"Simping for a post wall woman"
Answering a men's-rights individual's rhetorical question
A man (presumably) of the incel or incel-adjacent persuasion broke the sparsely-populated New Years internet by asking, in so many words, why Keanu Reeves isn’t Leonardo Di Caprio-ing it up a storm. Reeves is one of the rare men who really could have anyone, but instead of having literally all the 22-year-olds, he is, per RxRedpill, demeaning himself by “simping for” (dating; standing next to) a “post wall” (over-25? over 20? what brand of incel are you, RxRedpill?) woman.
The replies were, unsurprisingly, even funnier than the post itself, although you really need to read the whole thing as a unit. You need to go right from RxRedpill’s holding-forth to the possibly too confident assertion, in the rebuttal, that this unwrinkled 50-year-old woman is untouched by cosmetic dermatology.
But the replies really are a delight. There are the people earnestly defending Keanu’s choice to date a crone (a conventionally attractive woman nine years his junior who just happens to have gray hair). There are others who agree with Mr. Incel that a man with dark hair (dyed or not) with a woman whose hair is gray is an abomination.
Still others—my favorites—miss the boat entirely, and do not understand that this woman is Keanu Reeves’s partner.
Then there are those whose theories tend towards the elaborate. Who summon a trad-lens defense of Keanu Reeves dating a woman who is exactly 5,000 years old.
Most, though, come through with the only logical answer.
Time was, a man could express manospheric views like these to a sympathetic (simp- pathetic) audience. Not on the public internet, Bucko. A lesson learned by another men’s-rights dude or possibly the same one, I don’t recall (I am a sufferer of Winter Break Virus, the one that strikes when small children are home for extended periods of time, whose symptoms are headaches, sore throat, and making not much sense) regarding Pierce Brosnan, another famously attractive actor, whose wife is, per the connoisseurs of inceldom, insufficiently svelte and 19 years old for the role.
Anyway, Keanugate reminded me of my friend
’s recent newsletter about the role of consensus in appreciation of beauty, and specifically, the way people often want their subjective tastes—in people, in anything—confirmed as objective truths. (Also that , we will be podcasting about this on.)
It’s a thing, for sure. It is also a very much gendered one.
The ‘Pilled man mad at Keanu Reeves for not dating a barely legal swimsuit model sees the women of the world as divided between the ones he’d go for and the ones who would not make his ever so discerning cut. But it isn’t even the ones he’d go for. He’s not distinguishing between his own tastes and those of straight men generally. It’s a realm without subjectivity, his own arousal interchangeable with the results of a beauty contest.
For RxRedpill’s value system to make sense, there has to be just one sort of attractive woman: the woman Man deems worthy. What he wants has to be what Keanu Reeves does. If Reeves isn’t using his Keanu-ness to get what RxRedpill would use Keanu-ness for, then Reeves is doing something wrong, and therefore brainwashed by feminism into dating an apparently quite successful artist (I have already forgotten her name but I did google her, obviously) rather than a state-of-the-art sex robot.
It’s tricky for straight men, because status, for them, can be tied up with who they can get. This only adds up if you assume all men want the same women, and even people less ridiculous than RxRedpill do on some level assume this. Otherwise there’d be no beauty contests, no trophy wives.
The supposedly-but-not-actually objective nature of female beauty must pose a challenge for the men whose tastes don’t align with the expected. But it’s also not great for those who (like Borat, in Borat, which I just rewatched) want the Baywatch babes, only to realize that so does everybody else and there are only so many to go around.
For straight women, nobody cares what the men we’re with look like apart from ourselves. Nobody cares! Nobody assumes Keanu Reeves’s partner is secretly rich/powerful/conniving and that this is how she scored a genuine Keanu. She is not with a man who looks as Keanu Reeves does (and I have seen him in person and he does) to raise her standing among women. Whatever status boost (sought or not) she gets from being with Reeves is from his fame, not his beauty. It isn’t meant to tell us something about her, specifically, that she’s with him. You see them and think, OK, these two people met each other and hit it off.
There’s no assumption that every woman would be with a man who physically resembled Keanu Reeves if she could. Probably less of an assumption than there ought to be, although now that I think of it, incels are the only ones out there who do assume this about women. There are objective and subjective aspects to male and female beauty, but it all plays out so differently according to expectations and whatnot.
I have more on this—obviously—but am trying to keep timely news-cycle items for blog and deeper (?) things on this for the book about straight women that by the way I am writing for Penguin Random House Canada in case you are a reader of this blog and had missed this.
I don't know what the Keanugate comments say, but the appropriate response to incels in this context is:
Keanu has so overwhelmingly demonstrated his dominant male status in other areas of his life (legit action star at 60! Rich beyond imagination!) that he does not need to select a hot 22 year old partner to further indicate to the male hordes that they should bow to his male excellence. Perhaps, in the ultimate move of male superiority, as a leader and not a follower, in his selection of a partner Reeves is parading around the fact that he does not give a f*** what other men think of him.
And on that note: are incels aware of how deeply they desire the approval of other men, rather than actual women?
There is something about the male pursuit of the ultimate hot woman that every man recognizes as hot, that has always stuck me as at least a little homoerotic.
Oh wayward Incel Man! Have you already forgotten your Plato?!: "He should realize that the beauty of any one body is closely related to that of another...After this, he should regard beauty of minds as more valuable than that of the body."