Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
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.
I'm surprised to see this from you since you usually seem to be very skeptical (rightly imo) about a lot of these stories people - especially bitter men - tell themselves in the Discourse.
To see you citing how "men online" talk down Ratajkowski without a jab at how crazy /r/truerateme is is a bit funny.
IMO Ratajkowski is like Sydney Sweeney or hell, Benedict Cumberbatch for a weird male version: their status and/or SMV is so self-evidently high that people can sit around mocking them for their looks without it coming across as mean-spirited (well...less so than usual).
Unless you're a fashion designer or a homosexual, it's almost certainly a meaningless meme.
What's wrong with her looks? Or Emily's, for that matter. Both are quite attractive and not even close to someone like Amy Winehouse.
I'd be more inclined to describe Sydney Sweeney as a "butterface" (at least by Hollywood standards: she's still pretty enough, but her body is much more impressive than her face) than Emily Ratajkowski. They gave her a dressed-down look in her recent movie Reality, and I think it's fair to say this woman's face is far from stunning.
There are very few women that look stunning without make-up and/or retouching.
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