By David Futrelle
Well, here’s a new one, or at least a new variation on an old theme: According to one prolific commenter on Incels dot co, women are responsible for turning men into pedophiles — sorry, ephebophiles — because only underage girls are into weird, incel-looking guys. The proof? The incel making this absurd argument has a 14-year-old female cousin who thinks Adam Driver is hot.
“[T]here exists a whole class of men who cannot attract women their own age as they enter their 20s, yet they remain attractive to girls between the ages of 13-17,” Rassimov wrote in a post on Incels dot co today,
Why? Because they aren’t quite truecel, yet they never develop into traditionally handsome men “real women” crave for. Their youthful looks become a curse when it comes to attracting women past their rebellious teen phases.
His evidence? An informal survey with a sample size of two.
My two female cousins are perfect examples of this transition of preferences; the older one who is almost 19 likes masculine types with buzzed hair, the younger one is 14 and thinks Kylo Ren is the pinnacle of male aesthetics, the older one considers him plain ugly.
Yeah, it’s not as if any adult women are into Adam Driver or Benedict Cumberbatch or any number of other male celebrities who don’t look like the male models with perfectly chiseled faces that incels are convinced that all women exclusively desire.
Rassimov is convinced that it’s only “a matter of time” before both cousins “go Chad only.” According to his logic, the only female human beings incels have a chance with are the ones who aren’t old enough to consent to sex.
Notice how younger teen girls would still have a diverse array of crushes that include “artsy” unconventional types who are skinny, pale men with narrow jaws and unique features, but by the time she’s 20 she cringes at her former crush asking herself “Eww… what was I thinking?”.
Not sure you’re accurately channeling the minds of young women here, chief.
Girls are pretty much basic-bitches by the time they enter their 20s and the only two acceptable standards becomes either; ripped Chad or dad-bod Chad.
In Rassimov’s mind, incels are basically being forced to obsess over girls as young as 13 because no one else will have them. Even if he were right about female tastes — and he’s very definitely not — it’s an appalling argument, just another way these guys are constantly trying to normalize and excuse their obsessive fixation on underage girls.
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@Naglfar
It was actually a conversation about the absurdity of the “universal, objective hotness scale,” and how even a single person can find many diverse traits and people attractive. I brought up that the list of women that I find most attractive does not fit a single type, and the other person asked me for that list.
(For example, the list includes Kat Dennings and Lupita Nyong’o. Among other traits, I think they both have very beautiful skin, even though one is pale and one is dark.)
(On that note, one reason I never, ever flirt is that I am terrified of coming across like a serial killer. I’m convinced that if I ever, EVER complimented a woman on her skin, in her eyes I would immediately transform into Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs.)
@Naglfar @Fabe
Now, now, a lady never tells. 🙂
(But the answers to your questions are: this July and I was too distracted by the overall presentation to pay attention to minor packaging details.)
@Naglfar
Off the top of my head
Jenna Coleman
Danai Gurira
Daisy Ridley
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
I suspect the whole “dad-bod” thing infuriates them because it undermines their whole hypothesis that women aren’t interested in them because they aren’t swole gym rats. “Women are shallow (slurs) who only want swole guys! But women are swooning over a very definitely non-swole guy! Therefore, he must be a new kind of Chad! It all makes sense (phew)!”
@Moggie:
?
Yes! There can be the poignant scene where the female lead feels the need to go to Coachella and wear culturally-appropriative Native American costume, and begs sexy Adam Driver character to put her out of her misery… an Oscar shoo-in for sure ?
@Naglfar:
I liked it because it felt more productive than trying to write front-end code in C directly against Win32, or in C++ with MFC. The VB development environment always felt more responsive to me too when compared with Visual Studio, which always felt cluttered to me (especially on the old 90s-era screens). Also, VB let you drop out to the Windows API when you needed to. As my original programming experience was on an old ZX Spectrum where writing things in BASIC with the occasional performance-critical piece re-coded in assembly language, this felt quite natural. Meanders off into nostalgic reverie… VB.NET never felt like a “real” language to me, more like a sop thought up by Microsoft’s marketing department to throw to their customer base who had invested heavily in VB Classic and who would otherwise be justifiably miffed that they were killing it off…
@Otrame: I can’t see David McCallum’s name without thinking of Sapphire and Steel, the SF/horrow show he did with Joanna Lumley in the early 80s. It used to scare the crap out of me; the title sequence still gives me a little shudder:
If you ask me, this “Chad and Stacy”- thing seems like an extension of the Madonna-whore complex, repackaged for a new era.
Regarding what it is that people find “hot”, I remember seeing the results of an experiment a few years ago: basically, the researchers showed the subjects a series of photographs and asked them to rate them on attractiveness. Mixed in with the regular photos were ones that were photomanipulated by the researchers to combine more than one face. The subjects rated the manipulated ones as more attractive generally but also less memorable; that is, in a later test when asked if they’d seen an image before, they tended to say no for the doctored ones. These effects increased the more faces were merged to create the image.
The take-away seems to be that people tend to prefer symmetrical faces (the manipulation tends to average individual variation out). I’ve seen this justified on evolutionary grounds as a person with extremely asymmetrical features may have some kind of disease that could be passed on to potential offspring, but I’m always wary of evolutionary “just-so stories”. On the other hand, people seem to rely on minor asymmetries and imperfections to tell people apart. Very often these are considered part of what makes a person particularly attractive. I’m thinking here of someone like Cindy Crawford back in the 90s: no doubt she’d still have been a successful model and “face” without her trademark beauty spot, but for a lot of people that seemed to tip her over the line from “hot” to “smokin’ hot” ? The fact that we even call those minor “imperfections” “beauty spots” is interesting.
There are sites (for example, this one; only women, unfortunately, but I’ve seen it done for men too) that do this averaging trick for people of different nationalities. It’s interesting to look at– all the faces seem generically “attractive” to me. And (getting off the topic a bit) they do seem to embody certain national characteristics. The one marked “Irish” does seem like a face you’d see here in Ireland. Ditto the “Polish” one, as there are a lot of Polish people living and working here (though I’d probably have erred on the side of caution by saying it looked generically Eastern European to me…)
I remember a friend of mine commenting on how she was ready to jump Neil Gaiman’s bones after we had attended a reading he was doing.
When I told her that Neil was actually standing just behind her, she rolled her eyes, said, “Yeah, right,” turned her head for a quick look, turned back to me… and then did the most amazing double-take as she realized that in fact he was about four paces behind her. He was deep in another conversation and hadn’t heard a thing, but still…
@Cat Mara:
Good lord, Sapphire and Steel. They definitely played to the ‘these people aren’t actually human’ feeling there.
*Runs in out of breath*
Holy shit you guys! Roger Stone has been found guilty on all 7 counts! Sentencing on 6 February!
*Runs out again excitedly*
@Jenora: Hmmm, I definitely see the attraction with Neil Gaiman. I’ve been at a couple of readings/ signings of his and he comes across as a thoroughly nice person, very down-to-Earth and extremely generous with his time… I’ve seen him sign stuff for long lines of fans well beyond the point where I personally would be writhing on the floor clutching my wrist in pain.
He signed this copy of the collected Sandman: Season of Mists storyline and even threw in a little doodle of Morpheus! This after probably 45 minutes of signing stuff!
http://www.catmelodeon.com/images/SandmanSigned.jpg
(squees in fanboi)
I tried watching an episode of Sapphire and Steel, because I like McCallum.
But the episode started with three minutes panning around an empty garage, followed by the protagonists showing up and establishing where and when they had arrived with dialogue that included:
“Time?”
“The present.”
Aaand that was all I watched. It was just so boring and vague.
And the thing is, I have no objection to long establishing sequences. One of my all-time favorite shows is Samurai Jack, which would often spend four to five minutes on establishing shots. Thing is, SJ used those to establish a mood, while S&S was, as best I could tell, filling time.
Yay for other people seeing the total crushworthiness of David Wenham, Jorge Garcia, and Ron Perlman!
Among my circle of friends (consisting of women ages 21-54), some men that are crushed on: Bill Mosely (Otis B. Driftwood from House Of 1000 Corpses), Ben Mendelsohn, James Hetfield, Michael Rooker, the singer from Ghost B. C., Sean Gunn, Danny Trejo, Kiefer Sutherland, Donal Logue, Jeff Goldblum, the sheriff from Stranger Things… It’s almost as if women are capable of finding more than one type of man attractive!
So if I am extrapolating correctly from gay culture, [yell at me if this is problematic for me to say as a not-gay not-man] in addition to the “otter” body type (which incels seem to think applies to them, and the “bear” body type (Chad), there is also the “capybara” (dad-bod) body type?
Who wouldn’t want a capybara? They mom-snuggle all creatures, great and small.
@Allandrel:
I understand that reaction: the pacing on the show is glacial, nay, tectonic ?; and with the flat, TV-studio environments and the often-stilted dialog, it feels very stilted. I doubt they’d make a show like it nowadays. When the SF society I was a member of in university screened a few episodes, the reaction was almost uniformly negative.
I think it’s worth persevering with, but even I find some of the storylines hard to get into: the first one is clearly trying to find its feet; the second is way too long. Once the series gets going, though, it can be downright terrifying. The pacing even helps, in a way: it makes the things happening seem horribly inexorable. The vagueness too, I think, contributes to the atmosphere: the writer himself admitted he didn’t really think too deeply into the back-story.
Also, regarding symmetrical faces. If a face is too symmetrical, it falls into the uncanny valley. When I was a student [mumble-ty] years ago, I saw a project that split images of faces vertically, then mirrored each side so that it was perfectly symmetrical. The effects were REALLY off-putting.
https://petapixel.com/2012/10/02/a-portrait-project-showing-subjects-with-two-perfectly-symmetrical-faces/
Sapphire and Steel was terrifying. The pacing made it more so – it was such a slow, low key programme that you really had time to build up the fear.
And quite addictive.
I believe when it was broadcast the individual episode length was quite short, so the slow pacing may have been less of an issue. I imagine it might have been comparable to soap-opera episode pacing.
I’m usually kind of meh about people’s appearances. Most look just… normal?
That’s why this “universal attractiveness” has always seemed weird to me. Whenever I’ve been in a situation where I’ve been asked to confirm that a particular man or woman is hot or something, I usually default to agreeing, because saying, “Yes, they look perfectly normal” would seem a bit odd. I was genuinely surprised when I heard somewhere that Chris Pratt is very good looking. I accepted the fact, since I don’t have an opinion, but it’s still a bit weird to me.
I guess I usually pay attention to details. Some people have extraordinary eyes, some have cool ears.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, since I had a crush, and in real life I usually do not have crushes on the people I find most beautiful, so it always makes me reflect.
I only remember two things about Sapphire and Steel: that ridiculous opening narration, and my rage that the show seemed to believe that sapphire and steel are elements.
@Moggie
I’ve never watched this show, so I won’t venture an opinion on the show itself, but in my book calling things that aren’t elements as elements is a big no-no.
Though to be fair, I doubt a show called “Aluminum, oxygen, iron, carbon, and trace elements” would have as much appeal to the general public.
My friends (including people who basically go for women) acknowledge that most beautiful man they’ve seen in years is Ji Chang Wook.
This is the infamous shower fight scene from The K2 JCW has the shampoo and the tattoos
Warning: nude men (no genitals); comic violence.
https://youtu.be/FND8e_Ed1bg
Some of the other operatives who turn up on the show are Silver and Lead.
Objectively speaking, I know Mr. Parasol wouldn’t rank very highly on other people’s lists. That’s okay. He’s still the man who can make me say things like, “Dammit, why did you have to wait until AFTER I got dressed to look at me like that?”
(True story from this morning.)
@Moggie:
Yeah, even back then I knew that was bogus. I always head-canon-ed it that Sapphire (a form of aluminium oxide) and Steel (an iron/carbon compound) were “really” Aluminium and Iron, but they just picked cooler-sounding names.
(Of course, that still doesn’t explain the opening narration listing operatives called Jet and Diamond, both of which are forms of carbon ?)
@Moon Custafer:
Interestingly, both of those are much more “specialist” than Sapphire and Steel: Lead is muscle, and Silver is a technology specialist. Maybe the operatives with “pure” elemental names are specialists, while ones with “compound” names are more general investigators. The head-canon remains intact ?.
@Cat Mara:
Didn’t get a sketch like that from Neil Gaiman. I did once get a sketch from Stan Sakai, who literally sketched a picture of Usagi Yojimbo, a bush, and a tokage/lizard, in only a minute and a half, while carrying on a conversation in a language that wasn’t his native language.
Stan Sakai and Frank Miller were both guests at Anime North in 2003. I know which one I was more interested in talking to.
@Cat Mara
Don’t know – I got the impression that the metallic names dealt more with the physical aspects and the gem names dealt more with the mental aspects (It’s a 40 year old memory, so make of that what you will!) of time intrusion.
Still it was a rather awesome concept. How often did you have a show on prime time telly that quite deliberately and effectively put humanity very much in second place?