No Sex? Blame Beauty Standards.
Instead of narrowing standards, let's see beauty more broadly.
There’s a community on Reddit called r/Truerateme in which young men rate women’s attractiveness using ridiculous metrics. If someone rates a woman too highly, the others punish him. It’s in the community rules: thou shalt not overrate a woman’s looks. As one Reddit user critiquing the community put it, “I'm almost entirely certain that most of the posts are stolen pics from outside Reddit, they're beautiful women who are being given low ratings to make any passerby think ‘wow if she's a 6 I must be a literal bridge troll’ because the sub is run by woman haters who want us all to feel like garbage about ourselves. None of it is genuine, it's all to make us feel as bad as they do.”
If you’re wringing your hands over the “fertility crisis” and want to do something about it, start by telling these young men to get a real hobby. (Brazilian jiu-jitsu might do them some good.)
After all, do you really expect women to see this behavior on one app and be filled with desire to get on another app where they might meet one of these hypercritical losers? Who wants their profile pictures critiqued by some guy who obsesses over the distance between a woman’s nose and her upper lip? Who wants to sit down and have coffee with him, let alone exchange messages?
Unmeetable beauty standards correlate with a decrease in the fertility rate. South Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world, and it’s also facing a fertility crisis. Makeup routines for Korean women can take hours and often include taping down the skin to change the shape of the face. (I’m exhausted just from thinking about that; tiredness isn’t great for the libido, you know).
Contrast that with photos of American women from World War II. In most of them, you see very little makeup. Often, they’re wearing nothing more than a little lipstick. After the war, servicemen came home to those same women, and a baby boom followed. Am I oversimplifying? Probably. But I don’t think I’m wrong.
has written about how Botox injections eliminate microexpressions, which is “part of why chemistry and eroticism are dead.” It makes sense to me. If you can’t show spontaneous emotion on your face, how can you visually communicate to the other person that you’re interested in what they have to say? (Cue Elle chiming in with a headline: Flat Affects are Sexy, Actually.)DeFino goes on to say that Botox has been shown to disconnect people from their own emotions, so not only does Botox deaden your facial muscles, but it also makes you dead on the inside too. In other words, the Botoxed appear disinterested, and they are.
DeFino says, “Beauty culture has taken these really embodied, metaphysical concepts of beauty and desire and attraction and relegated them to the superficial realm. So we’re really only considering these supersensible concepts on the surface level, which is not serving anybody. Except industry executives!”
Want grandkids? Dump your Revlon stock and tell Junior to stop being so picky.
“If everyone is beautiful, then no one is.”
The novelist Lionel Shriver has said something along these lines, stating that we need beauty standards so that ugly people will know they’re ugly, or something. But I think she’s off the mark. Wouldn’t we be better off if we tried to see the beauty in everything?
Debasish Mridha says, “A wonderful person finds amazing beauty in everything and everyone.” That makes sense to me. Who wouldn’t prefer to spend time with someone who sees beauty everywhere over someone who says, “I need to know who is ugly”?
Amit Ray says, “Beauty is the purest feeling of the soul. Beauty arises when the soul is satisfied.” In other words, we don’t need ever more ridiculous standards to ensure beauty exists in the world. It exists already, and we’re more likely to see it when we are at peace with ourselves. Obsessing over flaws -- our own, or other peoples’ -- is the opposite of peace.
The Vietnamese monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, wrote:
In the Avatamsaka realm
We see flowers everywhere
Looking up, down
Ahead, behind
To the left, and to the right
We see flowers
Layers and layers of flowers
In fact in the Avatamsaka realm
The eyes we see with become flowers
The ears we hear with are flowers
The lips we speak with become flowers
And the hands we receive tea with
Become flowers
I interpret this stanza to mean that the state of enlightenment is one in which we see beauty in everything, and we become the beautiful things that we see. What do beauty standards, and the “need” for them, do for us but keep us mired in the self, the very thing we need to let go of if we have any hope of reaching enlightenment? What would you rather do: reach a higher state of consciousness, or wallow forever in a shallow mud bath of overpriced foundation?
Perhaps Sephora should change its name to Saṃsāra, the Sanskrit word that refers to “the cycle of aimless drifting, wandering or mundane existence."
Forget about beauty and start having fun
In an early episode of Cheers, Carla explains to Norm the “serious drawbacks” of dating beautiful women:
“[Y]ou can't eat Italian, 'cause they're always on diets. You can't go outside 'cause the wind will muss their hair. And you can't go to hockey games 'cause they might get hit in the face with a puck!”
Carla isn’t alone in emphasizing the benefits of fun over beauty. A video from 1949 offers some sage dating advice: instead of asking out the prettiest girl, choose someone who will be fun on a date.
Modern dating is anything but fun for most of us, and beauty standards are a major culprit. So, for those of you who are worried about declining fertility rates, stop blaming body positivity, feminism, or birth control. Try aiming your ire at Botox, buccal fat removal, Maybelline, and the money-hungry executives who insist we need all those things if we’re ever going to find love.
And tell Junior to keep his negative opinions about women’s looks to himself.
Buccal fat removal sounds terrible. Incels prioritize all the wrong things. Great essay, as usual.