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Notes -
Re beauty: Kurt is good looking by our western-media influenced standards, but the locals are acting with a fairly common hospitality extended towards unthreatening transients. Some of his baseline attractiveness is compounded by exoticism, but the locals are hardly treating him like their gracious god has entered their midst. If you want to see deference to beauty in Vietnam, put a kpopped oppa or unnie in their midst; that'll get you blonde-in-Varanasi level attention.
Nevertheless, it is true that Kurt is not 'ugly' and thus automatically distrusted, and it is interesting to examine the reasons for that: Across all cultures male and female beauty are associated with certain common factors:
There are of course a large variety of ostensibly common cultural values that tend to flow depending on specific economic and geographical considerations, notably fat=wealthy and pale=professional, but those factors are also influenced by a dynamic cultural environment shaped by competing social value vectors.
It has been scientifically proven multiple times, that attractiveness has strong value. Meaning, the opposites of the above 4 values I outlined have strong NEGATIVE value. There are extremely racist statements, perhaps too spicy for even this board to state openly, that especially highlight why some races especially value White and East Asian phenotypes - greater obvious dimorphism is the sole point I will state explicitly, for fear of offending even the toughened skins of mottizens.
Playing into the culture war angle, it is quite obvious that there are strong attempts to promote weird plainly ugly features, and this is clearly less about raising the attractiveness of ugly people than it is about lowering the standards of what is considered beautiful. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjq99z/why-cant-my-famous-gender-nonconforming-friends-get-laid https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42652947 The entire clown show of NB redditors posting themselves in dresses and asking for updoots. Its too mean to crosspost here, but its pretty sad.
Anyways, the point is that the modern culture war DOES have elements of deliberate celebrating of nonattractiveness, but their lack of sexual fulfilment is not a front being fought in this war. This circles back to a relatively common observation, that this is bitter losers in the sexual marketplace attempting to diminish sexual market value of attractive people in order to level the playing field out of spite. Ultimately, there are plenty more people who perceive themselves as losers rather than winners in the sexual marketplace hence why entities keep trying to put their finger on the scale. Whether we as consumers/participants in the marketplace Notice is the concurrent battle being waged as well.
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