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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   23832 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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This week I encountered an artifact at the intersection of my interests. I watched a good movie with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, The Nice Guys. The damsel in distress is played by Margaret Qualley, and additional reading about her pointed me towards this. Watch it, it's short.

It's a ten-year-old ad for a (terrible) fragrance, in which Margaret, wearing an evening dress, dances to a banging dancehall tune. It's very obviously inspired by the award-winning music video for Weapon of Choice by Fatboy Slim (and its director and the guy who wrote the music for the Kenzo ad are brothers), but that's not the point. The point is a goofy Christopher Walken doesn't have the same effect on me as a goofy Margaret Qualley. And she certainly does. She was "eh" in the movie, she is "hnng" in the ad.

Why does making faces and doing silly walks make a conventionally attractive woman even more attractive? The effect goes beyond the well-established TikTok practice of dancing and lip-synching. Why don't women use this superweapon? I can only think of (sorry!) Aella that does.

Some hypotheses:

  1. An active face in your twenties gives you more wrinkles in your forties. I don't think it works like that, but maybe women believe it does.
  2. It's another disarmament thing. You have women that can pull it off with ease (because they are attractive and outgoing), and you have the rest, who either have to struggle or can't do silly mode at all. A culture of limited expressivity has evolved to avoid an arms race.
  3. It's a limited masculinization budget thing. Similar to #2, but limited to a single person. Qualley does her routine in heels and an evening dress, the lines of her body unmistakably feminine even when she's walking with a pronounced hunch. Dress her in baggy sweats and sneakers, and the same routine won't have the desired effect. Why invest in a weapon that limits your other options?

I think the ad is more effective than the music video in large part because of the context of the first minute or so (which your link skips past by default). We first see Qualley sitting in a group setting, politely smiling at some speaker slightly above and to the right of the camera. So then, when she moves into an empty room and starts looking directly into the camera and making silly faces, it feels more explicitly intimate; now that we're alone she's taking the mask off and showing us her real goofy self.

I think this general strategy of acting goofy as a way of showing that you're letting your guard down is something women do often do. But it doesn't usually involve this level of crazy Jim Carrey expressions and movements because, outside the context of a larger-than-life musical number, it'd feel unnatural and forced. (If your goofiness feels too much like a performance, that works against the idea that it's an expression of your genuine self.) But you also can find that kind of thing in anime characters, and the segment of e-girls/cosplayers/streamers that imitate anime characters, because anime also creates a context where the viewer is expecting crazy expressions.

It also helps that her silly dance involves thrusting her chest out and jiggling around a lot, things that are usually more attractive when women do them.

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