For the Love of Shallow: Yes, Women Are Attracted to Hotties

We’re all the same; we’re all different. One man’s boner is another man’s lifelong aversion to
high-heeled women. One woman’s sigh is another woman’s Gilbert Gottfried. But
please, let us finally retire this idea that women just aren’t as visual as men and don’t care about looks as much, or somehow as a general rule don’t need to
want to fuck the person we are with. We are! We do! We do! We just haven’t
historically and culturally had the same freedom to be as shallow, so it’s a
more repressed urge.

What am I going on about? I’m going on about this Playboy essay by Gilbert Gottfried
entitled “Women Say They Want a Guy With a Sense of Humor — They
Don’t” that appeared in the recent 60^th anniversary issue, and
can be found online
here. The gist is thus:

It’s like a Pavlovian thing with
women. Ask them what they’re looking for in a man, and more often than not
they’ll tell you, “Somebody who makes me laugh.” But I’m here to tell
you, as a man who has made his living in comedy for more than three decades,
that women are full of shit.

He goes on to detail how being funny has never gotten him
laid in his life. If these shit-filled women wanted funny, he writes, they’d
trample over Depp to get Leno. They’d elbow Gosling to grope Larry the Cable
Guy. While he could’ve just renamed his essay “Why Haven’t I Gotten More
Pussy and Am Mad About It” and gone on with his life, I want to address
some of his points, because some of it’s actually right on, if misguided (and it’s all pretty funny anyway). But
first I have to note that, ahem, Johnny Depp is good looking and funny. And Gosling, too. Both of
them seem to have comedic charms-to-the-max on top of being symmetrically pleasing,
which is why they are beyond famous with the ladies.

Gottfried isn’t having it:

Guys are constantly being told that
a good personality is the only thing that matters to women. “If you can
make her smile, it doesn’t matter what you look like.” I know this girl who
prides herself on being attracted to nerdy guys. But still she has slept only
with a veritable who’s who of handsome rock stars. She’s a model (of course),
and she worked for a day on some movie with George Clooney. She told me,
“I wasn’t impressed with his stardom, and I didn’t think his looks were
all that great. But he was genuinely funny.” Horseshit! If he wasn’t
good-looking or famous, nobody would notice his sense of humor.

Holla! Good looks or the lack thereof make people ignore totally otherwise pertinent traits, huh? Sucks, huh? But yeah I don’t know why guys are being told that their looks don’t matter. Because that
is some bullshit. I’m not sure why that’s even a thing. Where did this myth of
female indifference to looks come from? It seems like a weird byproduct of
cultural myths and historical power imbalances. Prior to the concept of
romantic love, marriages were business arrangements, and as such, looks were
hardly given so much credence in matchmaking. But courtly love likely shifted the
idea of romantic attraction to consider physical beauty, and with men as the
active pursuers, it seems women could not hope for much but (passive) beauty
with which to attract potential mates. Add in various and sundry notions that
women are more spiritual and noble and more purely moral and other batshit
lies, and sure, I guess it’s easy and nice to think we don’t give a shit about looks. I mean fuck, if my only choices were marrying a man with no discernible chin but eating and living under a roof vs. being drowned for being a spinster whore-witch, give me no-chin any day of the week. Otherwise, I’ll take a chin.

But equality has a way of democratizing desire. Look around
today, when women and men are more equal than ever, and it’s easier to see
evidence that men and women are both free to put a premium on looks as much or as
little as they want. Yes, there will always be people, male and female, who
need a looker on their arm above all else, but that’s hardly evidence that most
of us operate on this plane anymore, or that men or women have the monopoly on
shallow mating.

Back to Gottfried:

It’s like those women who claim
they have crushes on Woody Allen or Larry David. If you’re looking for a Larry
David type, they’re everywhere. You want a bald Jew with glasses and an acerbic
sense of humor, I could fix you up no problem. But they’re making $7.25 an hour
bagging groceries at Whole Foods.

Haha. I laughed, but still: I always thought (young) Woody
Allen was attractive, for realz. He has an iconic, offbeat face, and his talents and
humor are inextricable from that perception. But that doesn’t mean I want Woody
Allen in real life. Besides, there are abstract wish-lists and there’s reality,
where you meet the people in your town or at your job and tend to be in the
same socioeconomic backgrounds and everyone looks like a fucking Normie
McRegular. The pool is much narrower in real life than when we sit around
blue-skying the Clooneys versus the Louis CKs. To say nothing of the obvious fact:
There’s crushing on people, there’s people you’d just hook up with, and people
you want to actually hang out with in your actual life in broad daylight. Those are
all chosen with very different criteria. I don’t eat lunch with just anyone.

So let’s just clear this up. LOOKS MATTER. TO WOMEN TOO. Everyone wants the same thing
in a mate — someone to be with that you want to fuck but can also hang out with. Want to fuck means attracted to. Attracted to means likes how they look.

In order to be with someone longterm, I personally have to want to
sleep with them and also be able to hang out together at the DMV. That’s it.
Built in to that statement are many assumptions about intelligence, humor, rapport, and YES, “attraction.” In fact, “looks” is just code for
attraction, anyway. The “looks” could resemble an anteater — it’s not really about whether a panel of impartial judges would agree with you — beauty/eye of the beholder/yadda yadda. They just need to make YOU feel all tingly.

As usual, Chris Rock already said it best:

That’s all relationships are,
they ain’t that complicated. It’s fucking and eating. If you don’t like fucking somebody and you
don’t like eating with them, y’all don’t need to be together.

Word.

And a final word
about that list of preferences thing Gottfried’s all worked up about: When someone says “what do
you look for in a mate” it’s already assumed that mate is someone you are attracted to. To even put “attractive” alongside “sense of
humor” and “says ‘bless you’ when I sneeze” is basically like
taking up TWO SPOTS on the list.

In FACT, the only thing you need to mention regarding
attractiveness on your list of preferences at all is if you DON’T actually care
about looks or have some bizarre specifications (has to be exactly six inches
taller than me, with blue eyes and a slight lisp). So if you’re one of those people like my
friend who happens to love rat-faced men, then sure, list “rat-faced,” THEN “sense of humor,” and let’s call it a goddamn day.
Everyone else: Go out there and laugh. (And fuck. And eat).