A footballer you haven’t heard of has been forced to apologise after suggesting on television that some women are more attractive than others and that if four girls were political parties the least ugly one would be UKIP.
I’m very grateful to the mainstream media for drawing my attention to the fact that this is a newsworthy story. Otherwise, I’m ashamed to say, I might have overlooked it completely. It’s because, unfortunately, I happen to be a throwback to the terrible era when young men would frequently assess women on the basis of their pulchritudinousness and when, amazingly, this was considered quite normal, healthy behaviour. Indeed, we even used to have these things called Beauty Contests in which – I kid you not – young women willingly participated in competitions where they were judged according to their looks, mostly by middle aged males, and didn’t die of sexism or misogyny poisoning afterwards.
Nowadays, I am given to understand, sexual mores have changed completely. Today’s young men are so fantastically enlightened that, were they to find themselves at a raunchy party with Megan Fox, Pippa Middleton, the Mother of Dragons from Game of Thrones and – at the UKIP end of the spectrum – feminist campaigner Caroline Criado Perez, Stella Creasy MP, posh, public-educated, comedy lefty impersonator “Penny Red” and the winner of the 2014 Andrea Dworkin lookalike contest, they simply would not know which one to pick as a sexual partner.
It’s a simple, basic, undeniable fact that men (with only extremely rare exceptions, such as footballer Joey Barton) just don’t care about women’s looks any more. Thanks to generations of important books like The Female Eunuch and to articles like the many that Caitlin Moran has written on the subject of “vajazzling”, men’s brains have now been rewired so that they are completely looks-non-judgemental.
The implications of this development for the human race are huge. Whereas before, better-looking women were more likely to find rich or powerful sexual partners, leading to a Darwinian process in which the sum total of human pulchritudinousness inevitably increased with each generation, we are now entering a new era of sexual and lookist fairness and equality. Probably, as a result of this, the human race will grow significantly uglier. But the great thing is, our brains will all have been so well trained by campaigners like Caroline Criado Perez and Stella Creasy that none of us will even notice.