The Tyranny of Biomechanics

Well, dammit, I had a very insightful article warming up in my drafts folder about Open Cuckoldry (it’s still coming, promise), but I felt compelled to riff on the new Pirelli Tyre calendar photoshoot first. The calendar art is replete with a semi-nude Amy Schumer sipping a pumpkin-spice latte, “tastefully” rendered in greyscale (the calling card of an ‘artiste’ as a opposed to just a ‘photographer’) and the doughy eyed stare of a comedienne who grasps the ludicrous seriousness of how her image will be received and delivered by a feminine-centric society.

I’ll be honest, I don’t much care for Schumer as a comedian or an actress, and if you read here with any regularity I’d expect you don’t either. She characterizes, with triumphantly unwarranted hubris, everything the Feminine Imperative would like generations of women to celebrate as a victory over the evil “Patriarchy” that, by design, is never entirely defeated. In a post-End of Men society, fat, goofy women will be the banner bearers the imperative will have dance on the symbolic corpse of the “Patriarchy” that will never die or be unuseful to it.

The irony here is that Amy’s naked girth is being lauded by the usual media suspects as “brave” and “stunning”. Calling a woman of this physique “stunning” is like telling the retarded kid he actually ran the football back for a real touchdown to win the big game. Perhaps Amy is self-aware enough to realize this, but her participation in her own humiliation tells the bigger story. The fact that she rationalizes her nudes as being “authentic” as opposed to ridiculous verifies this.

Now before I go much further here, I’ll remind readers that I’m entirely aware that this “groundbreaking” photoshoot of “real” women is little more than a publicity effort, nominally on Pirelli Tyres (are they a British brand?), but mostly for photographer Annie Leibovitz and her feminist triumphalisms (she also shot ‘Woman’ of the Year, Caitlyn Jenner).

Since the inception of this blog I’ve always gotten props for the pictures I select as my lead-ins to what I’m writing. This talent is really the result of my having worked in advertising and brand development for years, and having to be the de facto photographer and photo editor for more than 20 years. Trust me, I get the language of imagery, and it’s not difficult to see the train that Leibovitz is riding here.

At the launch of the calendar on Monday, Leibovitz explained that none of these photographs had been conceived with the male gaze in mind. Williams’s photo was “not a nude but a body study”, she said, while Schumer’s was a comic conceit: “The idea was that she was the only one who had not got the memo about wearing clothes.”

The ‘Male Gaze” card is disingenuous when the stated intent of the shoot is an,…

…arty soft-core ode to pinups produced by the Italian tire manufacturer,…

The Bigger Narrative

There’s a much larger story being sold here than a fat comedienne’s rationalizing her nude form as championing “authenticity” or “realness”. What we’re observing, yet again, is the frustration of women being able to optimize their inherent Hypergamy against what our evolved biology dictates for them.

I’ve written extensively on the conflict between an idealized Equalism and human beings’ evolved predilection for Complementarity. Whenever there is a new ‘outrage’ over “body shaming” or “fat shaming”, with a Red Pill lens we can see what this conflict represents: The frustration women experience, and the anxiety of insecurity they feel when presented with the prospect of not being able to optimize their Hypergamous impulses because simple biology selects them out based on their physicality.

No doubt Leibovitz believes in her rationalization that she’s shooting artful nudes without the mythical ‘male gaze’ in mind, but she knows on a visceral level the form of every nude woman in art throughout history has been rendered with the intent of replicating a beauty that inspires arousal (thus the ode to the pin-up). The simple hard-coded fact of nature is that the form of a semi-nude woman, by order of degree, stimulates the area of the male brain associated with tool use and thereby objectification. On a limbic level, sex with beautiful, arousing women is literally a problem to be solved by the male brain.

Leibovitz gets this. In fact she banks money on instigating the deliberate contradiction that human biology poses to her own (and a larger society’s) ego-investments in blank-slate Equalism. The root of this prefabricated indignation rests in women’s existential doubt of optimizing Hypergamy. That doubt conflicts with the uncertainty of establishing a social order that will force men to act and be influenced by idealized Equalism rather than their evolved biology.

In other words, the latent purpose of this social order is to force men to comply with women’s sexual strategy, irrespective of their evolved sexual arousal cues.

The ostensible want for an ideal Equalism, or a dubious gender parity, is really the cover story for the want of 100% consolidated control over their ability to optimize Hypergamy by literally controlling the sexual selection choices men are able to make for themselves.

Schumer apparently earns the label of “real” because a few rolls around her midsection are on display – because her body is less than perfect by pop culture standards. Would she be any less “real” if she didn’t allow her body to be consumed in this way? Can’t all bodies count as “real”, no matter what they look like and who lives in them and whether or not they choose to show themselves – clothed or naked?

I find it interesting that an out of shape Vin Diesel is ridiculed for his present physique, or that ‘Dad Bods’ are sardonically described as ‘sexy’ while the over-the-shoulder giggles ensue, but what I don’t expect is for these men to be held as a physical ideal in women’s estimate. There are no photographers, male or female, shooting artful nudes of overweight men, normal “real” men of professional accomplishment, or middle linemen for exclusive calendars. Firemen with rippling abs sell very well, but “real” men? Not so much.

However the difference is that men don’t expect women’s choices of what physically arouses them to shift in favor of their physiques based on expected societal shifts. In fact, we don’t even expect women not to laugh at a naked Seth Rogan or Jonah Hill. The automatic impression is to laugh at them because they don’t come close to women’s physical ideal, so the presumption of intent must be humor. Yet we are expected to perceive a naked Amy Schumer as “real’, “authentic”, “brave” and “stunning”, and to do so with genuflection, devoid of laughter and ridicule.

The uncomfortable truth is that women have far higher, far more static and far more stringent physical ideals for men than men will ever have for women when it comes to basic visceral arousal cues. Yes, I understand there are more variables to attraction than just the physical, but we are talking about representing physical ideals in photos and calendars here. Firemen and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models are the standard order for a reason – evolved, practical, efficient biomechanics that have made us what we are today, not pop-culture stereotypes.

T-Rex Wants to Hunt

T-rex doesn’t want to be fed; he wants to hunt. You can’t just suppress sixty-five million years of gut instinct. – Dr. Grant, Jurassic Park

Sexuality, families, and men did not come about because of society. To the contrary, sexuality, families, and men are what made society possible in the first place. – Pook

These are some excellent examples of the conflict I’ve described above here. The Equalism of Annie Leibovitz – the dubious societal idealism that hopes these fundamental, biological underpinnings can be overridden by a self-defined higher order cognitivism – will always lock horns with the T-Rex that represents human biology. Annie and the rest of the prophetesses of gender equality are only, symbolically, trying to feed the T-Rex of evolved gender dynamics in the hopes he’ll stay in the paddock, behave himself and only occasionally put on a good show for the customers.

However, even in the hopes of that a contrived, idealized gender Equalism will ever pull the teeth of the T-Rex, the same evolved need women have for Hypergamous certainty informs the concept of what that ideal “equality” should look like. The T-Rex is women too.