I heard a joke once about the Russian people trying to decide which revolutionaries to support. I couldn’t find it online, but I remember the punchline was that they had to choose between the group who wanted the tsars to be as poor as the common folk, and the group who wanted the common folk to be as rich as the tsars.
Which brings me to the Trivago guy. A lot of people have been criticizing his appearance. But this is just a lot of piling-on with a particularly visible person. Honestly, if you saw him on the street, I'm sure you wouldn't notice him.
Some people have welcomed the extra scrutiny on Trivago Guy's appearance as a new level of equality, since his being judged brutally on his appearance with no consideration of his personality is very much like the female experience. Well, that's true, and hopefully some men will learn from that, but this isn't what I had in mind with equality. The idea wasn't to bring everyone down to women's predicament, it was to get everyone the rights and privileges that had previously only been available to men. Or, to put it another way, when looking at women's income disparity, I would think that all but the most radical would fix it by increasing women's salary by 30%, not dropping men's salary 30%.
When it comes to appearance, I think men have it pretty close to ideal. Yes, I know everyone has their anecdote of a fashion disaster, but for most of the people you see in an average day, the men generally look quite acceptable, yet spend very little time getting to look that way. It's a balance between looks and effort that I think most women would choose if media and beauty magazines had not set the bar for respectability so high. So instead of criticizing men as though they're women, we should cut women slack like we do men.
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