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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12106 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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We Won

On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.

Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.

The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.

As an aside: I never understood the people calling AOC unattractive, and still don't. I find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing easier to understand (not that I consider her unattractive either).

She's objectively above average (for the US, at least), but her face is less attractive that the rest of the package. She has the eyes of a Starfield NPC.

Zendaya is just "girl pretty".

Everyone’s got different tastes and thus everyone has their own “average”. I’m really only into whites and Asians so they’re both starting with a significant handicap.

AOC is like, kinda cute, maybe. She’s not UNattractive.

Zendaya on the other hand is about as sexually attractive to me as a bowl of fruit. I think “girl pretty” might just be a way for women to sabotage and confuse each other.

I'll just come out and say it, then: I believe that Zendaya, in most of her appearances, looks like a man. And I'm assuming you're straight, so naturally that doesn't map as attractive.

I think “girl pretty” might just be a way for women to sabotage and confuse each other.

Most "girl pretty" outside the Asian sphere of influences make female faces more masculine, not less. By the way, did you ever notice that white tomboy women seem to have more feminine-looking faces than average?

I believe the reason for this is to signal the capacity for social aggression just as normal masculine traits stereotypically attractive to women signal the capacity for physical aggression. That's why models are cast that way, that's why the angry librarian glasses and angry-eyebrow jobs exist, and perhaps it's why white women are so obsessed with black women (I don't think that strong-man-Chad-jawed-homoeroticism is limited to men; I think this is just how [normal] women express it).

[It may be the case that, for tomboys in particular, their internal keep-yourself-alive compass points at 'to get stronger, you should get better at the physical aggression side of things'. Kind of sounds like a transgender thing to me, but what do I know. Same with femboys that want to get better at the social aggression side of things, for that matter.]

Furthermore, I think that to be normie-straight, you have to be attracted to the signals of how the opposite sex displays its power or worth. (I also think that men who don't tacitly understand this are doomed to have a hard time in relationships- it's just as much a mismatch as being in a gay marriage would be for most of the same underlying personality reasons (re: @aiislove's push-down-pull-up model of successful relationships being less viable when you're a mirror of each other rather than a compliment).

I'm sure you've noticed this on anime porn sites, by the way- 80% of it seems to be hyperinflation with no attention paid to the face (or the face actively looks male) because of this. The other 20% has faces that are far more palatable, but notice that 'cute' is not a valid search term unless it is combined with 'funny', and that combination yields 80% of the results (in that block of 20%).

Since you tagged me and we're all talking about whether Zendaya is hot or not I'll go too

I'll just come out and say it, then: I believe that Zendaya, in most of her appearances, looks like a man.

I went and saw Dune 2 without having ever seen Dune 1 or reading the books because I thought it would be fun to experience something out of context (much like the fun of traveling places where no one speaks english. Or going to museums and never reading the placards. You can just make up your own stories!) Anyway, the whole time I was just thinking how Zendaya has a very masculine face and how attractive she would be if she were a man. I kept wishing she had a chubby younger brother with a buzz cut, he would be just my type. By media standards she looks pretty good but I can imagine that she's the type of person when you see in real life looks strikingly beautiful.

Most "girl pretty" outside the Asian sphere of influences make female faces more masculine, not less.

I think I understand what you're getting at, although it has varied over the years a bit. Not exactly a shortage of angular-jawed models and actresses, especially a decade back. But I'm not sure if I understand what direction you're trying to describe as "more feminine".

Most "girl pretty" outside the Asian sphere of influences make female faces more masculine, not less.

Pretty much, yeah. Unfortunately.

I'm sure you've noticed this on anime porn sites, by the way- 80% of it seems to be hyperinflation with no attention paid to the face (or the face actively looks male) because of this.

…what?

Are you saying that anime women look like men?

Are you saying that anime women look like men?

A good chunk of them do (it's less bad than any other Western media or RL but it's still at times present) but it's simply most obvious in the hentai repositories.

To be fair, most of my repertoire at this point is CGDCT from the late '00s-early '10s so I might be a little biased; and I think I'm overextending the connection in normal Asian media (because half the reason I'm more focused on that area is because they know how to draw women well).

This is just completely and utterly incorrect. I’ll refrain from linking to any specific hentai examples but you’re free to browse the /h/ and /e/ boards on 4chan for a representative sample.

That's, uh, part of where my observation that they look like men comes from (they're not all like that, but some of them definitely are; 4chan also has better taste than average than some mostly-random aggregator).

I can accept that maybe it's just due to being bad at faces more generally, but the second-order of that then leads me to ask why, implying it's not the primary draw for the image. (It's also just considering the face, not the other characteristics; obviously you can usually see them in the picture.)

Are you saying that anime women look like men?

A good chunk of them do

From what I understand, they're meant to look like cats (not really).

A cat is fine, too.

They do indeed all have snouts to some degree; interestingly, the longer [and pointier] the snout, the more masculine the character (exhibit A: Deltarune; exhibit B: the rest of e621 lmao).

It might just be a neoteny thing (which, again, places where the women appear to have a better cultural relationship with the men tend to express/emphasize more often; the worse it is, the more socially-offensive the look women tend to take on) though.

I’m really only into whites and Asians

Insert obligatory argument over whether Hispanics can be counted as white.

Is there some argument against the "some are, some aren't; depends on ancestry" position other than the "race doesn't exist" SJ-adjacent one?

AOC is obviously not supermajority-white-and-Asian, so it's not surprising that someone only attracted to whites/Asians has reduced attraction to her.

I was just making a half-joking reference to the US federal government's recent race/ethnicity reshuffling.

I personally can't see much difference between indigenous Americans and heavily tanned Europeans, so all Hispanics look basically white to me. But that obviously is my problem, not Primaprimaprima's.

I personally can't see much difference between indigenous Americans and heavily tanned Europeans, so all Hispanics look basically white to me.

Just curious, where did you grow up?

If someone said they couldn’t see any difference between Slavs and Germanics I could forgive them. I especially understand not being able to tell Japanese and Chinese and Koreans apart, since I can’t really do that either, although I’m told that people from those countries have little issue with it. But not being able to tell the difference between South American mestizos and Europeans (even heavily tanned Europeans) is just wild to me. Like, bordering on willfully obtuse.

Just curious, where did you grow up?

I am a nigger of Caribbean descent (so technically not in the narrowest definition of "American descendants of slaves") who has lived in New J*rsey all his life (plus college in western Pennsylvania).

Not being able to tell the difference between South American mestizos and Europeans (even heavily tanned Europeans) is just wild to me. Like, bordering on willfully obtuse.

Look at prominent Bolivian Evo Morales as one example. Is he darker than a default European? Yes, obviously. But, other than that moderately darker skin, does he really look that different from, say, Jay Leno? IMO, no. In comparison, East Asians have wildly different eyes, South Asians have skin dark enough that no white could ever tan to match them, and blacks have both super-dark skin and wildly different hair.

Again, this is all my personal opinion. But to me indigenous Americans seem very similar to whites.

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I especially understand not being able to tell Japanese and Chinese and Koreans apart, since I can’t really do that either, although I’m told that people from those countries have little issue with it.

I haven't lived in Korea for too long for my experience to matter, but my experience with Korean relatives who live (and only ever lived) in Korea is that this is a lie we like to spread out to the rest of the world because it makes us feel superior. We have less issue, but it's a stretch to say that the issue is little.

AOC has African blood as well, or at least she claims to and it seems likely from looking at her. (So do a decent chunk of Hispanics.)

Native Americans are definitely far more closely related to whites and Asians than any of those are to Africans, Austronesians or Australian aboriginals (they're of North Asian descent), and I agree it can be hard to tell apart a white+NA Hispanic from a pure white.

My vascular system doesn’t count them as white, if you catch my drift.

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