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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Was the top meme suppose to be an example of a man that stills looks good? Because what I am seeing as a 20 year old woman is an old man that if he tried to hit on me I’d be making jokes about how I would need to check for a silver alert. No offence to tom cruise but I see a man and a woman that are exactly at the same level at the same age.
Presumably Tom Cruise can afford a lot of high quality plastic surgery—plus it’s a business expense.
Has this guy never heard of cheese? Finely aged cheese is absolutely delicious, and is much more to my taste than any kind of wine is. (This does not align with my preferences for people of any age or gender, however, as that remains a steady “none for me thanks”.)
People have different preferences, dude, and even if they didn’t, the worth of a person isn’t defined by how attractive some random yahoo finds them.
I think the meme actually translates thus:
“I would fuck 1986 Kelly McGillis. I would not fuck 2019 Kelly McGillis. On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind looking like Tom Cruise in either year. Since I have no ability to discern the difference between my own thoughts and objective reality, I am going to assume my opinion on this matter constitutes some deep truth about the difference between men and women.”
Ummm, no.
You’d need a reasonably objective way to judge their relative flavor.
As soon as 60-100 MGTOWs are happy to taste 60-100 other men each (we wouldn’t want men who are avoiding women to be forced to interact with any), you can get a good initial picture of whether or not your initial flavor-rating procedures exhibit good inter-rater reliability. If the same volunteers repeat the procedure a large enough number of times, tasting the same subjects once a week (blind to sample source, of course) for a number of weeks, we can then gain a good idea of test-retest reliability. Assuming the procedure provides us with facial validity, greater certainty of the test’s validity can then be inferred from strong test-retest and inter-rater reliability results (should the experiment show high results on these factors).
Depending on results, we may be able to proceed to a gender-comparative study right away, or we may need to propose and test new procedures for their reliability and validity, requiring MGTOWs to repeatedly taste men under other conditions as many times as necessary to reach a protocol that allows a prediction of age from an MGTOW’s report of a man’s flavor.
I can’t wait to see the MGTOW principle investigator’s NIH grant proposal. Hell, I may go get a degree in metabolic gerontology just so that I can be a reviewer on the grant.
Crip Dyke, I now officially have a crush on you. Damn.
(Muses on where one would go to study metabolic gerontology with an emphasis on palatability… perhaps UC Davis? They do support all that food science research…)
@Catalpa:
I know, right?
A nice old Grana Padano or Parmiggiano Regiano is divine.
Or old Gouda. A well aged Cheddar is nothing to sneeze at either!
And the best cheese I ever had was 20 years ago in France.
It was a soft cheese, wrapped in a chestnut leave. It was so ripe it was liquid and could walk on its own. And the taste was amazing.
And a lot of the men who claim they age like fine wine more age like cheap vinegar.
Also, what way do us agender or other NB folk age? Inquiring minds want to know.
Looking closely at the graph, it appears that the appeal of a woman stays at zero until she’s fifteen, not eleven, which is…better? I guess?
Halle Berry is 52 years old and still gorgeous. Now, it might just be me being too asexual and queer to understand the Cis Male Douchebag Boner, but I personally think she’s a lot more visually appealing than a ten-year-old is.
> Catalpa & Knitting Cat Lady
Yeah, cheeses can be tasty, for sure. Let just be sure you do not smell like them.
Out of Topic : i have read that Chicago has a new mayor (or mayoress ? Is this a word ?), Lori Lightfoot, who seems to be a nice person. Congratulations, David, maybe your life will be less stressfull in your city.
Now, it occurs to me that many manospherians may consider themselves aging like wine because they’ve spent years living inside a bottle in some dark, dank basement.
Tom Cruise is a nuisance:
@Lumipuna:
Ha! May they age like a cask of amontillado!
The way these guys treat this differential aging idea like biotroof is ridiculous. We’re conditioned to look at older men and women this way by society’s expectations. We’re supposed to overlook a man’s wrinkles, grey hair, creaking joints etc, because they’re a sign of his experience, which is valued. Worldly experience is less valued in women; in fact, for many, it’s considered a bad thing. This is not biology speaking!
@ occasional reader
I can’t answer for American practice, but in the UK until recently the title ‘mayoress’ was used to refer to the mayor’s spouse (yes, I know, and women have been mayors in UK towns for a long time now.)
I’d just go for ‘mayor’ which appears to be gender – neutral these days, and then go on to mention the new mayor’s name.
@Brassica:
The feeling is entirely mutual. I absolutely luuuuvvvvvvvdd the “emphasis on palatability” flourish. I wish I’d thought of it.
S.P.:
And Grace Jones is 70 and I don’t even know what’s going on there.
Quite a few male actors do seem to age slower than the average man in their cohort but a lot of them are blessed with good genetics and have the time and money for fine-tuned diets and punishing exercise regimes, especially action stars. However, plastic surgery, human growth hormones and testosterone top-ups are apparently a lot more prevalent in Hollywood than anyone will admit.
Not Cruise, of course, he has his Scientological superpowers to draw on.
I’m saddened to here about Val Kilmer’s cancer but you could have illustrated the differences between him and Cruise using most post-Batman photos of Kilmer.
Top Gun ageing memes have done the rounds for a while although largely to highlight how unusual Cruise is compared to the rest of the cast:
Trust the MGTOWers to strip out the other male actors to suit their own weirdo agenda. Whodathunk it?
I have to say that Cruise does seem to have aged quite a bit in that right-hand photo – if I was to guess, he looks to be in his late 40s. Now, it’s certainly true that he’s a really, really good-looking older man, but still an older man. Youth and beauty are often correlated, but they aren’t quite the same thing.
> Kevin
Ok, duly noted, thanks for the explanation. That is a bit like the remembrance of the time when married women were called Madam + full name of the husband.
Right, men age like wine and women age like milk. And that’s why MGTOWs are MGTOWs: not through any failings of their own or a lack of attractiveness to women. No, it’s because women get old and look old. MGTOWs, meanwhile, always look like Tom Cruise. Consequently, they have to Go Their Own Way.
Re: Tom Cruise
I’m asexual, so I can’t judge him on that.
But I don’t find him aesthetically pleasing. At all.
Might be that his scientology ness is so off putting that it overshadows everything else.
Also, a friend of mine used to organize movie promotions and stuff. So she met Cruise a few times.
Apparently he’s really short and always insists on there being a box or something for him to stand on. And nobody is allowed to take pictures below his knees…
Can we discuss how this toenail collector thinks that girl-children are more attractive than boy-children, even when they’re actual infants? I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, I’m going to suggest he thinks this is genetic and a fact about females, that they’re prettier than males in some consistent and objective sense. And even with that reading, I’m disgusted.
The idea behind the quote, though, isn’t that men’s physical attractiveness improves with age, it’s that their “SMV” (wealth, self-confidence, and power) improves with age, while women’s “SMV” (
compliancefertility and beauty) decreases. Tom Cruise is at the peak of his action hero movie career at 50, while Kelly McGillis has trouble finding roles.The problem with that is that it’s Hollywood, not real life. Milf is one of the most sought-out porn categories, and I don’t know a lot of thirteen year old girls with posters of wallets and CEOs in their lockers. MGTOWs are delusional if they think men reach their sexual peak 30 years later than women.
Besides, wines are designed to pair well with cheese, not 1% skim.
MGTOW wine doesn’t pair at all. It prides itself on ruining the flavor of everything it encounters. Every vintage of Chateau de Unsolicited Dickpic is terrible. It’s salty, fermented from the grapes of wrath, and spending long amounts of time in the dark doesn’t improve it any.
It’s worth adding that Tim Robbins spent two decades in a high profile relationship with a woman twelve years his senior – and it seems unlikely that the age gap was the reason that they split up.
Jane Fonda just called.
She said HA HA HA FUCK YOU, MAGGOTOWS.
@Onager
Wow, everyone else in that picture just looks like an older version of themselves, but then I get to Val Kilmer and I’m like “Is that even the same guy?” I guess cancer changes people more than I thought.