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 60th 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.