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So, I went to see Barbie despite knowing that I would hate it, my mom really wanted to go see it and she feels weird going to the theatre alone, so I went with her. I did, in fact, hate it. It's a film full of politics and eyeroll moments, Ben Shapiro's review of it is essentially right. Yet, I did get something out of it, it showed me the difference between the archetypal story that appeals to males and the female equivalent, and how much just hitting that archetypal story is enough to make a movie enjoyable for either men or women.
The plot of the basic male story is "Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong". I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough, if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I'm not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it's something like "Woman thinks she's not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect". And the Barbie movie really hits on that note, which is why I think women (including my mom) seemed to enjoy it.
You can really see the mutual blindness men and women have with respect to each other in this domain. Throughout the movie, Ken is basically subservient to Barbie, defining himself only in the relation to her, and the big emotional payoff at the end is supposed to be that Ken "finds himself", saying "I am Ken!". But this whole "finding yourself" business is a fundamentally feminine instinct, the male instinct is to decide who you want to be and then work hard towards that, building yourself up. The movie's female authors and director are completely blind to this difference, and essentially write every character with female motivations.
But this is simply a reflection of evolutionary reality. It's not the case that women gravitate to these sorts of stories because they're like, stupid or anything.
A man's future is always, within certain limits, radically open. His sexual marketplace value (SMV) can drastically rise or drastically fall depending on the actions he takes. If he puts in enough work, he can lift weights and bulk up, accomplish more things, gain more status, and be rewarded accordingly. The hero's journey.
A woman's SMV is primarily determined by the physical appearance that was gifted to her by genetics, and past a certain critical window, it slowly but steadily declines due to ageing. Due to a confluence of biological and social factors, a woman cannot expect to bring about an order of magnitude increase in her SMV through her own actions. We do have plastic surgery today, but its effects are limited, particularly in their ability to counteract the effects of ageing, and it wouldn't have been an option at all deep in our evolutionary history, when these mythic structures first became ingrained in the collective unconscious. In a very practical sense, the best thing a woman can do at any given time is to learn to make the best of what she's got. This is reflected in the stories they tell about themselves, to themselves.
Again, hardly atypical. Plenty of men define themselves solely in terms of women, in terms of their success with women. Probably the majority.
A woman’s SMV is determined primarily by the class and social status into which she was born and in which she grows up. This was especially true historically, but is still true today. It’s also mostly true for men, very few of whom heroically change their lives in the way that hero’s journey protagonists do.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, does Emily Ratajkowski's SMV really depend on her parents and social status? I guess maybe I'd find her a bit less attractive if I knew she had a deep Appalachian accent or something, but I truly don't give a single fuck about her social status, she could be an outcast with no friends for all I care, and it wouldn't matter a bit.
I presumed when you mentioned men improving their SMV by making money that you meant something more like ‘marriage market value’. (If it’s just who’s most fuckable at the club, hotness is the most important thing for men and women by far.) A handful of supermodels don’t change the fact that most mating is still assortative. A woman’s value in terms of romantic success is, in almost every way, capped by her social class. An Appalachian Emily Ratajkowski almost certainly wouldn’t have become a model and so neither you or any high-status men would ever have heard of her, unlike the version who grew up in London and Los Angeles and went to UCLA.
Hot working class women don’t usually have the opportunity to marry into the elite the way they would if their value was solely physical appearance. There are always exceptional cases but for the most part the beautiful woman from a poor family will not rapidly rise in SES because of her beauty over her lifetime.
How do you explain Pamela Anderson then? Her parents were a furnace repairman and a waitress, and she was "scouted" as she was in the stands at a CFL game. If you are pretty enough, things can happen, whether it be the prince taking interest or the beer sponsor deciding to sign you. You have to be very pretty, though, I will grant that.
Emily's parents were two school teachers. She was born in London, but it does not seem that her parents were jet-setters. Her mother does have a Ph.D. and taught at San Diego Jewish Academy. Ratajkowski Pere got a Bachelor of Fine Arts from San Diego State University and taught at San Dieguito High School, where he met Balgley, who also taught there for a time. This is a public high school, so Emily grew up in San Diego in fairly middle-class surroundings.
UCLA certainly could make a difference, but she attended for one year and was already a model. The child of two school teachers can usually get to UCLA, or another flagship college.
Looking further, Emily got into modeling when a high school acting coach introduced her to an agent and she signed with Ford models at age 14. I do not think that her entry is in any way predicated on her social class, as the acting coach at a public high school is accessible to most Americans. At 14 she was distinctively pretty, as this photo she shared shows.
I would guess that 50% of girls that pretty get introduced to agents, and the ones who are willing to do the work end up as models. Surely you know girls who were scouted?
I don’t think Ratajkowski is that pretty, she’s often cited by men online as an example of a ‘butterface’ with a perfect body but not so great face. And I think that an acting coach is more likely to know a modelling in agent in Southern California than in Appalachia.
But again, even for Emily Ratajkowski, how high is her value? She has a divorce and a son with a largely unknown indie movie producer who was seemingly so poor that he couldn’t pay the rent on their shared apartment (the weird online estimates of his wealth are absurd and fictive), and who doesn’t seem to have particularly wealthy parents. She certainly didn’t marry up and so leaves her marriage both a single mother and certainly no richer than she began it.
Karlie Kloss was a supermodel who married ‘up’ financially, but she was already the daughter of a doctor and so firmly upper-middle class (which, really, is what the Kushners were, too). That maps to my own experience, the people I grew up with might date one or two rungs lower on the scale (as have I), but for the most part not that much lower.
She is stunning in person, which actually counts for a lot. When I last met her, I was not wearing my glasses, as I am vain, so she just looked blurred, but her effect on other guys was very obvious.
That is true, but not enormously so. Modeling agents look for girls where pretty girls are.
I agree with you here. She was appearing on the cover of "erotica" magazines when she was 21, which is pretty low class.
Financially, but arguably not socially. Real estate is weird that way, with rich people who have no class. I am sure there is an obvious example around.
I do think it is very hard to marry up several levels. Grace Kelly did it. Miranda Kerr is notable, as she was getting any younger. Natalia Vodianova seems to have done well. Class in the US has been eroding, and the levels are not as obvious as they were. I think in the UK it probably is still much more rigid.
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