mainstream media – Edward Trimnell Books

Newsflash: women are more attractive than men, on average

The Guardian, a British publication, has made an earth-shattering discovery:

“Women’s faces are rated as more attractive than men’s, even by other women, but the perceived gap declines with age and all but vanishes by the time people reach their 80s, researchers have said.”

To restate this in a single sentence: All but the most elderly women are, on average, more visually appealing than most men.

This generalization will simultaneously upset a certain kind of feminist, the sex-starved zealots from the manosphere, as well as the sexless “gender-neutral” crowd.

But it’s true. This is something I discerned decades ago. It was the early 1980s. I was an adolescent boy who was just starting to “notice” girls and women. I was at the grocery store, and I spotted the seductively attractive woman on that month’s cover of Cosmopolitan.

There was a seductively attractive woman on the cover of Cosmopolitan every month, I observed. Often these women were clad in revealing attire. These were images that the average heterosexual man would find very attractive.

Cosmopolitan, though, isn’t a girly magazine aimed at horny men. The target market of Cosmopolitan has always been heterosexual women.

But at the same time, the covers of Cosmopolitan were always adorned with photos of attractive women.

What gives? I wondered.

Gradually, I understood. Even heterosexual women would rather look at images of other women than at just about any man.

(Here’s another piece of magazine trivia from long ago. In the mid-1970s, they came out with Playgirl, a magazine that was supposed to be the women’s equivalent of Playboy. The magazine attracted almost no female readership (though some women did consider it a novelty/joke). The only demographic who read Playgirl in significant numbers were gay men.)

The most recent People magazine “Sexiest Man Alive” selectees were Jonathan Bailey and John Krasinski.

Neither one of them is much to look at. Sure, you could make the case that both Bailey and Krasinski are “less ugly” than I am. But I can’t think of a reason why any human eye would linger on either of these two men for a second longer than necessary.

This is one reason why, as a thoroughly average-looking man, I have never been particularly sensitive about my looks. I may not be much to look at. But neither is that other guy.

-ET

Political violence and “punch Nazis” LARPing

A USA Today columnist, Dace Potas, has sounded the alarm on the normalization of political violence in leftwing, progressive circles. He specifically cites the posthumous mockery of Charlie Kirk and his widow, which has taken a decidedly creepy and ghoulish turn. The name of his piece is: “The left normalizes political violence. We can’t accept it.” You should read it.

Dace Potas is writing editorials for USA Today, while I’m just some guy in Ohio. But I saw this coming a few years ago, when the catchphrase “punch Nazis” became commonplace in progressive spaces online.

Why shouldn’t we want to punch Nazis, you ask. Isn’t that what Harrison Ford did in Raiders of the Lost Ark?

That’s all fine and good, if you’ve got a time machine and you’d like to go back and slug it out with a brigade of the Waffen SS. Be my guest, if you can pull that off. Knock yourself out.

But in most cases, what you actually read about is young punks carrying out cowardly attacks on 80-year-old men wearing Trump hats.

A part of me isn’t surprised. Folks on the far-left fringe have long engaged in a version of “stolen valor”, vis-a-vis World War II veterans, few of whom are still alive to speak for themselves. (Note: My maternal grandfather was a World War II veteran who engaged in combat with the real, historical Nazis—the ones who spoke German. My maternal grandfather lived well into my adult life. We had many long discussions. My maternal grandfather would have had nothing but disdain for twenty-first-century “antifa” goons.)

What “fighting Nazis” really looks like: my grandfather manning an anti-aircraft gun in the Atlantic, 1943

Here’s the problem with the whole “punching Nazis” thing. Who gets to decide who is a “Nazi”?

The historical Nazis are all dead. (A few may be living out the last of their days in nursing homes in Germany. They would be over one hundred years old in 2026.)

Okay, what about homegrown, American Nazis? The American Nazi Party, which had a grand total of 500 members in the late 1960s, doesn’t really exist today.

What about the Ku Klux Klan? There are fewer than 5,000 of them in the USA in 2026, scattered throughout the country. They mostly exist online.

So you’re not punching non-existent “Nazis”. And you can’t even find a genuine, sheet-wearing klansman to punch in Toledo or Poughkeepsie.

So who is it that you want to punch?

Let’s cut the BS, and define what is really going on here. What “punching Nazis” means in practice is: labeling those who disagree with you as ‘Nazis’ so that you can justify political violence against them, while LARPing as a member of the 82^nd Airborne, circa 1944.

Likewise, “Antifa” is—if you’ll pardon my technical jargon here—a complete bullshit term. Calling yourself “antifascist” does not make you a freedom fighter, any more than me calling myself “Taylor Swift’s boyfriend” would make me that. If you want to fight fascism, join a branch of the US military, because they’re the last US-based organization to actually do that.

This doesn’t mean you have to silently agree with everyone on the political right. I certainly don’t. I find Matt Walsh (to pick one name at random) to be an insufferable killjoy who wants to outlaw all biblically non-compliant forms of sex (based on his interpretation of Scripture, of course).

But to compare Matt Walsh to Reinhard Heydrich is gross hyperbole at best…and it is the encouragement of political violence at worst, if accompanied by rants about “punching Nazis”.

-ET

Above: A self-styled Captain America (the comic book shirt on a grown man speaks volumes) encourages people LARPing as antifascists to engage in street violence against people LARPing as Nazis.

Everyone in this scenario is nuts. There are no heroes here (and certainly none that rise to the level of the men and women who fought in World War II).

A pox on both their houses, basically.

The New York Post fails Economics 101

As Mark Twain reportedly said, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

And then there is sloppy clickbait journalism.

In a recent article, Zachary Kussin of the New York Post presents the following statistics on recent trends in home ownership and home buying:

“Baby boomers — born between 1946 and 1964 — comprised a 42% share of buyers, which remained unchanged from last year. These older Americans benefit from the equity gained from homes they previously sold — and likely lived in for some time as they raised families.

Both the Silent Generation, the eldest Americans born between 1925 and 1945, and Gen Z, who were born between 1999 and 2011, made up the smallest share at 4% each.

Younger millennials — those born between 1990 and 1998 — made up the largest share of first-time buyers over the past year, at 60%. That marks a loss in market share, as that figure is down from the 71% tallied the previous year.

Older millennials, meanwhile — born between 1980 and 1989 — are moving their way up in the world, and that’s manifesting in home purchases…they have the highest median household income of any generation at roughly $133,000, purchased the largest dwellings with a median 2,100 square feet and were less likely to be first-time buyers than younger millennials.”

I won’t argue with the statistics. They may very well be correct.

But somehow, Mr. Kussin managed to spin all that data into the following headline:

“First-time home buying plunges to record low as baby boomers prevent younger Americans from ever owning”

Before you ask: no, I’m not a Boomer. (I was born in 1968.) But “blame the Boomers for everything” has become tedious and intellectually lazy, the last resort of all simpletons who are not Baby Boomers.

There have always been generational differences in equity in the real estate market. No one has equity when they buy their first home. And there have always been older homeowners with comparatively more equity. It’s called time.

This was the way it was when I purchased my first home in 2000, or when my parents purchased their first house in the early 1970s.

Time and equity are not Baby Boomer conspiracies to deprive younger home buyers. Any journalist who would publish the above headline needs to take a basic course in economics.

-ET