Are you familiar with how common cosmetic surgery is, especially among women? The internet has this effect on everyone, and it’s no wonder men are starting to f

Are you familiar with how common cosmetic surgery is, especially among women? The internet has this effect on everyone, and it’s no wonder men are starting to feel the same. I don’t like the reduction of sexuality to resource competition, but it is an admittedly useful lens for analysis. One used to be “in competition” with the people in their own town, or their neighborhood. Even the advent of cities wouldn’t have marked such a major shift in one’s perception of beauty. With social media, one can digitally “live” among the most beautiful people in the world, distorting not only their self-image but their expectations for a mate[1]. I’m not active on any of this, have decent self esteem, no features that I would consider deficient, and receive enough female (and male) attention to feel good about myself. I still have twinges of inadequacy when exposed to such things. It’s dismissive to ascribe this to “incels”, although they may be the first group to really prioritize such things for men. The whole thing is antisocial. It should be fixed, but it won’t, and we’ll see an arms race of self-augmentation. [1] I will say that a lot of the obsessive quantification of traits applies more to oneself than to others in the real world, and that people have trouble translating between the two. Regarding height specifically, I’m barely above average. No woman has ever accurately assessed my height. They always think I’m a couple of inches taller than I am. I don’t do anything to exaggerate it, it’s just that they have specific numbers that they’ve fixed upon as “a good height” and when they see a man that looks tall enough, they think he must be at that height. On the other hand, they tend to get fixated on their own perceived flaws, like breast size, where I actually prefer someone on the smaller side, but they’ve already quantified an “ideal” and determined that they don’t meet it.