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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I guess that when you’re a cheeto stained blob of neck and beards, someone else putting any effort at all to look presentable feels like “cheating”.
Jordan Peterson: Isn’t he the guy who says he’s living on meat, salt, and water only? And now his fans say women are the deceptive ones because they wear makeup?
Oops! Sorry about that gibberish above. I unsuccessfully tried to copy and paste a photo.
You can find the photo near the end of this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest
Jordan Peterson is pictured with lots of (as hairstylists say) “product” in his hair. It appears to be the kind of product that encourages curl. You’ll even see a stray curl on his forehead. DECEPTION? You decide.
None of them have the slightest awareness that they’re being manipulated by junk science, conspiracy thinking, and logical fallacies, but THEY’RE ON TO THE LIPSTICK.
Exhibit A:
“Female orgasms don’t exist, women are just passive receptacles, sperm drains men but has magic mind-altering powers for women, and I am an expert despite the fact that neither I nor anyone else has ever observed this happening in real life.”
@Paireon
I did not mean to shame you in any way with my comment. There is nothing wrong with fetishes or with having insecurities, and as long as you don’t put certain things into the real world, you’re not doing anything wrong. I admit that I sometimes have problematic thoughts as well. There’s also nothing wrong with being a virgin or with living with your parents, and I don’t mean to shame you for that either.
It seems that unlike the people we talk about here, you have the meta cognitive ability to see when thoughts are best kept in your head. That’s a good thing, and it will serve you well.
I know what it’s like to separate thoughts from reality. I love death metal music and I listen to songs with potentially problematic lyrics (such as about violence) but also enforce a strict mental separation between what I hear in lyrics and what I do in the real world.
I hope my prior comment didn’t come across as shaming or as a personal jab. I was merely trying to psychoanalyze the far right obsession with cuckolding. You are not like them because of the aforementioned crucial difference. You are better than them.
@Definitely Not Steve
I support the use of deodorant, but I really don’t like the smell of some colognes and sprays. Axe body spray in particular I‘m not really a fan of. However, it seems to be the go to perfume for many men (who would probably be angry that I called it a perfume). Not sure if it’s a masculinity thing or if some people like the smell.
If straight women, en masse, all decided to go makeup-free, stopped shaving their legs, and stopped plucking their eyebrows, we’d never hear the end of it from MRAs.
I don’t think women in their natural state are unattractive. I’m a straight woman living in Amish country, and I think there’s a real beauty to the Plain People, both women and men.
What about when men exaggerate their wealth/accomplishments/status in order to impress women? I used to date a guy, many years ago, who said he would tell women in bars, “I own Citgo!”. I said, ” What, did they believe you? “. He said, “No, they thought I was a drunk asshole.”
@Dormousing_it
You are right. It’s a no win situation, and they want it that way. If there was a way for women to win, then the MRAs would have to stop hating women at some point.
@Catalpa – Wouldn’t quite say “skewed” as much as “lacking experience” – I haven’t been actively reading the comments section and adding to it for very long, and while you appeared like a nice enough bunch (hence why I opened up so much) I never take anything at face value, so it’s a bit hard for me not to sound a bit defensive at first. Also, no worries, I have absolutely no desire to expose you to the cesspits of my mind’s deepest, darkest corners LOL.
@Naglfar – Oops now I made you feel bad… Sorry for that, wasn’t my intent at all. You didn’t shame me at all; first, if you’d done that I wouldn’t have opened up like I did with that wall of text; it may have been a bit defensive but that’s mostly a conditioned reflex due to my innate skepticism and cynicism, not a guided response (is that the proper term?). Second, I’m actually really, really hard to shame because while I may have low self-esteem, I’ve learned to be relatively comfortable with who I am, warts and all, and am scrupulously honest with myself. I actually have a bit of a reputation among some of my friends for how shameless I am LOL. So no worries, we good.
Anyways, thank you all. Really happy to be here.
#feelsgoodman
(bonus chuckles for those who know that meme’s origins)
@Viscaria:
First you get 79 cents on the male dollar. Then you’re expected to spend more of it on cosmetics than your male colleagues are, just to keep your job. How much is left after the “pink tax” is assessed? Maybe 69 cents?
@Paireon
You didn’t make me feel bad, I just wanted to make sure I didn’t make you feel bad. It’s all good. I just innately apologize way too often.
Boy’s Club by Matt Furie? That’s where I saw it before.
@Naglfar – You a Canuck like me, mayhaps? We do have a reputation for apologizing a lot. And yes, that’s the one. Of course, said by Pepe the frog; it’s the meme that popularized him before he was sadly co-opted by the alt-right.
The anti-makeup thing is a consequence of objectifying women. A “naturally” beautiful woman is a work of art, with God/nature as the artist (and God and nature both notoriously don’t show up at their own exhibitions, so you can praise them as much or as little as you feel like for their work without worrying about their rampant egos).
But a woman who achieves beauty via cosmetics and fashion? Now she is the artist, with her own face and body as her canvas, and praising her beauty means offering genuine compliments to a woman, just acknowledging her creative skills as if she were a person. Can you even imagine?
On the other hand, if you reframe makeup as deception, you still get to look at a hot woman but now you also get to decry her hotness! Win-win! For you, that is.
That doesn’t anger me. Provided you do separate fantasy from reality as you say, I have no quarrel with you.
@Paireon
No, I was born and raised in the US (though I’ve visited Canada several times). But I do apologize a lot, which in my case seems to be a family affliction; my mother and her sister do the exact same thing.
It is sad he was co-opted. Matt Furie is actually a pretty good artist, it’s sad they took over his art.
@Citerior Motive – Good to know; and it really is how I prefer things, otherwise I feel like it cheapens both. I usually have a hard time with “realistic” dramatic fiction, as since it only talks about “ordinary” things happening to “ordinary” people, it offers me nothing I can’t get by simply interacting with real-life people. Historical fiction is different, of course, since it’s no longer “ordinary”.
@Karalora – Huh. That’s a very interesting viewpoint I hadn’t yet considered in your second paragraph.
@Naglfar – He even “killed” the character when he realized what those dumbasses were doing with it. It’s especially annoying that it happened to an indie artist’s creation, rather than a megacorp’s IP. I’m all for the détournement of those, if only to rile up our corporate overlords.
See, that’s just evidence that women are evil. Because we’re shallow and only want men for their money.
However it is not evil for men to be shallow and only want women for their looks.
Because science.
@Paireon: I wish they would have too, but they never would have taken a corporation’s logo, etc – corporations unfortunately have the power to silence those using their logos for whatever reason, ligit or not. They knew what they were doing was stealing, so just chose someone who couldn’t defend themselves.
This reminds me of the “morning routine” monologue from American Psycho, but then all of the manosphere reminds me of American Psycho, so there’s that.
@WWTH:
After all, that’s what Trump does.
@Moggie
I wonder if Trump could get an endorsement deal with Bronx Colors?
It is interesting that this happened around the same time that we found out which brand of makeup Trump uses. Coincidence?
@Moggie,
I wasn’t aware we were calling orange Sharpie “makeup.”
I hate makeup, but it’s part of the “woman at work” uniform, so I wear it anyway. It sucks.
@Definitely Not Steve
Apparently he uses this. Hence my reference to Bronx Colors.
I spent a couple years doing tailoring. The amount of artificial padding in the average man’s suit blows push up bras away. Just sayin’.
But that’s not vanity or deception because reasons.