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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12411 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?

FWIW (1) In general I find Margaret Qualley to be very attractive; and (2) to me, that dance routine was not attractive at all. If she were my girlfriend, I would try to avoid thinking about that dance number.

In any event, my wild-ass guess is that if a woman is willing to violate certain social norms, some men perceive it as a signal that she might be down for a quickie.

Why don't women use this superweapon?

Women have an even stronger super-weapon to generate attraction, which is to wear clothing which is significantly more revealing than the average women around them. A shorter skirt; a more low-cut top; a skimpier bikini; and so on. So why aren't there lots of women walking around naked? (Actually sometimes it seems we are headed in that direction). There are a few answers to that, but a big one is, again, social norms. Most women don't want to be perceived as trashy. Besides, as another poster pointed out, most women want better suitors, not more suitors.

In the same way, there's a social norm against doing the sort of goofy dance she is doing in that video. In fact that's kind of the point of the video -- she is doing something unconventional.

FWIW (1) In general I find Margaret Qualley to be very attractive; and (2) to me, that dance routine was not attractive at all.

Same. I first saw her in Nice Guys around when it came out and thought she was gorgeous in that so I have watched a lot of what she has been in, and I have to say she is one of those Nepo Babies with real talent. That dance is one of the least attractive things I have seen her in. She was prettier in Maid where she was dressed all the way down as a poor single mother.

I first saw her in Nice Guys around when it came out and thought she was gorgeous in that so I have watched a lot of what she has been in, and I have to say she is one of those Nepo Babies with real talent. That dance is one of the least attractive things I have seen her in. She was prettier in Maid where she was dressed all the way down as a poor single mother.

FWIW I really liked her flower-child/hippie look in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Hot take: Talented nepo babies in Hollywood are vindication of HBD.

Nah, it's dynastic advantage. College-educated parents have college-educated kids, doctor parents have doctor kids, actor parents have actor kids.

A random girl from Missouri might want to become an actress, but she has no idea how to become one. There's this meme that you first move to LA to wait tables and then wait tables until you lose all hope and go back home to Sedalia.

Actor parents know how the industry works. If their child shows any promise, they have director friends, producer friends, they have agents working for them, they know what first roles are good for their kid's acting career and they get dibs on them. By the name Maddyson graduates from Smith-Cotton High School, her spot has already been taken by someone sufficiently good.

Far be it from me to put HBD evidence in the trash, but I take it more as evidence that acting is trivially easy and the only people who can’t do it are crack babies (a set with significant overlap on nepo babies, which is the real reason nepo babies usually can’t - they are unusually disadvantaged on account of their parent’s drug use)

Have you tried it?

I did drama in high school (mostly to avoid having to do painting). It was, indeed, ezpz.

Fair enough. I tried and was awful: wooden, unable to easily imitate tone or behaviour. You may be more talented than you think.

I used to think acting skill was about acting convincingly, but I think it's actually more like being someone people want to watch. I don't think it's trivially easy, or at least it's comparable to something like picking up women at a bar. It's easy if you've got it, really hard if you actually need to get good at it.

Yeah especially with unlimited retakes and the star power PR vehicle behind you.

Thirded? I find Qualley to be one of the most attractive currently active actresses, the algorithm has served up this clip a few times and always just scroll past it without watching the whole thing.

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