Before you hurl in disgust, watch this TED episode to the end. It’s important you do since the real meat of what Cameron Russel discusses here is towards the end. It’s very easy to dismiss her musings here as just another pretty girl suffering from liberal white privilege guilt, but what she’s driving at here is an inversion of the body (fat) acceptance movement.

Today’s topic comes courtesy of Burrough’s SoSuave forum thread, and after watching this video I felt there was a lot of interconnected gender and social issues being danced around. I have no doubt Cameron is one of the more intellectually developed ‘super models’ of the past decade or so, but her apologetic observations here are only effective because she aligns them with what she knows will be received well from a fem-centric audience.

PlayHerMan had the best comment from that thread which puts her message into context before I go any further:

Well most attractive women don’t start to really understand how the world works until they start losing their looks. Most of them are truly oblivious to the fact that their looks have opened probably 95% of the doors in their lives. I’m guessing the chick in the video was oblivious too when she was 22. This is why she is talking about it NOW and not THEN. If you told her this crap back then she probably would have called BS.

Now that she is past her “prime” she has realized her looks meant everything in her life. Once her looks deteriorate, she will be tossed out of the industry like yesterday’s donuts and be invisible to most men of dignity.

Once the bloom of youth starts to fade and stuff starts to sag.. its a real wake-up call for most women. For the first time in their lives everyone is not kissing their ass. For the first time in their lives they have to pay a speeding ticket. For the first time in their lives they actually have to be qualified or connected to get a job. For the first time in their lives, men are not drooling over them. For the first time in their lives they face the harsh reality that all men face from adulthood onward = Be useful or perish. 

Entitled women who figure this out early get knocked up ASAP so they can mooch off the state as an insurance policy should they not find a willing man to serve them financially.

If you spend your life in delusion exploiting men and thinking you can live that way forever, its a harsh wake up call when you find yourself in your 40’s with no skills, no money, no kids and no men to take care of you. Scary stuff.

PlayHerMan gives us a good point of origin here. Cameron is having her ‘come-to-Jesus’ moment in that, while she’s still attractive as she’s aged, she sees the Wall for what it is finally and requires some sense of catharsis, some degree of absolution, for having lived in (willful?) obliviousness of it for so long. She knows  full well that the majority of the womyn in a TED audience will likely have gone through various stages of hating women exactly like her in their upbringing. She also knows that at some stage she’ll gradually have to join their ranks in a post-Wall existence and needs to make the peace with them in order to coexist in their own phase of life.

For their own part, these women living on the outside of beauty, in the context Cameron represents to them, even the most staunchly intellectual amongst them wants to feel some sort of kinship with her. These are the women who’d hack up in disgust at commercials with the message “don’t hate me because I’m beautiful”, but when Cameron delivers the same message in a more intellectually palatable way, they embrace her surrender to the greater sisterhood. The hate her, but they love her.

The Genetic Celebrity

Cameron Russel is correct in one assertion, she did win a genetic lottery, contextually speaking. She’s been too insulated in her own version of model’s girl-world to really have pause to think any deeper about beauty and the biological associations with it beyond what’s served her feminine solipsism. She acknowledges the genetic aspect of beauty, but only insofar as she’s experienced the utility of it in her very insular model’s world. To her, beauty is just the luck of the draw. Maybe a woman can enhance herself with cosmetic surgery and maintaining her diet, exercise, etc. but for a girl who already benefits from natural good looks and a high metabolism at an early age, you can hardly expect her to develop the insight to see beauty beyond fate or luck.

As with most women in search of a rationalization for the unforgiving brutality of their genetic draw (or inability to build upon it), she predictably resorts to the beauty-as-social-construct feminist trope. It’s interesting that even former supermodels will embrace feminist boilerplate when it serve their interest better than their looks used to. You see, it’s not that you’re not beautiful it’s that the patriarchy society has perverted beauty into what’s commercially applicable.

While this fem-centric rationale serves to assuage many an HB4’s sexless  Alphaless existence, there is one kernel of truth to it. It’s not that men respond to a prefabricated  social norm for beauty, it’s that we tend to idealize certain biological templates for beauty. In Why Men Are The Way They Are Dr. Warren Farrell describes this idealized female as a Genetic Celebrity. This is the girl that most closely resembles what a teenage boy sees as his dream girl. She is the one who in real life best matches the Playboy Centerfold, the SI Swimsuit Model, the TV personality, etc. who turns him on. This is just the surface level idealization, however, the degree of idealization becomes further compounded with layers of idealized personality, a woman’s sincerity, an emotional connection, sexual availability, and a host of other attributes is added as a man matures.

That said, in the beginning, the Genetic Celebrity is what most boys start with. Show me a guy with really bad ONEitis and I’ll show you a guy who’s psychologically sold on her being his Genetic Celebrity ideal on some level of consciousness. For myself it’s easy, I love pretty blondes with flat stomachs, long legs, perfect small asses and mediumish tits. Back in the 80’s Heather Locklear was my teenage Genetic Celebrity template. Since then I’ve experienced a variety of different women, but by far the most common recurrence of woman in my LTRs, including the evil BPD, and yes, Mrs. Tomassi, have followed this Genetic Celebrity template.

I think it’s very important for men to recognize this preferential template in themselves. I don’t think it’s inherently a bad thing, but it can predispose a Man to make bad decisions, relinquish frame or develop ONEitis to make that dream girl come true for himself despite the dangers she may represent.

While I can’t pinpoint it now, I think there may be a vestigial, psychological purpose to a man developing a genetic template for his idealized mate. Sex sells for obvious reasons, and commercialization of sexuality picked up on this long ago, but the added bonus for commercial interests is the compulsive tendency for men to imprint that template in their psyches.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this template is the result of it being manufactured for men – this is feminism’s rationalized ego salve – the associations a guy must make to elevate a woman to Genetic Celebrity status are founded upon the environmental sexual cues that we evolved long ago. In other words the reason Heather Locklear was my template, instead of Rosy O’ Donnell, was due to her physique aligning with what my hard-wired sexual response found arousing. If it were true that beauty is a social construct, then it would stand to reason that with enough social reengineering the Rosy O’ Donnells of the world end up becoming Genetic Celebrities. The lie in this, and in Cameron’s beauty analysis, is the genetic part of the description; it’s the biomechanics that make beauty in the first place.