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Notes -
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.
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%).
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".
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