By David Futrelle
Reactionary Canadian fussbudget Jordan Peterson was roundly mocked for suggesting that women wearing lipstick are trying to mimic the look of sexual arousal, when women’s lips apparently all turn dark red or pink or perhaps No. 19 Fuchsia Rouge.
But to his fans his thoughts on the allegedly “provocative” nature of lipstick were eminently reasonable, and the Lobster Boys continue to get mad about the alleged deceptions of makeup on a regular basis.
Earlier this year an actual woman bravely marched into the Jordan Peterson subreddit to inform the gentlemen assembled there that she doesn’t wear makeup to signal her sexual readiness but instead to appear, well, awake, noting that when she doesn’t wear makeup she looks tired, even when she isn’t.
The boys were having none of it.
“[L]ooking nice” is synonymous with looking sexually desirable,” mansplained someone calling himself Vito_The_Magnificent.
You cannot make yourself look nicer, but less sexually desirable. They’re the same thing. …
If one of my eyebrows is bigger than the other, its going to bother me. I’m not thinking of other people when I fix it, but fundementally, I’m fixing it because humans, including me, find symmetry sexually desirable.
Someone called Mexails went on the offensive, accusing the OP of dastardly makeup manipulation.
Come on, looking alert and fresh is obviously == looking more attractive. You put it on to look more attractive, because you prefer to show a fake freshness to people and prefer to hide how you really look. You prefer to manipulate people into treating you differently than they would if they’d actually see how you look for real.
You try to cheat their brain by presenting a more sexually attractive face to them than what you really have.
TheMythOf_Feminism jumped into the fray as well, declaring that sexual provocation is
what makeup is used for. It mimicks for example, the natural female indicators of sexual fertility and sexual arousal.
Of course there are different types of makeup and different amount a woman can use, the point is, generally speaking , a woman wearing makeup is using sex to get things like favor and attention.
But my favorite comment of the bunch comes from an amateur evolutionary biologist called ee4m:
Women become energized when ejaculated into, while men become sleepy. Women use make up to look more awake, to create a sexual freshly ejaculated into vibe. Its evolutionary biology.
I think — or at least hope –he’s joking, but honestly, I don’t know. I spent about a half hour going through his comment history to try to figure out his politics; he calls himself a leftist but thinks “identity politics” is a capitalist plot and has nice things to say both about Christina Hoff Sommers … and Mao. And JBP. So I give up.
If he is serious, I guess I must have missed that day in biology class.
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Wait, is this their admission that they’re doing the same thing? So when men adjust their appearance with the explicit intention of being more attractive it’s okay, but when women use makeup it’s deception? Some interesting doublethink they’ve got going on here.
This sounds familiar. How much do people want to bet this is a semen retainer?
Also, the beginning is rather ambiguous. I think he meant that men become sleepy after ejaculating, but I read it the first time as men become sleepy after being ejaculated into. Those are rather different, and I doubt Jordan would approve of the last one seeing as (I think?) he’s a homophobe.
Skidmarxist.
So, I’ll just be here waiting for the Peterson stan trolls to show up screeching “context!”
I guess that’s why I don’t wear makeup. ?✌
There is the very slightest grain of truth to this for certain contexts. For example, makeup is often considered more “dressy” or more “professional.” I wear makeup for a lot of reasons (mostly because it’s fun for me and I like it) but definitely one of the reasons is because a certain kind of makeup look is considered to be just part of how my face should look when I’m working. Women and people who are perceived as women are often punished for not conforming to these expectations of “professionalism.”
If that pisses you off (it should!) maybe attack the expectation rather than the people who have to choose between being a woman and being punished at work for that and being a woman and being punished at work for both that and for not being a woman correctly. Both of those choices suck!
Some workplaces are just one example of where certain styles of makeup can be an expectation that determines how women/perceived women are treated. It just happens to be the most relevant in my own life, which is why I’ve discussed it here.
Also, expectations for what “womanhood” should look like are associated with both race and class, so people of colour and lower-class people face greater and different impacts than white and upper-class people from this policing of makeup.
Have you seen Jordan Peterson? He frequently wears a suit and tie, rather than the minimum standard of dress required to avoid arrest or hypothermia. His hair is short and combed: unnatural! True, he has facial hair, but it’s trimmed, not the full Grizzly Adams look nature demands. What this all tells me is that Jordan Peterson is a total slut, and should be shunned as the deceiver he is.
@Moggie
So, it seems like Peterson’s fanbase is overwhelmingly young straight men, but that made me think: does he get groupies? I don’t want to think about anything sexual and Jordan Peterson, but now I can’t stop thinking it.
I noticed that their are male chauvinists who complain about women wearing make up and also complaining about women not wearing make up and fabricating tin foil chewing conspiracy theories for both.
I get the impression this is not a coincidence…. if anything this seems intentional on their part….
Naglfar: what happened to that poor seal? Looks like his left flipper is injured.
@numerobis
I didn’t even notice that. I don’t know. I posted a picture of a sea lion bouncing to represent the Peterson stans that show up whenever we discuss the lobster messiah.
Now I’m tempted to record a parody of Leper Messiah by Metallica called Lobster Messiah about JBP.
It sounds like they’re just defining sexual provocativeness as any attempt to not look like you just crawled through a landfill. I guess if you broaden the definition so much that wiping your own ass would be sexually provocative you can accuse just about anybody of such, but then it’s not a very useful definition.
Never fails to amaze me how manbabies with zero experience with live women (outside of relatives) are 100% sure of all the facts about women and dating them and anything else they know utterly nothing about.
Nothing says “I’m on the Internet so I are an expert!” like the teens and 20-something white manbabies of reddit.
@MJ
All the manosphere and alt right pseudointellectuals and their followers are the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action.
If men want to wear make up to look hotter, they can do it too. Just saying.
This seems like an admission that he can’t think someone looks nice without immediately wanting to fuck them. Which, if true, is not really the kind of thing he should be telling the world.
You cannot make yourself look nicer, but less sexually desirable? Either this guy does not know the be-permed blue haired church ladies I know, or he has an interesting fetish.
@Nicholas Kiddle
It does seem like a self own of sorts. Though, as we have seen, these kinds of people are the masters of accidental self owns.
Reminds me a bit of this clip from Alexis’s podcast:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/200314/1066937-self-owns-self-help-a-sketch-from-the-violet-wanderers-podcast.mp3
@Weasel-Rah
My guess is that Peterson is probably anti masturbation like the rest of the alt right and so his fans are really horny and find everything to be sexy.
Wait, I’m confused. Why would a woman giving off a vibe of “I just had sex with a man who isn’t you!” be sexually appealing to these chucklefucks? I thought that evolutionary biology was all about how men are supposedly biologically driven to want
teenage girlsvirgins because something something genetic preservation.@WWTH You just reminded me of that lip-sync battle that Tom Holland was in. 😀 Yummy!
(Also very happy I grew up during the New Wave era – made-up men everywhere!)
I still fail to see how my blood red lipstick or my black mat lipstick makes me look more fertile.
@Catalpa – Well, given their obsession with talking about “cucks”, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them ended up developing a cuckolding fetish. Which they would sublimate by becoming violently angry at the women they thought were “sluts”, and would then justify their anger by pointing out that these women (who have never been in a relationship with them) are cuckolding them by imaginary proxy because thinking about them having sex with a man who isn’t them gives them funny feelings in their peepee.
No, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s not like these folks are any good at actual logic.
@Paireon
I think they do have cuckolding fetishes. The whole history of cuckolding fetishes and cuckold pornography has been connected to insecurity. For centuries one common racist image has been a black man cuckolding a white man, and this played upon white insecurity. Today, it continues. Sexually insecure white men projecting their insecurities into cuckold fetishes. Fetishes often exist based on someone’s fears (e.g. forced transformation, consensual non consent roleplay, submission). Here it’s the same way, just with a very specific fear and fetish.
I’m getting quite a bit of use out of that armchair sexologist hat from earlier today. As always, if anything I said is wrong, please correct me, as I am by no means a real expert.
Personally, I say if the Peterson stans want to call their ‘god’ the Lobster King, then they have to accept Blibdoolpoolp as their Queen. (First illustration NSFW.) Only fair, yes? XD
@Naglfar
Here’s the thing: my despising MRAs, incels and miggies is due to the fact that, in many ways, I am very similar to them, or at least the stereotype of them, especially the latter two (40-year-old virgin white cis/het dude, lives with his mom, geeky/nerdy, bad at trying to establish intimate relationships with women). I’ll let you guess the one crucial point where I diverge from the stereotype.
In any case, and perhaps related to the above divergence, I am myself on one hand quite insecure on the sexual front, and on the other I have a vast number of fetishes (many of which would anger a lot of people here due to their misogynistic undertones, although since I mentally enforce a very strict separation between my fantasies and reality there is no bleedover affecting my opinions concerning real life; think of it as pretty much the same thing as the vast majority of horror fans, who would definitely be horrified at the idea of a horror movie/novel scenario happening in real life). Weirdly enough though, cuckolding is not one of them. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care about it but neither do I mind it being there. If someone gets their jollies from it then more power to them, I’m not about to try and regulate their fantasies.
Of course, I’m capable of admitting to myself what my darker fantasies are, and that enacting them in real-life outside of a kinky consensual role-playing situation would be a horrible thing to do. That may be a second point of divergence from the misogynistic underbelly of the alt-right that I have, actually – I realize and accept that I have a dark side, and I recognize that giving in to it is a terrible, terrible idea, so I don’t (and it doesn’t even take that much effort on my part in my opinion). That does not make me any better or worse than the average person, it just makes me human.
They, on the other hand, make the Classic Blunder(tm) of thinking of themselves as Good People by default, therefore any of their thoughts and opinions are Good by definition, because Good People only have Good Thoughts! Of course, this tends to cause large amounts of cognitive dissonance, and since it’s usually easier (and more gratifying because dopamine) to justify your pre-existing opinions, beliefs and prejudices than it is to critically re-examine them, they create whole-cloth a series of further beliefs, opinions and prejudices that reinforce their pre-existing ones, with both sets feeding into each other in a vicious circle (and yes, this does make for a lot of circular reasoning). Anything that doesn’t quite fit into that pattern/narrative, well as I said before they sublimate into negative emotions aimed at fueling the pattern, and/or they project onto others who don’t agree with them (i.e. racist Nazi asshats want to exterminate non-whites, but everybody knows genocide is bad? White genocide conspiracy theory! That way, not only do “those other people” and their “collaborators” are already planning/prosecuting that bad thing, but doing it back to them isn’t as bad because it’s self-defense! Like killing two birds with one very racist stone).
Whew, that was long. Also hoping I didn’t alienate the good folks here – feels good to be able to talk about this stuff.
Looks like I’m also wearing an armchair psychologist hat today…
@Redsilkphoenix: Well, given that Blibdoolpoolp is the deity of the Kuo-toa, that Kuo-toa are the Dungeons & Dragons version of HP Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, and that for most of his life Lovecraft held deeply conservative and racist views, it’s probably even more appropriate (in a roundabout way) than you thought.
Dude, you’re not the only person who’s got “problematic” fantasies. (Hell, I’ve got problematic fantasies, and I’m an asexual. Brains just do weird shit sometimes.)
I think you’ve got a bit of a skewed perspective of the commentariat here if you think that we’re going to be angered by thought crimes.
Though this isn’t an invitation for you to share notes from your boner with us.
Not-very-hot take: men wearing deodorant and/or cologne are trying to cheat women’s brains by presenting a more sexually attractive odor than their natural BO.