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So the Bezos-Sanchez wedding took place, and by all accounts it was exactly as overblown, tacky, and vulgar as anyone's little heart could desire. I haven't watched any of it myself, so why am I mentioning it in the Culture War thread?
Well, because Tina Brown commented on it, and it's at least tangential because we've often discussed on here "what do women want/dating apps/men get the rough end of the stick in divorce/other such delightful War of the Sexes fodder".
I get the impression that Tina wasn't on the guest list so there may be an element of sour grapes here, but in general I think I agree. Jeff Bezos, fourth richest man in the world (depending on the day and the ranking) could have pretty much any woman in the world he wanted. So, who did he blow up his marriage for and before we get into the complaining about his wife taking him to the cleaners, it was he who caused the divorce (actually, divorces because his inamorata was also married at the time)?
The woman next door, a triumph of grinding determination to keep her figure through diet, exercise, and plastic surgery. She managed to find a classy wedding dress so kudos for that, as well as showing off the results of all that effort.
Back to Tina's commentary:
Ouch. But also, yes. What am I trying to say here? Mostly that the next time there's yet another post about reversing the fertility decline by putting obstacles in the way of women going to higher education, steering them to marrying early, and good old traditional 'the man is the head of the house and women should work to please their husband and that includes sex whenever and however he wants it', remember this. Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs (though once again, I have to salute her commitment to starving and exercising in order to keep a taut muscle tone). It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.
I have to be careful to distinguish here between how much of my experience is idiosyncratic and how much of it can generalize, because I find the Sanchez woman to be rather repulsive, but evidently there are many men who do not.
If you listen to TRP/manosphere content, you'll frequently here them say "men have the biggest variety of preferences, men can fall in love with anything, but women only want one thing (and that thing is Chad)". This is one of their favorite talking points, they repeat it quite often. And women often react with incredulity when they hear this, and they claim that reality is in fact that exact opposite. "What? All men just want a 'hot' woman. But my hubby, he's got a bit of a potbelly and he isn't the tallest, but he's got a great smile and a heart of gold, so I love him all the same. Obviously women's preferences are more varied and less superficial."
I think the key to resolving the dilemma is that, although the secondary and tertiary traits can vary greatly, there are certain key traits that, if absent in a man, will make it very hard for a woman to be romantically attracted to him. As far as my observations can confirm anyway. Although, pinning down exactly what these traits are is a bit difficult. It's not stability per se, nor is it social dominance per se, nor is it social adeptness per se, but rather it's more like an abstract distilled commonality that forms a part of all these traits. We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself. If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness", then he's not going to have much luck with women.
What the TRP guys are correctly intuiting is that men have no such minimal criteria. In spite of the fact that there are clear patterns, at the end of the day they really can go for absolutely anything. There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.
I think this is actually sort of analogous to women allegedly preferring "dad bods". I don't think any woman genuinely finds a dad bod more sexually thrilling in isolation, but for a woman self-conscious about her own weight the idea of a man that lives at the gym and eats a stricter diet than a supermodel just sounds intimidating and miserable. I think 4chan NEETs are not necessarily attracted to a NEET girl so much as they just imagine that she will be attainable and have low standards in men and make their own failure less humiliating.
My understanding is that women are in more unanimous agreement about the attractiveness of various features. For example, tall is considered more attractive than short by probably 99% of women. It's just that women place less emphasis on attractiveness relative to social status/dominance, confidence and so forth. Men are more varied in their physical tastes, a nontrivial percentage of men seem to genuinely prefer mega-obese women not merely as a compromise of necessity but as their first choice. But irrespective of their physical preferences, physical looks are regarded as much more important.
Very possible that what women mean by dad bod is not what's popularly envisioned, too.
This is exactly it. They often mean "guy who looks like he can deadlift and bench a VW Beetle, but has some softness around the midsection (so he's probably not insane about tracking his diet, but also so him having too-defined abs doesn't make me feel insecure about my own body)."
My wife has recently given me a little gentle ribbing about my softer than usual belly. We were at the beach last week, and she turned to me and said, "Yeah, seeing all these shirtless men makes, me realize how in shape you actually are."
Point being I agree.
One of the times I was most proud of my dad was at scout camp. They had a bellyflop contest for all the scoutmasters and other adult leaders at the pool, and my dad had the smallest belly by a massive margin. And my dad isn't morbidly obese or anything, but he's certainly no beanpole either.
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