r/AmIOverreacting: AIO for being upset my husband forgot to come get me from work? He’s been driving me back and forth for two months with my car.
r/AskWomenOver40: Frustrated in my marriage
My issue is with the sheer numbers of people coming out of the woodwork to call her ugly. “Oh she has trailer park white girl eyes” or “she looks like she has fetal alcohol syndrome” or “she’s the most basic white girl you can find at any McDonald’s, she was never pretty”
Now, beauty is subjective, of course. But Sweeney is very conventionally attractive. I think she’s quite beautiful on the outside. The complete switch up is INSANE to me, how people went from “she’s the most beautiful woman in the industry right now” to “actually she’s always been an ugly bitch” so fucking fast.
Hmm. Idk who this was. I heard the name, but after looking her up I do agree that looks very conventionally attractive.
I rarely see problematic men getting attacked for their appearance so viciously. It happens, of course, but certainly not to the degree that I’m seeing with Sweeney.
Edit: I didn’t make this post so y’all could tell me more about how ugly you think a woman is.
I think thats true. I think also the ugliness of any man is taken for granted? It’s not a big issue. Also, I don’t think I hear attacks on conventionally attractive mens looks as much for when they do something bad.
Some of the commenters point out how they start finding men unattractive if they learn something bad about them. I think OP was trying to make a point along the lines of how important a woman’s looks are. A bad woman has to be an ugly women and its also we important that we talk about how ugly she is.
The commenters were focusing on why someone might see others as unattractive, OP, I think, was trying to comment on the important of womens looks.
Comments have stuff like:
I feel for you. My divorce judge looked at me and said “well you picked him” and that’s when I realized. NO one has any sympathy for us
I waited until I was 39 to get pregnant. I was married, had a good career, did everything the “right” way. My husband left me at 10 weeks pregnant. She’s not wrong!!
They say that we pick these men but at some point we gotta understand we ALL can’t be picking the wrong men
I know so many women who are staying in unhappy marriages because they can’t leave financially. To the young women reading this, please don’t do it!
Just to give you some hope your 40s are going to be great. My abusive ex stole 20 years of my life but my daughter is raised and I never have to speak to him again. I fought years of court battles and have had men I dated lie to me to get me in relationships. I am totally focused on me at this point. You can have a great phase 2 of your life.
Has there been any discussion on the 4B movement here? Searching for it, I don’t think so.
I’ll share some stuff I’ve heard soon. A korean coworker of mine told me about this movement. I think it could be relevant here? Well actually: is the focus here on feminism/women’s mistreatment in the west or just broadly speaking?
I read the 4b subreddit sometimes. I linked one of their posts in Comments on The Boyfriend's Introduction to Feminism - #365 by Elliot
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Tangentially, re parenting (my bold):
One of the things that distinguishes people who behave abusively from people who don’t is that abusers think certain behavior can justify abuse. That’s why you’ll hear abusive parents talking about “discipline” and how they’re teaching their kids not to be “bad,” and why right wing men love to frame women as irrational, crazy, emotional, and stupid. The justification for the abuse is built in, and reframes the abuse as love and help. Over time, they convince their victims to believe this, too.
I write about how authoritarian parents—often evangelicals—set their children up for abusive relationships here and here.
Have any of you folks heard of the Looksmaxxing community? They think physical attractiveness, especially facial features, is the most important factor in personal success, social treatment, romantic outcomes, and even economic opportunities. They argue that society is super biased towards good-looking people via the halo effect (where attractiveness leads to assumptions of better personality, intelligence, and competence), making looks a non-negotiable metric that trumps hard work, status, money, or personality alone. Ignoring or downplaying this, they claim, is delusional and cope.
Hardmaxxing can involve things like getting face surgeries to make your face more aesthetic, getting leg lengthening surgery to become taller, and taking steroids for physique.
This is Clavicular, one of the most popular in the community.
Society is biased about how people look but also people use their looks (particularly stuff that’s hard to change) as an excuse for failures.
If someone wants to dress “well” in order to be treated well, maybe that’s fine. But getting surgery in order to be liked better by biased people is not the life path I’d recommend going down, especially for men (who have more opportunities available than women even if they aren’t pretty).
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I think that this is just demonstrably false in a way that feels almost too easy, and kind of silly. Like, you can just look at the most successful people, the richest people, the most powerful CEOs, etc.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, etc. — these are not particularly good looking people. I would go so far as to say they range from decidedly average to distinctly unattractive depending on the person and the features. And yet they’re highly successful. So clearly, there’s other stuff involved in success.
In a sense, I could stop there. Looksmaxers made a bold claim about the world, I proved the claim false. QED.
But I’ll engage with a slightly less bold version. Appearance does matter in some contexts, and being attractive can definitely open doors for people sometimes. Particularly in some fields of work, e.g. being an actor.
And IMO, much more than pretty privilege, society has issues with ugly discrimination. I think having looks society sees as markedly below the norm has way more downsides than looks above norm has upsides.
So if some pretty privilege is real, if some ugly discrimination is real, then surely looksmaxing is back on the table, right?
I mean, maybe. Kinda. Taking some steps to look better, look closer to norm (or look a bit above norm if you can), could have some reasonable payoff in many areas of life. But there’s diminishing returns here. Looksmaxers grew out of the incel and redpill communities, and these communities all share extremely narrow and false views of what is considered good looking. So for example I mentioned one career where being pretty can help a lot: acting. Lots of A List movie stars are widely agreed to be very attractive, get named “sexiest man alive” etc.
But these A Listers also routinely fail to meet various incel/looksmax standards. Tom Cruise is 5’7. Robert Downey Jr. is 5’9”. Lots of famously handsome A list movie stars are of average or slightly below average height. Lots of them have crooked teeth, imperfect jaws, craggy skin, etc. They don’t typically look like plastic dolls.
It turns out that actual societal beauty standards are not the same as looksmaxing/incel beauty standards.
—
Another issue is that in general, to be successful, there’s a wide range of stuff that often helps. Being pretty can help. But so can being good at talking to people. So can having startup capital. So can being motivated and working long hours. Looksmaxing like this kid does involves investing huge amounts of time and money and health towards looking good. Those investments involve not devoting that time, money, and energy towards other goals.
Especially for men, for whom there is not much standard culturally ingrained looksmaxing practice. Women might spend time doing makeup each day, but often they learned that at a young age and internalized it and the actual energy it takes is fairly low compared even to a man doing an identical makeup/skincare routine, much less an over-the-top routine like a looksmaxer would endorse.
So basically I just don’t see much value here.
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For misogyny examples, see the section “False Claims”, including the Reddit links, in Curiosity – Dennis Hackethal Is a Bully
Talking to my coworkers, which are nearly all women (we have two guys including me), they’ve shared a lot of stories about guys sucking and personal issues they’ve experienced. Though something I wondered:
While I’m not trying to disparage(?) the posts shared here, what makes my coworkers (and all these other womens) experiences different from, lets say, an incel? In the sense of what they say. Obviously they have different more objective things that happen to them, but I’m just going off of the stuff they say. A lot of them say guys suck. On the surface level, I can see why/how that could be similar to incels saying that women suck.
Hmm. I do think women have a much more objectively worse experience. I guess my point here is: why do men think they have it so bad. Though also women can downplay some really shitty situations. So its probably a cultural thing or something.
Yeah, I think maybe a good way to investigate this would be to go read some of the specific things incels claim and judge those things, and then do the same for things women claim.
See if there are some consistent throughlines you notice. What are they? Are the complaints are reasonable? Are there alternative explanations you can think of? Etc.
Sometimes I see instances of women complaining about men and the complaint seems a bit weak, or a bit reductive, or maybe I can think of a better explanation, etc.
But I spent a while reading a lot of incel forums (back when it was easier to do so because their subreddits hadn’t been shut down) and in general the quality of their complaints is way way worse. The issues they describe frequently make them look bad. Like the version of events they tell, biased in their favor, still makes them look terrible.
But some incels might have had legitimately bad experiences, too. That’s possible.