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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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you don't need gay designers to convince normie men that the majority of the women on this list are attractive

While arguably not a normie, I am a man and I posit they're not exceptionally attractive. They have sometimes amazing faces and are all around okay, but this is despite them lacking feminine waist and hips (I don't mean Beyonce, Megan Fox and other celebrities who got on that list because of being actual sex symbols). I think we can learn more about male preference from actual, organically emerging markets. How prominent are women of this type among [some high percentile] Onlyfans? Among strip club dancers? Are these bodies present in escort girl catalogues? Do women photoshop themselves into that shape? Do they seek out clothes exaggerating those traits?

And how much effect does a typical male's preference have on who gets to the runway?

A huge fraction of eastern European and Asian sex symbols buck your sex doll trend.

Seeing Japanese lingerie models, I very much doubt it. Asians may have less interest in bottom-heavy physiques, of course.

Bill Gates and Papas Elon and Bezos who are all richer than G*d could easily have maximized for breast size and didn't.

There's the notable "billionaire wife" meme, I think they didn't prioritize looks in any case.

most modern men actively wouldn't marry a stacked girl with >double Ds and a huge ass given the choice because they aren't viewed as respectable

I am not sure about that, and the idea that rail-thin (as opposed to just tall) women are inherently more attractive to the higher-status men is on par with the most hare-brained evo psych stories. A fit, non-sagging woman with bigger tits and ass wins, although of course there are trade-offs.

We could make up any number of bullshit evo psych arguments to fit the data.

Sure, but I think we don't have to, because the data in all conditions where large numbers of representative men actively express their preference and are in a position to demand the subjectively best possible pick is overwhelmingly in favor of the blogpost's hypothesis, which you are unjustifiably dismissive of.

While arguably not a normie, I am a man and I posit they're not exceptionally attractive.

My high school friends (at least when we still talked about that kind of thing) would beg to differ. Beyond that my only exposure to normies is the internet, so /shrug

I think we can learn more about male preference from actual, organically emerging markets. How prominent are women of this type among [some high percentile] Onlyfans? Among strip club dancers? Are these bodies present in escort girl catalogues?

And yet who, aside from the creeper admin in the chat, would marry the onlyfans star/stripper/escort? Can tell you from personal contacts that having children with strippers goes poorly. I suppose you could argue that if you strip away all the social context/hierarchy/power and put a spherical man in a vacuum where nobody could watch (which may better be approximated by shmuck masturbating in his basement vs. actually choosing a mate), he might fuck the curvy girl down the street over the Hadid sisters, but real life does carry all that baggage.

You could contrive an experiment where men are asked to rate the attractiveness of a series of naked models while trying to control for race, height and whatever else and maybe converge on some breast size and hip ratio. But then, I could probably contrive an experiment where people read an article about the Hadid sisters being millionaire supermodels lusted after by hundreds of millions of thirsty fuckboys and have them rate higher than your golden ratio girl. On the one hand, lizard brain wants hips and tits. On the other, chimp brain wants status and latest fad. Now, are you a soyboy, low IQ lizard brainer or a chad chimp brainer who wants to play status games with the rest of us?

which you are unjustifiably dismissive of

No, you are unjustifiably dismissive of my justification for dismissing your article. I gave you three or four justifications, you just don't like them.

Besides, I'm not dismissive of it. It's just not even wrong. It's the kind of thing that's fun to read but debating it's truthiness inevitably leads to poop flinging unless we're on the same page already and fistbump over it.

And yet who, aside from the creeper admin in the chat, would marry the onlyfans star/stripper/escort?

…Come on, this is a trivial confounder. If there's a reason not to marry or date a conventionally hot sex worker, it's not her looks as such. At worst, it's some perverse signaling consideration, like you say, or insecurity about competition, but ordinarily just an essentially moral and practical choice. A fat prostitute, or an emaciated drug addict with anorexic «model» proportions, are obviously even less attractive! And a «decent» woman with a hourglass figure is not seen as non-respectable or non-desirable.

In fact, you can get in trouble for slut-shaming an actual slut! Assuming that a conventionally hot woman who isn't a slut is non-respectable just because of looks that would boost a slut's popularity is ludicrous and frankly suicidal levels of sexism.

But then, I could probably contrive an experiment where people read an article about the Hadid sisters being millionaire supermodels lusted after by hundreds of millions of thirsty fuckboys and have them rate higher than your golden ratio girl.

Men seem to be generally less influenced by choice copying, though I admit evo psych explanations of this aren't very solid.

Now, are you a soyboy, low IQ lizard brainer or a chad chimp brainer who wants to play status games with the rest of us?

I flatter myself thinking I'm a misaligned high-order mesa-optimizer that maximizes abstract notions like model consistency, aesthetics and diversity of possible agents.

But my dick has a head of its own, and I think this is the same for most men. Taste can be socially influenced; but you were discussing raw attractiveness. The position I and your previous interlocutors defend is that there are some damn robust biologically determined attractors in the attractiveness space, and the body shape common to healthy women with normal hormonal profiles is one such attractor for cis men. Another is skin quality (even harmless freckles are a rather minor fetish), another is hair quality indicative of high estrogen. A man can be an ass man or a breast man or even an abs man, but an archetypal shorthair tomboy with visible abs is still just a 90-60-90 girl who's cut her luscious hair short, trained a bit more and ate a bit less. And everything we see shows that the modal desirable female phenotype oscillates around this, actually quite narrow, setpoint.

Besides, I'm not dismissive of it. It's just not even wrong.

How is pointing at revealed popular preferences not even wrong? It's clearly less not even wrong than pointing at arbitrarily picked runway models.

but you were discussing raw attractiveness.

I mean, several recursions ago I was just talking about dudes wanting to wear dresses. Other guy had to bring sexuality into it.

How is pointing at revealed popular preferences not even wrong? It's clearly less not even wrong than pointing at arbitrarily picked runway models.

I'm not necessarily claiming my poop is better than yours, yet we feel the need to fling it just the same.

It's the equivalent of me writing an effortpost about some survey data/psych experiments on undergrads suggesting that we date people with traits held by our opposite sex parent, and all my friends find it eerie how they've ended up with girlfriends similar to their mom. If I show people photos of women of varying races, men will invariably show a strong preference for women of the same race as their mom. Ceteris paribus, controlling for variables like weight/clothing/whatever, men show a statistically significant preference for women that look similar to their mom. Season with some choice quotes from Freud and myths from antiquity. Do you now believe that the Oedipal complex drives human sexuality, and that we have a genetic imperative to fuck the closest thing to our mom that we can find?

Just the fact that you agree all those other considerations (money, status, body 'archetypes,' flavors of the week, lineage, etc that you call confounders) feed into sexuality and 'mate choice' (to sound like a sperg) more or less lines up with my main thesis that sexuality is fairly plastic according to the norms du jour. I don't deny that there are genetic influences, but I do disagree with throwing out a bathtub full of babies to focus on a single axis of sexuality.

edit: Maybe this post is closer to my thesis than what I linked to above.