By David Futrelle
You, in your foolish ignorance, may believe that men and women — and everyone else besides — deserve equal rights, because, at the end of the day, we are all human beings.
But such a belief fails to take into the incalculable advantages such faux “equality” gives to women, who use the diabolical power of, er, makeup to bamboozle and exploit men by, er, looking all pretty and shit.
This, in any case, is the powerful case set forth by the eminent political philosopher *checks notes* Some Random Dude on the Internet.
“Ladies want equality? Stop wearing makeup!” the anonymous philosopher declared in a post on the MGTOW.com message boards, where the assembled Men Going Their Own Way have many strong opinions about women despite very loudly and publicly claiming that they are “going their own way,” away from women, and that they really don’t spend any time thinking about icky girl stuff at all.
“Why can’t women be more like us and stop wearing makeup?” he demanded.
Lets see the ladies start taking big manly steps toward equality and stop doing things of no real value! …
The difference between men and women is as plain as the makeup on “their” face!
They’re just like clowns and all MGTOW know it! A game to attract the largest wallet with cash and prizes disposing all the rest while aiming for the highest turnover rate, like a lotto junkie scratching tickets!
They work for hours on their external appearance, and no time on the internal, whereas men are exact opposite!
You ladies are invited to come over to our side of thinking if you want a real challenge and real equality!
Until then, I’m not part of the rotating stock pile of men orbiting your public toilet pussy.
In case you’re wondering what it looks like when something orbits around a pussy, this gif might help.
Anonymous Dude’s mini-manifesto received a mixed reaction from his compatriots on MGTOW.com.
Some immediately saw the wisdom of his argument. “[A]n excellent point re fake up,” wrote someone called MGTaoist, “any woman claiming they want equality should be ashamed to wear it.”
A commenter called Zarathustra spake:
I think this is one of the smartest posts I have read in a while. Makeup belies the whole problem. If women wanted genuine equality then they would be willing (even if unable) to pull their fair share. But when they wear make-up to enhance their sex appeal (whether you agree it works or not) it sends a the message they prioritize using their sex appeal to get men to do the pulling.
But not all the assembled MGTOWs agreed. Some felt that women without makeup were just too ugly to contemplate. (Is this not a form of oppression itself?) And one churlish fellow noted that men could always wear makeup themselves.
Anonymous Dude was having none of it. “Please, don’t refer to them as men!” he retorted.
They’re Manginas! Feminized men!
Remember, it’s all an experiment initiated by social engineers that were cloned for many decades and nourished by the liberal Marxist education regime.
I pity men that abandoned their masculinity in this ongoing experiment.
It’s an argument as powerful as his original one. Marxists have been pushing makeup for men from the beginning. Indeed, though few are aware of this, most of the third volume of Marx’s Capital consisted of advice to workingmen trying to find the right mascara for their eye color and skin tone. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways,” Marx famously wrote in his Theses on Revlon. “The point, however, is to change your look in an instant with a kicky new lipstick!”
Little do the men seduced by this message realize that male makeup is the first step on the road to Manginocracy.
Clearly, no one should be wearing makeup. Random Dude on the Internet has spoken!
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Yeah, those kohl-wearing Egyptian pharaohs were total manginas.
I am going to bet one of my Viola Desmond sawbucks (which are evidently wreaking havoc with vending machines and ATMs due to their vertical nature) that these are the same clowns that would look up adult actresses without makeup and just spam “UGGO! UGGO! 2 out of 10!”
Off-topic, but I was feeling rather… introspective this weekend, kinda reflecting on my childhood interests and how one of them was Space exploration. There’s an old photo that my mom kept of me wearing a Space Shuttle Discovery sweatshirt, and I remember having a Columbia pencil sharpener (my brother had a matching Discovery one). It got me thinking about why it fascinated me so much, and I think the reason was that at the time, there was a lot of media hype around Roberta Bondar’s flight aboard Discovery in 1992. IIRC, the sweatshirt I mentioned had the Canadian and German flags in relation to that exact flight (STS-42). I think I also had a toy model of the full vehicle, with the orbiter, external tank and solid rocket boosters that you could actually disconnect with a hidden latch. It’s astonishing how much I was obsessed with the Space Shuttle.
But my morbid engineering brain got to thinking about Challenger. When I was a kid, there were only the three Orbiters (Discovery, Columbia and Atlantis), but I was always told there was a fourth called Challenger that was always spoken about in kinda hushed tones. Later, of course, I learned about its fate, but I had no context for it. I was only six months old when the disaster occurred and Endeavor would only be built to replace her in 1991. So I went on to YouTube and found a documentary on what lead up to January 28, 1986 and as an engineer, it just had a million and one lessons to be gleaned: about media hype, about corporate environments, about the nature of capitalism, and of course Richard Feyman’s contribution on the investigative panel. Even the nature of the shuttle program itself was a huge question mark in the aftermath of Nixon’s and Reagan’s budget cuts. Again, not having any context, but I didn’t realize that the Shuttle was essentially a cost-saving measure as its components were meant to be reusable and if the NASA budget hadn’t been slashed, the Saturn V could have been sending astronauts into orbit and to the moon for years after the Apollo program ended in 1975.
I also watched that Mister Rogers documentary and it mentioned Challenger and how so many schoolkids had to bear witness to that tragedy and it was up to Fred to explain to the younger kids how to handle those feelings of grief. Part of me was thankful I was just an infant at the time; I couldn’t imagine watching that broadcast live…..
Didn’t mean to bring anyone down… just something kicking around my brain.
@Katamount
Yep – the shuttle program was about building a fleet of trucks. Or as they were semi-affectionately dubbed, “penguins.”
I was in high school when Challenger had her final flight. We weren’t watching the launch, but I’d been following the news, and I still remember the look on a classmate’s face when he repeated the news. Mr. Parasol’s parents both worked at JSC, and his father was on the post-disaster investigation team. As Mr. Parasol puts it, “We didn’t ask Dad about work while that was going on.”
I don’t remember if I saw the Challenger disaster live or on the news. I was 5. I do remember reenacting it in my bedroom by making explosion noises and throwing myself off the bed. I was a strange child.
For adults, I think Challenger was one of those “you’ll always remember where you were” things (me: on a Metropolitan Line train, seeing the headline on someone else’s evening newspaper and thinking “oh Jesus no”). The Apollo 1 fire was horrific, but that was on the ground, where people die every day. Apollo 13 was a stirring story of courage and engineering ingenuity. Challenger was just a kick in the gut, reminding you of how hugely dangerous crewed spaceflight was, and how it depended on the highest standards from everyone. I think it was the first time I asked myself “should we even be doing this? Sending people?”
I was on the bus home from college the morning of the Challenger explosion. My mom picked me up at the station absolutely devastated and in tears. I thought someone in our family had died. We went home and sat and watched the news and the awful footage in silence. It was utterly heartbreaking. That was the end of American optimism about the space program.
Back then, whenever there was a headline tragedy, the jokes would immediately start circulating. And this was in the days before the internet. You’d go out to a party that very night, and somebody would already be repeating fifteen tasteless jokes they’d heard from their uncle or the kid next door. It was weird how quickly they proliferated, and how so many people accepted them as a normal part of processing these events. I used to wonder if there was a federal Department of Insensitive Jerks tasked with making up and distributing them.
Nowadays they’re all on /pol/.
@Full Metal Ox – Hmm… 😛
Okay, seriously, that article seems to be one of those cute/quirky science pieces, but also the kind of thing that gets twisted by incels and Petersonians into their just-so stories (with their obsession over wrist circumference and other little things that might have once, somewhere, in whatever tiny percentage, contributed to sexual selection or increased fertility or whatnot).
@Katamount –
That’s fascinating. It shows how seriously Rogers took his job.
Part of me is wondering if the main feeling was fear rather than grief. I remember reading that young children haven’t developed the emotional/cognitive tools to feel much empathy for people they don’t know.
Of course, I could be remembering wrong or oversimplifying. Probably I’m also drawing from my own experience of seeing news footage of 9/11 when I was 13. At the time, I was more excited than sad – something unusual was happening, I got to watch TV instead of doing schoolwork for half an hour – and only later in the day did I say anything about feeling bad for people (again, as far as I remember). For a long time I had residual fears, though; I lived near an airport, so it was easy to imagine planes crashing into things.
By the time the war in Iraq rolled around, I was strongly against it and my worries about it were less selfish. I wonder if the post-9/11 news cycle helped me become more politically aware… or if it fed an unhealthy appetite for bad news… or if I was just more mature, being a year and a half older.
Going back to space disasters, I remember the Columbia crash in 2003, which also killed 7 astronauts. But the Challenger was the one I heard more about – I guess just because it was first.
Ha, Weird Eddie, a classic cinematic masterpiece.
I don’t know if I can fully understand and unpack my relationship with makeup. I know that I like it. I like trying different looks, different styles for different occasions.
At the same time, I usually feel obligated to wear it when I leave the house. For work, I feel unprofessional without it, and in other situations, I am ashamed that someone will discover that I am a living, breathing human being with (don’t tell anyone) pores. So I know that’s a bunch of internalized misogynistic nonsense. And it’s expensive, and it’s an expense I don’t feel comfortable removing from my budget.
I also like makeup because it fits into my overall “feminine” presentation. I love dresses, I like doing things with my hair, wearing earrings, all that kind of stuff. But how much of my fondness for those things is just part of who I am, and how much is reinforced by a culture that tells me I’m supposed to fill that role? ?♀️ I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully disentangle and decode my own motivations like that.
But as incomplete and confused as my analysis is, at least I can feel confident that it’s more sophisticated than what Mr. “like a lotto junkie scratching tickets” up there can come up with.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants – Oh god, and such stupid ones usually. My uncle: “Princess Di died, get it?” Because “Di” is a homophone of “die.” MUCH HILARITY.
The corners of the internet I visited as a teenager on my friend’s computer (circa 2002-2006), were more into “randomness”* than morbid humour but there was also Uncyclopedia,** which often combined the two. The other Wikipedia parody was Encyclopedia Dramatica, which was apparently a 4chan offshoot and much cruder.
*e.g. Trogdor the Burnanator, Schfifty Five, early xkcd, (di)hydrogen monoxide warning notices (the joke is it’s water)
**where I first heard of Theodor Adorno, incidentally
Men: piss and moan about us wearing makeup
Also men: creep on us like clockwork whenever we wear makeup
ALSO men: look at us like we’re made of pure ugly when we don’t wear makeup
Also… men: walk around looking like 5 day old corpses, with oily skin and bad breath and miles of stubble, and yet expect us to be interested in them personally when they start giving us The Look on the subway.
Take your opinions where the sun don’t shine, bros.
More Challenger derail
I had just moved to Japan to teach English and had a very limited command of the Japanese language, but I knew the word “sensei”. My coworker (another USian) and I were eating breakfast with our host family, and kept on hearing “Challenger” and “sensei” on the morning news. We knew Christa McAuliffe was on board, but it was kind of routine at that point, so we were wondering why this was on the Japanese morning news. Then we watched the footage. In another country, with a huge language barrier and no internet. It was horrible to see and not have any information to help us process. A friend sent me a thick envelope full of magazine and newspaper articles, when it arrived there was much reading and crying, and feeling very isolated.
When Columbia disintegrated, we actually got a shuttle tile to test at work. ( I do basic research in optical scatter.) We ran it through at a priority to provide data to the folks looking at just what happened and when during the catastrophic reentry. Fascinating heat transfer properties in that tile, as you’d expect in something designed to take the heat of reentry.
As for the OP- So not concerned if I’m meeting his metric of filling my life and time with what he considers to be of value. I’m pretty sure we have different priorities.
Do you even lift, bro?
(I know Mexican Hot Chocolate already brought up gyms, but damn it, that was the first thing that popped into mind and I wanted to say it.)
That’s not even to get into what it is about the “internal” that gamers are spending hours on…
@epitome of incomprehensibility:
Have you seen Lindsay Ellis’s video on Transformers, Marxism, and film theory?
Makeup does wonderful things, like hiding acme scars. Which for some is sadly needed in this society if you want to get ahead in life.
@Buttercup: Sick jokes as a coping mechanism seems to be quite well-ingrained in humans. I’m sure there’s examples predating the printing press, but the earliest one I can quickly recall was a proliferation of Ed Gein jokes in Wisconsin after the bodies were discovered in his house. I believe there was even a sociology or psychology thesis written about it.
Thanks everyone for sounding off on Challenger. It occupies a very unusual place in my mind, like a spectre that haunts the very idea of space travel. For me, it was almost literal: in the wake of the incident, there was a series of special classrooms established call the Challenger Learning Centers. Most are in the United States, but there was one in Canada, located at the Ontario Science Centre. Back in the 90s, I vividly remember it on Level 3, just past the Canadarm, with a big mural of an astronaut sitting just behind its locked door. As a kid, it always felt like the forbidden area because they only allowed school groups in there.
Despite my fond memories of seeing space exploration as an adventure, it almost felt anachronistic, because it struck me watching that doc on Challenger that it signaled the beginning of the end for an optimistic view of space exploration. While all sorts of hype surrounded Christa McAuliffe, that it ended so horribly with pretty much the whole world’s attention focused on it left almost everyone numb to the further shuttle launches. Sure, Bondar, Payette and Hadfield grabbed some headlines up north here, NASA was still the organization that had The Simpsons skewering its poor public perception. It felt like something had to go horribly wrong for it to get any public attention, to the point that the destruction of Columbia almost had to remind me that those shuttles were still flying at all.
I suppose I kinda lament an optimism and a wonder that feels like it has eroded over time. It’s probably what keeps bringing me back to Star Trek so much.
i was on a programming course at the time of the Challenger disaster, which meant that i was staying in a hotel. I walked out of breakfast in the Icarus restaurant and saw it on the telly. It’s the sort of detail that sticks in your mind.
(For anyone who doesn’t know/remember, Icarus and his father excaped from a tower by flying on wings stuck together with wax. Icarus got over enthusistic and flew too close to the sunso that his wings fell apart.)
And I’d been so very, very jealous of Christa McAuliffe up until then.
On a happier note I’ve had a space shuttle tile in my hand too, at the Science Centre at Herstmonceux. I went to the Space Show (because of course I did). It was aimed at kids, but for the bit involving the shuttle tile and a blow torch, they wanted an adult, obviously. They got it glowing red hot on one side and completely cool to the touch on the other. Which is exactly what is was designed to do during reentry, but seeing it up close was startling.
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2019/01/makeup-free-woman-actually-is-pretty-tired-thank-you-for-noticing/
Makeup-free woman actually is pretty tired, thank you for noticing
Oh, Beaverton, never change.
@Cyborgette:
Ay-MEN. (Pun fully intended.) They’re OUR faces; we can do with them whatever we want. Or not do with them whatever we don’t want.
Re: Challenger — when it happened, I was at home. I was high-school-aged at the time. My brother burst into the room yelling that “the space shuttle just blew up!” I didn’t believe him at first, so I ran to the TV, and, sure enough, there it was…blowing up and into two forking trails of smoke on the screen, over and over and over again. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel so envious of those who got to be astronauts. And DID feel terrible for the history-makers like Ellison Onizuka, who overcame anti-Japanese prejudice in the US during WWII to become its first Asian astronaut.
RE: Challenger
I was a junior in high school, and the launch happened to coincide with my chemistry class – my chemistry teacher was very into the space program – so we were watching it live. And while it was disturbing to watch, it kind of didn’t really hit me until the next day, when I heard someone tell the “need another seven astronauts” joke.
The speed with which that and other morbid humor ran through our culture was appalling to me at the time, and remains a cornerstone in my understanding of troll psychology.
My wife, cowgirl that she is, doesn’t go in for makeup. And, frankly, that’s part of what makes (and keeps) her attractive in my eyes. But that’s an issue summed up best by the phrase chacun à son goût. MGTOWs declaring that it is a hill worth dying on are merely reinforcing what we know already, to wit: How superficial and trivial their concerns are.
I was in high school when the Challenger blew up. English class; I remember the classroom in the Challoner building (which doesn’t exist anymore, unfortunately). It was… rather a shock to the system at the time.
And yes, I remember several of the rather poor-taste jokes that almost immediately followed.
(I’m old enough that my first remembered bit of the space program was the Apollo-Soyuz linkup from 1975.)
That said, I did get to meet some astronauts later; some of the people I worked with were collaborating with Daffyd Williams on the Neurolab experiment on STS-90. Somewhere I have an origami space shuttle that was signed by Chiaki Mukai, one of the backup astronauts for that mission.
I need to get back to doing origami again. Where did I leave my John Montroll books…
I was watching the shuttle launch. I’ve been totally nerdish about spaceflight since forever, when I was a kid I read Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, lived for the next Gemini/Apollo missions. It was like an out of body experience watching the explosion. Really same with Columbia later, tho there was not the close up coverage, and, unless I’m confusing memories, we at least had an idea the bird was in danger.
On topic, I have no dog in the hunt regarding makeup, haven’t worn any except dramatics in high school. I don’t have any inclination to demand that women wear or not wear makeup, nor, of course do I have such a right.
I apologize if this is objectifying, it’s not intended to be, it’s just me…. The only interest I have in women’s bodies is I’m attracted to eyes. Sometimes when enhanced by makup, I get shortness of breath.
Most of us seem to have been affected by Challenger. I saw it live on television, too. I really lost my taste for watching spaceship launches that day. It just felt too much like watching gladiator fights after that.
I wear make-up to my first job interviews and then when they hire me I show up without anything, because HA! FOOLED YOU. I WAS UGLY THE WHOLE TIME!!!!
And make-up was never worn again.
I’m blessed in that I’ve always had self-confidence and pretty much no desire to make men happy or attracted to me, so I’ve never felt compelled to wear make-up. I dunno, seemed like a waste of time (time I can spend sleeping in the morning). And as the great manospherians predicted, men ignore me. Except I’m not sad about it, which I’m sure gets the MGTOWs’ knickers in a twist. They wanna be missed so. badly.
I could really go for more men in make-up though. Make-up makes you look hotter, news at 11.