'Even moderately attractive'

I will start with my theory, and then get to the most perfect example of it in action the universe could have provided. I have been saying for years for years that when the incel says, ‘No woman would have me,’ it’s 99.99% of the time a statement that means, ‘No woman I notice and deem worthy of relations has reciprocated/has spontaneously come onto me.’ That, or these are 15-year-old boys who will get a girlfriend the following year or two and are simply experiencing a normal lag between wanting-of-girlfriend and having-of-girlfriend, to which they’ve attributed a stupid very-online category that risks proving self-fulfilling.

William Deresiewicz’s new Tablet essay, “Unfuckable Hate Nerds,” has a delightful title but it’s downhill from there. It’s kind of a sex-themed twist on, ‘why are schools these days such feminized environments/so unfair to boys?’ Interesting premise, maybe? (The radical idea that men are people, too.) Or just an opportunity to trot out circa 2003 pop-evo-psych ideas about why men and women are like so? No paywall on Tablet so you can decide for yourself.

That said, even in context, you will be forced to contend with the following paragraph:

Any young woman who is even moderately attractive will be courted, complimented, paid attention to, by women as well as men. Older men will buy them things. People will hang on their words even when they aren’t interesting and laugh at their jokes even when they aren’t funny. They will have entry into places—private clubs, backstage after a show—young men can only press their noses against. They will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men. Young men, meanwhile—those losers, those loners, those apes—are left to pick their psychic zits on the periphery.

My reaction, apparently not uncommon, was that if this is how it goes for “even moderately attractive” young women, then my late teens-early 20s self must have been grotesque.

I tried to picture being that age, and apart from the “courted” bit (I had boyfriends or whatever, no problems in that department), none of it rings at all true to my experience. What “private clubs”? What professional advancement via batted eyelashes? Was that how French-lit grad school was meant to work? Because if it did work that way, not for moi.

The paragraph reads as if its conception of “moderately attractive” young women comes straight out of Emily Ratajkowski’s memoir, My Body. Imagine the world bending for you at every turn because you are just that sexy. This is true for a handful of people, people who (see: My Body) may find that it has drawbacks. It is very much not true for every cute-enough (‘mid’) 21-year-old woman.

Meanwhile the “powerful older men” thing, it’s like, some of those men are gay, and are not necessarily holding other men’s youth against them, as it were. If you’re a young man who wants to use your youth as power, there is that route. There’s also just being promising, something I am quite sure young men get to be, every day of the week, and not just the “even moderately attractive” ones.

The paragraph is so perfect because it gets at exactly this thing where ‘woman’ is defined as ‘extremely beautiful woman virtually every man wants sex with.’ It is easy, in some respects, for such women. Theirs is not the universal female experience even if you restrict things to women aged (say) 18 to 25. The festering resentments at how easy women have it come from a place of imagining that all women resemble Emily Ratajkowski, which I suppose you would think if all women who do not are invisible to you.