In the online world, there’s this unofficial rule that everybody who isn’t an internet troll is supposed to pretend all women are beautiful, even when everybody knows they’re not.
For example, when an overweight, ugly-faced girl posts a picture of herself in a hideous dress and captions it “Look who got a new dress!”, the rule is that we are all supposed to politely click the heart-shaped button, and if we have time, we are to type out a reply telling her she looks beautiful.
Everybody knows she’s overweight and ugly-faced and doesn’t look pretty in that dress. Or in anything. She knows this too. But the polite rule is that we are all supposed to click the heart button and tell her she’s pretty.
You might think “What’s the big deal about this? People are just being nice instead of being a-holes!” But it’s a matter of principle. What right does this ugly woman have, who frigging knows she’s ugly, to try to force all of us to lie in front of each other as we perform the “you’re pretty” politeness ritual, so we can all demonstrate compliance with the social rules for one another?
I guess that’s why I’m an internet troll. I’m not supposed to say the rules out loud or complain about them. It annoys everybody and makes me look autistic. And when I say an ugly woman isn’t pretty, they tell me I must not like women and must be homosexual. They also remind me that I am not hot, and therefore am required to be attracted to non-hot people. (As though we don’t all know that the ugly couple is just clinging to each other out of loneliness and the inability to do better.)
We live in interesting times. Large magazines have token inclusion spots for overweight models. A hot older celebrity just got a bunch of young pretty models fired from her newest movie set so they could inclusively replace them with chubbier women.
By the way, that hot older celebrity was named “world’s most beautiful” in People Magazine. And yeah, she’s still pretty for her age, but “most beautiful” in the entire world? Heck no. She got that honor because she’s old, not because she’s the prettiest woman in the world.
And that’s where we’re at. Women get magazine modeling shoots and roles as movie extras not in spite of being fat, but specifically because they are fat. And older women get featured as super-pretty in the media not because they’re super-pretty but specifically because they’re old.
And the correct social behavior when we see this is to click the heart shaped button and type a comment indicating that these women are beautiful. Because all women are beautiful.
This compulsory affirmation is a social loyalty test. It trains everyone — men especially — to silence our true thoughts, censor ourselves. In the service of maintaining the ego of women. And once we’re willing to lie and censor about something as blatantly obvious as physical attractiveness — ignoring our very eyes to play polite social games — that softens us up to lie about other things.
If you’ll tell a fat girl in an ugly dress that she’s beautiful, what’s the harm in telling a woman she’s smart? Or her opinion is insightful and unique? Or that her behavior is moral? That she has merit? Value?
That’s small potatoes. We’ll let an older woman take the title of most beautiful and call any troll who doesn’t say nice things about a chubby model’s bikini pics an obvious homosexual. So giving a porn star a religious podcast, or pretending the tiny object in the corner of an internet pic that is three-quarters boobs is oh-so-interesting and the woman posting it is oh-so-smart with insightful opinions? Barely worth a thought.
Look at the pattern. The degradation of language. We don’t just pretend the overweight girl in the new dress is beautiful. We pretend that the word “beautiful” itself has no meaning. That it’s completely subjective and fluid. We go along with the idea that it’s possible to erase any hierarchy. And if there’s not a clear hierarchy for something as blatantly obvious as physical appearance, then there certainly can’t be a clear hierarchy for things like intelligence or morality. We can hand-wave away having standards for any of that stuff as just your dumb misogynistic opinion.
So it’s okay to promote the mediocre female executive over a competent man because now that words don’t have any meaning, she’s “crushing it” under at least one or two metrics we can come up with.
Now, the single mother isn’t making poor choices. She’s the strongest woman we know.
And the aging actress isn’t an okay-looking woman coasting on her past looks and connections (and her bajillion dollar beauty regimen with an entire trailer full of stylists and cosmetologists). She’s literally the most beautiful woman in the world. Magazines say so.
Standards aren’t fair. Life is not a video game. We aren’t characters in real-life RPG, all created with an equal number of points that we allocate to various characteristics so that we’re all different but equally valuable humans. Some humans are just better than others. Smarter, better looking, more capable — the whole package.
But the social rules of our society are created and maintained by women, and women hate standards. Because objective standards are mean.
This is why the “you’re so pretty” social ritual is grating. It’s not kindness. Kindness would be private encouragement toward improvement, or at least silence that spares everyone the performance. Instead, we face public endorsement of a different rule: female self-esteem is a non-negotiable public good that trumps truth, male judgment, artistic standards, and even basic visual coherence.
When we endorse collective lies about something physically blatant, we erode the very concepts of standards and language. If we can’t speak plainly about objective features like symmetry, waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, healthy hair, and all the other evolutionary cues that have guided mate selection for millennia, then we lose the plot on everything else that requires discernment. Hiring. Leadership. Art and entertainment. We end up with a culture that praises all formes of mediocre existence as valid and equal, while having too much excellence is something we shun and declare to be luck and privilege.
I’ve written before about how women wield enormous agency but hate acknowledging male agency or consequences. The beauty ritual fits right in. The ugly girl posting the dress photo knows she’s fishing for compliments. She knows the game. She’s not seeking honest feedback. She’s demanding tribute.
That’s where we come in.
The troll’s role isn’t just to be an asshole for sport. It’s to refuse the script. To be the adversary. To take over the story and become the plot.
And Internet Men: We have done so.
Today’s internet traps aren’t just laid out to seek validation. They are laid out for us. So that we will show ourselves and do what we do best. And when we victimize these poor creatures, yes, they are praised for their brave endurance and we are called homosexuals. But we also remind the universe, tongue in cheek, of what it already knows: The emperor isn’t wearing clothes. It was always just a game. We keep the game a game and prevent things from getting too serious.
Keep up the good work!
