Arthur Brooks: Looksmaxxing Is Repulsive

If there was ever a bigger disjunction between technology and evolutionary biology than this, I haven’t seen it.

“BY LOOKSMAXXING, MEN DO NOT SEND TRADITIONAL MALE MATING CUES,” WRITES ARTHUR BROOKS. (ILLUSTRATION BY THE FREE PRESS)

By Arthur Brooks

07.27.26— 

Everyone knows there is a gender double standard when it comes to physical appearance. And to this, I say, “Thank God.”

When my wife and I got married, 35 years ago, she said that embracing me—I was 6′2″ and 142 pounds at the time—was like hugging a coatrack. (Today, she says that cuddling up to my 60-something gym-rat body is more like spooning with a leather sack of ropes.)

But, of course, she still married me. And sure enough, while women’s physical attractiveness plays a significant role in men’s mate preferences—particularly at the beginning—behavioral science shows that for men it confers only a modest advantage in permanent pair-bond mating (what you civilians call “marriage”). Other factors, such as dependability, hard work, and character, are much more predictive of mating success.

In other words, at least I am a leather sack of ropes with good character.

Some observers claim this double standard is changing. If you’re following new trends on social media, you can’t avoid hearing the word “looksmaxxing,” a practice based on the idea that, because fleeting first impressions are everything, a man’s physical attractiveness is his most important attribute if he ever wants to get a mate. The trend has “soft” variants that involve skin and hair care, teeth whitening, and muscle building, and an alarming “hard” type that encourages cosmetic surgery, fillers, steroids, and even “bonesmashing” to get... 

 More (paywall): https://www.thefp.com/p/arthur-brooks-looksmaxxing-is-repulsive

S. Joachim Confessoris, Patris B. M. V. ~ Duplex II. classis

Share this with all your Opus Dei friends

“But keep the missals and the ornaments, because the Mass of all time will return!

- St. Josemaría Escrivá

Popes and the Modernist sin

 « The modernist system, more precisely the modernist apparatus and procedures, offer the pope an entirely new occasion to sin, a possibility of evading his mission that has never before been proposed to him. […] There followed this destructive consequence: the apostolic Tradition in matters of doctrine, morals, and worship has been neutralized, although not killed, without the pope, officially and openly, having needed to renounce the whole Tradition and thus proclaim apostasy. […]

“The pope has never said, has never needed to say: ‘everything that was taught, everything that was done up to Vatican II, all the doctrine and all the worship prior to Vatican II, I strike with anathema.’ Yet the result is before our eyes… To reach where we are, it sufficed that the pope, without taking measures that would strike the Church’s prior tradition, allowed modernism to proceed. »

- Father Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. (1914-1975)

Why performative Catholics don’t show up at the TLM.

Richard Rich wants all the silver cups life has to offer. But you have to know the right people first.

It’s like the conversation between More and Richard Rich, who doesn’t want to be a teacher, in “A Man for All Seasons”, “because nobody will know.”

He’s performative. He wants a job, a vocation, a life that will draw attention and acclaim. Not a life pursuing truth or beauty or goodness for its own sake.

He’s superficial.

He wants to be the Lord Chancellor of England. Like More. Then people will know who he is. The right kind of people. Lots of people. That’s where the action is. It’s monetizable. People will read the blogs, buy the books, open their wallets for you, if you’re known. You’ll be invited to all the right parties. 

More’s answer: “God will know. Your students will know. You will know.”

That’s what separates the men from the boys. When, as More counseled, it’s enough that God knows. When the public gaze, monetization and the obsession with the externals and the superficial take a distant last place in spiritual priorities.

For the worldly, for the performative, the excuse for talking a good game without following through, it’s  always, “but nobody will know.”

For those who seek out the TLM, who turn away from the world together with the priest at Mass,“God will know.”

Horizontal vs vertical. Choose.

A “moderately grave” reason suffices to excuse from the obligation to attend holy Mass on Sundays

Friendly reminder, since I've seen it trending around Catholic X that "if you don't go to Mass on Sunday without a good reason you'll go straight to hell if you die", that pre-Vatican 2 moral theologians were quite generous in their interpretation of what a "good reason" actually is.

For example, Fr. Heribert Jone in his "Moral Theology" (which went through multiple editions in the mid-20th century) counsels confessors that "any moderately grave reason suffices to excuse one from assistance at Holy Mass, such as considerable hardship or corporal or spiritual harm either to oneself or another." He then lists several examples including:

-- women who are pregnant out of wedlock who would bring shame upon themselves and their families by attending Mass

-- those who cannot "abide the air in church" for physical or mental health reasons

-- servants whose duties require them to work on Sundays and/or whose masters forbid them to assist at Mass under threat of loss of employment

--those who lack clothing appropriate to their social standing

--those who would suffer the loss of "extraordinary gain" by attending Mass

He even excuses those who would miss Mass for the sake of a "pleasure trip", provided it happens only once or twice and one has no other opportunity throughout the year.

So maybe we should stop making scrupulous people feel even worse when they have to miss Mass through no fault of their own.

Source: @LB236 on Twitter/X.

Vatican II vs. the popes

“Either we agree with the Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom and thus oppose the teachings of the popes, or we agree with the teachings of the popes and thus disagree with Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom. It is impossible to subscribe to both.”

 -Abp. Lefebvre