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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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money (clothes, make-up, perfume, hairdressing etc. are not cheap).

Except 90% of the choices women make in this arena are negative for sexual attraction of men. Thereby blowing the whole theory out of the water. Imagine men wearing orange overalls and telling every woman they meet they are an alcoholic and you have an approximation of women's fashion over the last 2 decades.

Except 90% of the choices women make in this arena are negative for sexual attraction of men.

Just in the interest of avoiding typical-minding, I ask my fellow whore-makeup-appreciation-chads to rise up!

Bad make-up is better than no make-up because I interpret any make-up at all (just as the feminists' nightmares alledge) as a signal that "I am trying to make myself more pleasing to the male gaze", which in turn implies a receptiveness to male advances, which IN TURN is more alluring in terms of attainability bias than the 'natural beauty' it replaces would be.

And yes, yes, I know that we are lectured relentlessly that "That's not what wearing make-up signals you misogynist", but whether my perception of it's implications is accurate or not is beside the point.

Yeah, this is how I feel as well. It is for the male gaze regardless of the official narrative. Not just a receptiveness to male advances, but a tacit acknowledgement that men and women are different and that women should try to be at least somewhat attractive to men. So it signals that she's not entirely lost in the feminist frame.

Yes, it's even harder than I suggested: a woman needs money, skill, AND taste to increase her attractiveness this way.

I do think that much of makeup and fashion that is actively unattractive to men is a signalling activity for women, though; so it might not be that 90% are so bad at it that they fail utterly.

Interesting. Or they may be trading off attracting men with impressing women.

Yes, fashion is intra-female signaling. That there are no straight men in the industry is proof enough of that.

I think stuff like expensive handbags are the most clear example of this. It used to be that men would buy women handbags, and being a woman that can get expensive gifts from men signals that you are a desirable person (even if people may secretly envy you) and less dispensable as a person in the group. (Or it might simply be flexing, I don’t know? Someone can probably flesh this out better.) Now that women earn money comparable to men, they buy their own handbags, even though the true signal (of “I’m so attractive I can get people to get impractically expensive things for me”) is dead, and the recognition of handbags as status symbols is pretty much vestigial at this point.

At least I don’t think I’ve met a man who gushed over a woman’s LV handbag and wanted to bang her afterwards because of it?

Is this really true? I'd 'personally' say all existing makeup and 99% of fashion is bad, makes people unattractive, and specifically in the equivalent senses of the highest aesthetics and the functions / signaling meaning of attractiveness. And, certainly many women apply makeup and fashion in an unattractive way. That isn't a mainstream approach though.

But many men can fall for equally social-signally-fashionable things like expensive cars, shoes, various sports things, video game skins, etc. Maybe some of them find that makeup or fashion stuff attractive for the same reason the women do?

Also, a lot of makeup really does work at covering up obvious or more subtle but still important flaws. Often people do notice the bad parts of makeup, but well-done makeup is just being hot. Also, more people I know than not say makeup makes women more, not less, attractive.

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