By David Futrelle
Manosphere dudes love to spread their ideas, such as they are, through memes. And most of these memes are just plain terrible — badly designed, vaguely incomprehensible, and full of blatant misinformation.
I’ve made fun of assorted manosphere meme fails many times here on We Hunted the Mammoth, but I haven’t ever made a concerted attempt to fact-check their claims. So I’m going to start doing that.
Here’s the first meme on my list.
THE CLAIM: Women age like milk, men age like wine.
This central claim of this meme — that men age better than women — is a favorite folk belief of the modern Man Going His Own Way, and MGTOW memers like to illustrate this point with photos of the two main stars of the 1986 movie Top Gun — Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis — from the movie itself and as they look today, more than 30 years later. This is the newest version of the meme I’ve been able to find:
In order to properly assess this claim, you’d need a representative sample of people of various ages and a reasonably objective way to judge their relative attractiveness (perhaps using some sort of large survey in which a representative sampling of people judged a set of pictures).
What we’ve got instead is a sample of two, and the person doing the judging is the sort of dude who sits around making MGTOW memes in his spare time. Not only is the sample way too small to be statistically significant, but it’s also wildly unrepresentative, given that one of the two subjects is Tom Cruise, a genetic freak who doesn’t appear to age. Normally you’d throw him out of any data sampling as an outlier.
Using him to represent how men, on average, age makes about as much sense as using, say, Helen Mirren as your example of how women, on average, age. I mean, here’s Helen Mirren at the Oscars in 2002, when she was about the same age as Cruise is now (56).
And here she is in a bikini at the age of 62.
I mean, who can compete with that? I’ve got more than a few years to go before I hit 62, and I certainly don’t look that good in a bikini.
Tom Cruise, like Helen Mirren, is a decidedly non-representative data point.
You don’t even have to expand your data set very much to see just how unrepresentative Cruise is. All you have to do is to look at some current pics of some of the other male stars from Top Gun.
Here’s Anthony Edwards today, looking neither like fine wine or curdled milk bur rather like a dude in his mid-fifties, which is what he is:
Val Kilmer, now 59, is fighting freaking cancer, which is a motherfucker.
Tim Robbins, at 60 years old., still retains some of his perpetual boyish charm, but there probably aren’t a lot of teenage girls with this picture tacked to their wall.
The point is: different men age differently, and very few of them — even Hollywood stars — age as gracefully as Tom Cruise.
So that’s the men. What about Kelly McGillis, who’s now 61? Well, in the recent picture in the meme above she certainly doesn’t look much like curdled milk to me. I mean, sure, she doesn’t look like she did in Top Gun, but if THIS is your example of a 60-year-old who’s aged badly you seriously need your eyes (or your brain) checked.
But again, basing your aging expectations on Hollywood stars is a bit ridiculous. The real world tends to be a bit less less glamorous.. Some age gracefully, some not so much, and I’m pretty sure it has little to do with their gender.
And let’s not even get into that chart, which isn’t based on any actual data but rather is just something some dude put together using data points he pulled from his ass. Also, if you look at the age range across the bottom, it appears that the graph maker thinks 11-year-old girls are more sexually attractive than 50 year-old-women? Jesus fucking Christ.
VERDICT: The meme maker’s claim is unsubstaintiated, due to small and unrepresentative sample size and blatant misreading of the data. And the only thing the chart proves is that the chart maker should probably be on some registry somewhere.
You may be left wondering how gracefully MGTOWs themselves age. Well, I don’t have a representative sample to work off of, but I do have some anecdotal evidence in the form of the video below, showing an assortment of mostly middle-aged Men’s Rights Activists and MGTOWs enjoying themselves at a retreat organized by A Voice for Men.
Though this video practically reeks of alcohol, I have to say I’m not seeing a lot of fine wine here.
Now growing old gracelessly isn’t a crime or a moral failing; how you look at any age is really no one’s business but your own. But MGTOWs like to throw a lot of stones, and it appears that in this case, as in so many others, their homes are made of pure glass.
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@Podkayne Lives:
Every so often I check AO3 for obscure fandoms. Last time I checked for Ea-Nasir fics there were at least eight. My favourite was the dialogue between one of his disgruntled customers and a scribe who was patiently telling him that he could not in good conscience take down a letter that was simply “Ea-Nasir is a Jackal’s bastard” written out sixteen times.
@Lurker LXVII:
Scalzi, amongst other things, is pretty good with owning his mistakes when he makes them. He also wrote an entire article on his blog called ‘Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is’ in which he attempts to explain the concept of privilege while deliberately avoiding the word because the sorts of people he would be using this explanation on have already decided that ‘privilege’ is a word just used to make them feel bad.
(I also liked his response when another author called him ‘gay’ as an insult; Scalzi basically went, ‘Umm, the fact that you think gay is an insult says more about you than it does about me.’ When the author in question later apologized, Scalzi responded with ‘I don’t need an apology, because I wasn’t insulted. You need to apologize to everybody else you smeared by assuming gay was an insult.’)
With regards to ‘Vox Day’… also remember that this is a guy who was a columnist for World Net Daily, and is the son of tax protestor and borderline sovereign citizen Robert Beale, who was also one of the people working on Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign. He comes from a family that has been alt-right before alt-right was a thing, and is on the outs with a lot of the modern alt-right because he wants to be the main grifter and he’s being left behind by a movement that cares even less than him about the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability.
@ cat mara
I believe that is the most eloquent insult I have ever read in my 71 years of bookwormery.
@Jenora Feuer:
Given that pedigree, can we even classify him as “alt” right? That’s mainstream right, right there. AOR right. Hair metal right. Christian rock ri– you get the picture ?. Which makes his “how do you do, fellow kids?” attempts to ingratiate himself with the new fashy cool crowd all the more pathetic.
@GrumpyOld SocialJusticeMangina:
Thank you very much. It’s fun to let one’s inner Hunter S. Thompson out for a spin sometimes! ?
Not only is Helen Mirren gorgeous – now as then – my husband had his first ever date with her when they were both 15 or 16.
They went for a frothy coffee in Southend where they were both at school.
@Cat Mara:
You’re right on that, and that sort of thing is why Vox eventually got kicked off of Gab. Vox is a capable wordsmith, and prefers saying his horrible things with just barely enough wiggle-room and vagueness such that he can pretend to be offended when called out on what he’s said. “I didn’t say that was a good thing, I just said that it made perfect sense from a social control standpoint to throw acid in people’s faces.” That sort of thing. Playing Xeno’s Paradox with the line of what’s acceptable to say.
Which means that he doesn’t like the more up-front and unwilling to be quiet sorts because they’re provoking more pushback, and the up-front sorts consider him to sound just like the sort of intellectual they despise.
Vox Day is nothing but an attention seeking troll that will intentionally say whatever is the most vile thing he can think of to garner popularity with the “being offensive is the same thing as being sincere” crowd. He does not maintain plausible deniability to anyone but the most denial dedicated nazis.
I don’t think it’s the fact that Men physically age better tham women. It’s that most Men and Women use diffrent metrics for attraction.
The normal course of a life is that your social status (esteem, career, accomplishments) accumulates while you physical beauty goes down – both for men and women.
Men value beauty more, while woman value social status more – thus women are losing the important attribute and gaining the less important one, while men are gaining the important attribute and losing the less important one.
Which is why when there are big age gaps in relationships, it’s nearly always the woman who is younger – she likes the social status of the older man, and he likes the beaty of he younger woman – it’s a win/win.
His entire argument suggests that MGTOWs are using such memes to prove the saying. It is merely to present examples, and many more are used than this one photo the author of this article focuses on. (Check out Red Pill Bill on youtube – he has TONS of examples). However, no on needs to prove this fact, because everyone sees it before their eyes. A 21 year old man is rarely as good looking as he is at 35. The opposite is true about females. If you are going to ignore what you see before your own face, I would not be surprised if a bolder slams into it one day and you still insist it was a snowflake. This article posts a swimsuit picture of her with her face obscured. Big deal she has a stunning body FOR HER AGE. She looks terrible compared to what she did look like. The same cannot be said for Cruise. Then he goes on to post Tim Robbins who was never good looking. The best criticism anyone can make about this saying is to point out that wine continues to improve by age, whereas a man has a limit: hardly will he be as good looking at 95 as he was at 50. The saying is meant to make a point, not be taken literally in every aspect. That females lose their beauty at an alarming rate comparatively, and that they dupe men into marriage just before they hit 30 and that beauty fades, makes MGTOW humanitarian to show these photo’s and warn men not to bait the bait for it won’t be long until that bait turns sour in their mouths.
Why does he stuff his face with fillers, then??? ?
What I think kinda gross is that they have a graph suggesting women or girls above the age of 10 „start to get good until they are 20..““…. like sure a 12 year old to them is kinda …what?! .what the duck? 12 year old girls are children and shouldn’t be represented in the „when women are at their best“ graph. Soooooo gross. I can’t believe this.
I think it’s kinda fair say that men overall do age „slower“…meaning a 40 year old male could the valuable as a 32 year old women (attractiveness). That is ok, maybe men have 5-10 years more time. But to think that men age like wine is…funny. The average male will not look great after 45, at least not to women in their 20s. To them a man in his 20s is far more attractive. Most men don’t look like Prad Pitt (and even he is made to appear younger in movies). Money isn’t sexy either, considering women who date „ugly“ rich men don’t think those men are attractive, but only the money. Looking at statistics young Women dating older men is pretty rare. Not that there is something wrong with that. But yeah.
Also keeping in Mind That yes even men’s fertility drops significantly after age 40-45. The chances of the child having autism, schizophrenia and so old increases. And it takes way longer for the wife to get pregnant if her husband is old (regardless of her age). Sure, fertility problems with age do have bigger effects on women (bc they carry the Child…) but men DO NOT age like fine wine.
A majority of women hit the wall early, guys do to with balding and getting a spare tire, depends on how well you take care of yourself really. but our fertility can go on to old age. Women envy us for this reason.