Modern Wymyn Are Narcissists!

What do I rate myself? BMS babe! Broke the mothafucking scale!!

Manosphere Twitter thinks modern western women are all narcissists because they say they’re 10s who don’t need men. It appears that their theory for why average looking women “think” they’re sooo gorgeous that they “break the mothafucking scale” is because they routinely receive sexual interest from objectively more attractive men, not realizing that men simply have low standards for casual relationships. These women (apparently) naively assume that any man who tries to sleep with them thinks they’re a 10.

I find this pretty incredible. I mean, women are quite aesthetically aware. We spend far more time on our personal appearance and far more time comparing ourselves, often unfavorably, to other women. Many women, especially young women, curate social media feeds that primarily serve them images and videos of one shockingly beautiful woman after another (I myself closely followed every VS model when I was ~23, this behavior was great for my self image). The idea that women are not able to judge their relative attractiveness doesn’t map on to my experience of women nor does it accord with common sense. And, by the way, women are very, very aware of the fact that many men have extremely low standards for casual sex. After all, “guys literally only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting”.

I buy the narrative that women on dating apps will match with men that are, on average, more attractive than they are (in terms of percentile within their gender). This seems likely given the heavily male-skewed sex ratio and aforementioned difference in standards for casual relationships. And it’s not implausible to me that this could skew expectations for the type of man women think is “in their league” for a more serious relationship.

Dan Kras

reports that in his dataset women rated 72% of men as below average attractiveness, with the median man rated as a 4.1 while the median woman was rated a 5 (it’s unclear if this is new or related in any way to dating apps, perhaps women have always been relatively unimpressed with the median man). 

While this might strike men as “unfair”, Dan also found that women tend to be less concerned than men about physical attractiveness. He found a “50 percentage point increase in likeability between the least and most attractive quartiles for women, but just a 21 percentage point increase for men”, in other words, being a hot woman is a much more meaningful factor for getting opposite sex attention than is being a hot man. Regardless, even if it’s true that women expect they can bag a more attractive man than they likely will, I don’t think this affects their ability to judge how they look relative to other women.

But where does this come from? Well, it’s certainly the case that female friend culture is very affirmative. We tell our girlfriends that they’re beautiful and that they deserve a man who treats them well and makes them feel loved and special. And we really mean it! It’s just that in these contexts women aren’t really using the word beautiful the way these men think we are. When a woman tells her girlfriend that she’s beautiful she doesn’t mean “I think you’re objectively far more attractive to men than most women are”. What she actually means is “I think you have a lot to offer the world and you ought to carry yourself with confidence because there’s a man out there who will truly love and appreciate you as you are”.

This is mostly a lovely aspect of female friendships. Everyone needs a pep talk sometimes and girlfriends are often there to give it. But I do think there are downsides to the affirmative nature of female friendships. We’re less likely to tell our girlfriends when we think they’re in the wrong or when we think they have unrealistic expectations. From what I’ve seen of male friendships, it’s not so uncommon for a guy, after hearing his buddy’s report of a fight with his girlfriend or wife, to tell his friend that he’s being an idiot and urge him to apologize or shape up. 

This is almost unheard of in my experience of female friendships. We might encourage a friend to try to see things from their partner’s perspective but we’ll typically do so in a very indirect and cautious way with plenty of hedging to make sure they know we’re on their side. While a man might tell his friend “make sure you don’t lose her” or encourage him to acquiesce since “happy wife, happy life!” a female friend is much more likely to tell her friend that she “deserves more”.

I do think these friendship norms can encourage women to approach relationships from an unproductively expectant stance. Focused too much on what they deserve and not enough on presenting what they can bring to the table. But this may be a corrective to help manage the greater desire for romance and relationships among young women relative to young men, which

Stella Tsantekidou

discussed in her viral piece on female neediness. Women do seem to be more willing to stay in unfair or unsatisfying relationships than men are and sometimes need their girlfriends to help them realize that they’re dating a loser.

But back to the point, I don’t think these women, saying they’re a 10, off the charts etc. are trying to imply that they think they’re much more attractive than other women. Or that they incorrectly assume that any man who wants to sleep with them thinks they’re a 10. I think it’s largely reactionary, a way of responding to the assertion that women are valuable only for how we look. If you constantly tell women that they’re about to (or already have) “hit the wall” after which point no man will want them, is it really so crazy that they’d feel the need to pump themselves up about their looks?

There’s a strong parallel to body positivity here. The language is “every body is beautiful” but the message is really “everyone is deserving of love, including self love”. If you watch the original video it’s clear that these women are attempting to signal self love and confidence rather than provide an objective judgment of their attractiveness. At one point the interviewer asks a group of three girls how they’d rate themselves. The first girl responds “I’m a 10, 11”, the second responds “10” and when the third says “I would say I’m an 8, solid” the other two reel in shock and say “10! You gotta believe in yourself!”. These women are not narcissists! They’re basically doing affirmations, just in front of a manosphere street interviewer rather than in front of the mirror.

All that said, I think this is the wrong approach. I think their needs would be better served by responding that “I’m not going to rate myself on a scale because I don’t define myself or measure my value based on how I look.” This is similar to the issues I see with women responding to “The Wall” discourse by insisting they’re actually hotter than ever at 38! We can’t all be Lana.

Of course there’s a reason for this phenomenon. We really do want to be attractive, and a big reason we want to be attractive is because we want male attention. But also, we don’t want to define ourselves based on our beauty or based on what men want. And men don’t face this same conflict. They’re quite comfortable in the knowledge that their physical attractiveness matters to women, but also that it’s very fungible with other attractive attributes. As

Cartoons Hate Her

wrote recently, “men don’t seem to have to walk this tightrope between needing everyone to think they’re hot, and needing everyone to think they don’t care if anyone thinks they’re hot.” But all I can say is, ladies, please don’t lose the plot! Insisting that we’re all super hot isn’t subversive. It’s actually a capitulation to the most simplistic of red-pilled narratives.