Modern obsession with ‘hot girls’ teaches everybody to be shallow

By David McElroy · October 3, 2017

If your culture were selling you a lie, how would you know it? And if you assumed the lie were true — and you lived your life the way the lie told you to live — how would you know there was any other way to live?

Powerful forces in modern culture are eager to use the natural human desire for sex in order to sell us goods and services. If those forces — advertisers, entertainers and publishers, among others — can tie their products to your sexual desires and promise to satisfy those desires, they might sell you more of whatever they’re selling.

Sex sells. It sells movies, music, television shows, fashion, magazines, cosmetics, perfume, deodorant and toothpaste. Sex sells so many things today that we couldn’t possibly list them all. It’s treated as a shortcut to get your attention and make you believe you will get whatever you want from various partners — all in exchange for buying whatever some company wants you to buy.

This isn’t a puritan lament that sex is bad. This is an acknowledgment that our culture is making a mockery of something special — and it’s an assertion that this practice is seriously damaging our ability to make emotional connection with our partners.

It starts with teaching men — and young boys — to value “hot girls” above all.

Do you know why Victoria’s Secret is so successful selling underwear to women? It’s because the company projects a “hot” image — an image of shallow sexuality — for straight men to drool over. And when straight women see sexually attractive models who are desirable to the men around them, it makes them want to emulate them.

I doubt any woman consciously says to herself, “Since Caleb is attracted to Gisele Bündchen [or the model of the moment], he’ll be attracted to me if I wear the same underwear,” but the association is in her mind. Both men and women have been trained to believe that if a woman buys clothing from Victoria’s Secret, she is going to be more sexually attractive.

The people who own Limited Brands Inc. (actually L Brands Inc. now) don’t care whether Caleb is really attracted to Jennifer. They care only how many of their products they can sell. So they’re quite happy to peddle the story that this underwear will make Jennifer “hotter” to Caleb.

How do we judge the success of a man in this world? To a greater extent than we like to admit, our culture teaches us that the determining factor is whether that man has a sexually attractive woman at his service.

A few days ago, I ran across this headline on a sports website called the Sports Daily: “Samaje Perine’s Hot Wife Proves RB is Doing Well for Himself.” That’s right. Perine is doing well for himself because he has a “hot wife,” not because he’s making a good living as a running back for the Washington Redskins. He’s doing well because he has a “hot wife” — pictures are all that matter — not because this woman might be a good life partner for him. (She might be brilliant and have a great personality. She might have wonderful values. I have no idea. That’s not important to the story. She’s just “hot.”)

What I’m about to say is a violation of all that modern culture teaches you. It’s heresy. Ready?

Sex is overrated by modern culture.

That’s right. Sex is overrated. But notice exactly what I’m saying — and what I’m not saying. I’m not implying that sex is bad or something to be ashamed of. Sex is something which our Creator programmed into us. (If you don’t believe in God, call it evolution or genetics. The point is the same.)

Sex is amazing, but it’s amazing in the context of a relationship with someone you love. Sex won’t make you happy all by itself. Sex will merely act as a bonding agent for the right kind of relationship. In the wrong kind of relationship — a shallow one — sex will be merely momentary pleasure.

But our culture teaches sex without context and without boundaries. To our culture, a woman is valuable if she’s “hot.” And to make it fair in a feminist era, smart marketers have tried to sell the reverse — “hot men” to straight women and gay men. But the real money is made selling attractive women to straight men. The money is made by teaching men that they can buy certain things and have sex with the “hot” woman of their dreams. The money is made by teaching women that they can buy certain things and become that “hot” woman.

So why is this a problem?

It’s because this cultural message is messing up the minds and the expectations of both men and women. Men are taught to devalue women — to see women merely as objects to satisfy their sexual lusts and to be seen by others — and women are taught that they are not good enough unless they buy more and more and more products in an unsuccessful attempt to be that perfect “hot” woman.

Sex has become the center of relationships. It’s what we are taught to expect as the most important thing in a relationship. Will a man be a loving husband and father? Will a wife be a good mother and intelligent companion? Can these two people trust each other as partners as they pursue goals together? Those things don’t really matter — as long as the relationship is filled with a constant version of Sexual Olympics.

And as reality doesn’t measure up to the fantasy, we’re now being told we need to turn to sex robots and an ever-increasing array of sex toys. (The picture above is from a factory that makes sex dolls. That’s one of the faces you can choose.) We are being pushed so much down the road toward the cultural fantasy of “hot sex” that we’re being told to disconnect our sexual desires from real people. And the more we do that, the less we’re interested in the normal, “boring” sex with a partner who we should be able to love and trust.

Let’s be honest. Hardly any woman can measure up to the sexual fantasy standards of a Victoria’s Secret model. Hardly any man can be the sort of man to attract that kind of woman. So both people in a relationship are programmed by culture to feel like failures — both for not being good enough and for not having a partner who measures up to the fantasy.

But there’s good news.

You are not required to buy into this standard. You are not required to value shallow sexual fantasies over the real relationship you can have with a very imperfect wife or husband.

I’m far more interested in the depth of a relationship than I am in the sexual fantasy. Of course I want to be sexually attracted to the woman I marry, but that doesn’t mean I expect anything close to the “hot fantasy” of culture.

I want a woman who is smart, curious and shares my values. I want a woman who is a good mother and is willing to make our family the center of her life. I want a woman who is willing to grow together and work together to become better human beings.

If I have those things with the right woman, sex will take care of itself. That’s the way humans are designed. It won’t matter if she’s chubby or suffers any number of “problems” which my culture tells me (and her) mean that she’s not good enough. And let’s be honest, if some perfect woman existed, she would be looking for a perfect man — and that’s not me.

I know what I want. What’s more, I know the culture is lying to me. I also know that culture is lying to my future wife, so one of my jobs is to help her see herself as I see her — not through the lens of a culture that expects her to be a “hot wife.”

The culture is lying to all of us.

Sex is wonderful. Sex is important. Sex is normal and natural. It’s time for us to reclaim it for what it is — and stop believing the shallow sexual fantasy that makes it difficult for us to have meaningful emotional connections with real partners.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts