beauty?
to me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.

~ Pablo Picasso

feminists and their ilk are infamous for asserting that beauty is socially constructed.

if taken literally, that statement is ridiculous; it’s clear that female beauty is, to first approximation, an objectively measurable quality.
whr, bmi, frankfort line, rule of fifths, nasofacial angle, etc. — no single one of these parameters captures female beauty by itself, but they can be combined into predictive formulas that are uncannily accurate, and cross-culturally robust, in predicting men’s ratings of female beauty.

however, it’s equally foolish to assert that none of men’s conception of female beauty is socially constructed.

like most claims that make up feminist cant, “beauty is a social construct” is a whole cumulus cloud of lies that has condensed around a tiny grain of actual truth. since most of my readers are well aware of the lies, it’s worth articulating the grain of truth.

specifically:
it’s obvious that, to first approximation, there is a universal standard of female beauty.
however, when i see people trying to parse the differences out to the first and second decimal places — “she’s a 9.3, she’s a 9.4” etc. — i know i’m seeing people for whom one of the following is true:
(1) they are nerds that live in their basements, nitpicking everything to death as a proxy for living it;
(2) they share the same solipsism that they are so quick to point out in women, attributing the exact niceties of their own highly granular scale to other men;
or, ironically,
(3) they are highly social and spend all their time in, and with people from, a very narrowly defined social milieu.

#1 and #2 need no explanation, but #3 runs deep. it’s one of those forces of which most people are unaware; that unawareness is precisely the source of its power.

the graduations at the highest level of the female beauty scale — even the ones that can be measured or approximated scientifically — are heavily influenced by social factors.
anyone who has actually met people from different races and different walks of life, firsthand, would know this.

there are two primary mechanisms.

1. Preselection

PUA types have expatiated on the role of preselection in amplifying a man’s attractiveness to women, but, as is so often the case in the dance of the sexes, one partner’s footwork is mirrored by the other’s.

the more socially aware a man, the more likely is his idea of female beauty to be conflated with preselection.

gedanken experiment, for the men out there:
let’s say you can have exactly one of the following as your mate of the moment, with whom you’ll be seen by your whole social circle as well as by surrounding strangers. what you’ll get to do with her, and to her, is left as an exercise for the reader, but everyone will see her on your arm:
1) gisele bundchen;
2) a random woman who is the exact ideal of the type you like to fuck. (if you say this is gisele, you are almost certainly either lying or incredibly self-unaware.)

in this experiment, most men would pick gisele — even at the cost of the extra hardness of their hard-on.
in this experiment, ALL men with extensive upper- and upper-middle-class social circles would pick gisele, even if they’d rather be fucking the other woman.
why?
one reason is preselection.
these men know, perhaps unconsciously, that being seen with a supermodel — the very quintessence of feminine beauty and desirability from a female standpoint — will up, or re-up, their status with other women. in other words, the arm candy may not be optimal from the men’s own standpoint, but it certainly is from the standpoint of other arm candy.
the man walking around with a willowy, sylphlike model is not as sexually entranced as the man walking around with a voluptuous vamp who oozes molten sexuality, but it’s a pyrrhic loss; consciously or not, he’s bartering a certain quantity of pure carnal obsession for a greater degree of power over other women, who see the apotheosis of beauty (as seen by female beholders) on his arm and fantasize themselves into her place.
it takes an uncanny level of self-awareness, a level most men simply don’t have, to tease this confounding variable out of one’s evaluation of beauty.

the power of this particular confounding variable is particularly strong when it is not attenuated by the blistering heat of prior carnal fulfillment.
most men have never known the joy of fucking the body, soul, and mind a woman who is, at least for the moment, a pure sex object; the quickening, the sudden restoration of meaning to an otherwise hollow existence, that can only come from the violently cathartic release of our true, irrational, passionate, reptilian inner nature with a partner who is far from perfect. or, indeed, if she is “perfect”, the concomitant pleasure of smashing that superficial perfection with an relentless salvo of wanton, irrepressible salaciousness — smearing her carefully applied foundation of makeup, pretense, and resistance with dirty, passionate hands powerful enough to strip away her outer layers and reveal the gloriously imperfect whore beneath.

for men who haven’t had that experience, and are thus unable to penetrate the deepest, dirtiest corners of a woman’s soul in a single, languorous, cryogenic yet burning glance, preselection is a powerful force indeed.
for those of us who have, the gentle piccolo of preselection and objective visual beauty is forever drowned out by the throbbing, tympanic beat of sexual compulsion.

2. Class Indicators

men’s notions of the zenith of beauty are also strongly influenced by social class.

the more socially successful a man, the more likely is his idea of female beauty to be shaped by the social class in which he has achieved that success.

the willowy, lissome body that would launch a thousand amex black cards would have little currency on rockaway ave., brownsville, while upper-class ideals are too narrow for the thick, curvaceous lodestars of fertility that awaken the lyrical muses of ghetto poets.
just as literal hunger awakens men’s tastes for more voluptuous women, so it goes for entire cultures.
no man is an island.
when a man is surrounded, at work and at play, by a homogeneous fraternity of buddies and colleagues who are unknowingly entrusted with enforcing the unwritten rules of their social class, he will begin to internalize those rules. with each barb, each innocent tease about his taste in women, he turns ever so slightly and imperceptibly away from his own desires, tightening the ties that at once bind, unify, and divide.

quick: think of all the men you know whose tastes in women are “freaky” or “unconventional”. (if you don’t know any such men, get out more. if you can’t stand the thought of doing that, talk to an escort or pimp sometime about the wide variety of men’s lusts, and about the surprisingly unconventional “beauty” for which high-powered men will pay good money.)
generally, the more “freaky” the tastes, the more socially unaware or reclusive the man.
why?
the relentless prodding of conformity that inevitably accompanies social success has had no opportunity to do its work on these men; so neglected, they are left honest.

—

only for us few, proud, blessed outsiders do beauty and sexual irresistibility ever converge.
and therefore, only we outsiders, for whom social constructions have disappeared and objective beauty has been engulfed by the greater force of primal impulses, can truly penetrate the deepest beauty of all — the beauty that is not skin deep, nor in the eye of the beholder, but in the flash-point of the explosion for which our own hands are the catalyst.

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