’s Norman French.
Re: beauty pageants
I can see what some people may find them problematic but it’s easy to avoid offence if you just follow the example of Father Ted.
Als erstes machen wir mal Axe eine Freude. Hi Axe, freut mich dich kennen zu lernen und cool das du Deutsch gelernt hast. 🙂
I hope that was neither too easy nor to diffficult. 😉
Yep. It’s the evil dative killing the poor little genitive. The newest trend however is leaving out prepositions. For example: “Ich gehe Schwimmbad.” instead of “Ich gehe ins Schwimbad”. In English that would be: “I go swimming pool” instead of “I go to the swimming pool.” I have a degree in German linguistics, so I know that prescriptive grammar is essentially pointless, but this still makes me whimper a bit every time I hear it.
While I, being a native speaker discovered a few years ago that I have no clue how to explain them to someone not already familiar with the concept.
I had a job teaching kids from refugee families German and cases were the hardest part, because once I got out of my own intuitive language use, I realized just how complicated and illogical some of those rules must seem.
Grammatical genders, too. For example, men and boys are grammatically masculine, women feminine, but girls are neutral, so you actually say “it” not “she” when referring to a girl. While objects are not always neutral, but can be male or female.
The initial confusion of my students taught me a lot about the inconsistencies of my own language that I hadn’t learned in several years at university.
Yay, Latin! Does Arabic have cases? It’s one of the languages I always wanted to have a closer look at, but the script scares me. Speaking of which, I did some Japanese a while ago and it was fascinating because it’s structure is different than any of the other languages I know. It makes really heavy use of particles, for example.
Those of you who learn German, was there any particular reason you chose it above a more “useful” language like Spanish or something “traditional” like French? What kind of teaching material did you use? I would love to get a qualification as a foreign language teacher for German, so I’m really interested in this!
It’s great that I’m not the only language nerd here. 😉 I actually speak only a few, though. The rest is either “I know a bit of [language]…” or “I have a book about [language] lying around here somewhere…” My most recent addition was Welsh, too, by the way. I just liked the way the words looked. Luckily for a German person most of the sounds are easy to pronounce, unlike Irish…where I always end up feeling: “So the rule is like, half of the letters in each word are silent and the other half are pronounced completely different than you’d think. Okay…”
@Hambeast
The only thing I can honestly claim to know about brains is this : those things are the weirdest, seriously. Which also means I might be terribly wrong about that cognitive dissonance thing, by the way, but it doesn’t seem so much of a stretch given that it’s simply a slightly different version of the old adage that ignorance is bliss. Like how we believe what we allow ourselves to believe, our brain shows us what we want to see.
When it comes to beauty, it doesn’t even matter that what we perceive is not the “reality”, since “real beauty” (as in, objective beauty) doesn’t exist anyway ! It’s a wonderful thing when you think of it.
Most of my friends I wouldn’t find attractive, but to me they’re the most beautiful people in the world, even physically. “La plus belle bande de sales gueules que j’ai jamais vue !” (since we’re also on the subject of language – anyone got a good way to translate “sales gueules” ?)
On the other hand, a lot of people who aren’t unattractive become really ugly to me as soon as they start spewing their stupid shit. That was kinda awkward in junior high – hormonal rollercoaster between the moment when you see someone for the first time, and the moment they open their mouth. And of course it also worked, still does, the other way around : a great personality is definitely the best fuel for sexual attraction.
Brains are weird things, but they’re amazing.
1. Half because a lot of my childhood friends were first or second-generation German migrants, and half because I’m a huge fan of Rammstein. >_>
2. In Australia (or at least South Australia), it’s an elective class throughout high school, though I also picked up a bit from my friends and music.
I’m hardly fluent, though. I can understand it perfectly well but I never got the hang of writing my own grammatically-correct sentences. =P
@LittleLurker:
I have a lot of German ancestry, and like a lot of New World people I’m fascinated by my own heritage and the country they came out of.
There’s also the aspect that as I become aware that I’ll never return to South Africa, I’m gradually identifying as more European. I’d like to be able to live and work in Germany: I like all the Germans I’ve known and I find your national sense of humour incredibly funny.
I have some German ancestry myself, but you have to go back to the Poor Palatines to find it. That branch of the family has been living in the land that would become Canada since the American Revolution.
As for why I chose German, it mostly came down to my high school electives. French was required (again, Canada), but there were elective languages for both Spanish and German while I was there. Mostly it came down to German sounding more interesting than Spanish given I already knew some French.
(And I still say I learned more about the English language in my German class than I did in my English classes. Being able to compare languages shows you all sorts of things you might not have noticed in your own.)
Til 1st make we time Axe a joy. Hi Axe, pleases me you know to learn and cool that you German learned have
1st of all, let’s give Axe a treat. Hi Axe, I’m happy to get to know you and cool that you have learned German
From what I learned in middle/high school, kennenzulernen was 1 word. Threw me for a loop to see it in 3 parts. Also (English ‘also’, not Deutsche ,also’), shouldn’t that last clause need another verb?
,,Und cool das du Deutsch gelernt haben ist” oder so?
Wouldn’t presume to know, and you’ve obviously a better grasp of the language than I (had to look up both ,freut’ and ,Freude machen’. My grammar still rocks, but the vocab is shot). Thanks all the same!
I ain’t cryin about it. ,Die wände des Hauses sind blau’. The fuck is that?
Spanish is so useful, I didn’t see the point. Everyone learns Spanish, so why do I need to as well. And there’s nothing traditional about French. Combine that with the fact that my friends were all taking German, and that it seemed super edgy when I was 13…
Early on it was your basic textbooks. Deutsch Aktuell in our case. Then, in 3rd, 4th, and AP German, the main teaching material was us being disallowed from speaking English during class. We did anyway, of course. Still, outside of the odd ,Wie sagt man __’, I got pretty good at it
Edit: the German 4 class and the AP class had the same schedule. There wasn’t enough of either, and it’s basically the same anyway
Learning about separable verbs opened my eyes, yo!
I speak French and Spanish (French used to be very fluent once upon a time; alas very rusty now :-((( ) and read Italian, Portuguese and Catalan … but I’ve always wanted to learn German. And have tried and failed dismally several times now :-\
I suspect those dastardly declensions may have something to do with it 😉 (well, it’s an excuse. Otherwise I have to admit that my will and wits are failing me, which is more likely closer to the truth)
@ Sinkable John, sale geule … maybe “ugly mug” is not too far off, but that’s pretty literal. I’m not sure, does it carry any suggestion in this context of being a hardarse?
… um, in the spirit of proper disclosure I should clarify that when I say “read” I mean “read, and look up the bits I don’t know as we go along”.
@opposablethumbs
“Mug” is definitely right. “Ugly”, I dunno. Gotta give it some thought after I’ve had some sleep.
Can you develop this ? I don’t really get what you mean ._.
As I said, I need some sleep…
@Sinkable John, does it carry a hint of “délit de sale gueule” by association? (which would be something like “the crime of existing/breathing etc. while black” ?)