“Do you know the guys’ nickname for me on the other side?” asks Stew Stewart (yes, really).“No,” his beautiful brunette fiancée Jax Guelli responds. Her eyes are blank, her voice is flat. She looks like she’s staring down the barrel of a gun. “They all call me Kennedy,” he grins. She covers her eyes with her hands, her engagement ring sparkling. “More like Mitt Romney,” she deadpans in the now viral clip from Netflix’s dating show Love is Blind.
The premise of the reality series is simple: is love really blind, or does physical attraction make or break a relationship? In the show, men and women from the same city — in this series, Boston — go on remote “dates” in separate pods, where they can only hear each others’ voices. They narrow down their options and, when they really hit it off, they get engaged. Only after the proposal can the couple meet in the flesh. The reveal is often disastrous because one party has exaggerated their hotness out of cunning or delusion (men and women alike). This delicious discomfort is exactly why this otherwise boring show of dense try-hards is popular.
Our “Kennedy” is one such culprit. He had compared himself to a young Jude Law in the blind booths — but despite being conventionally good looking (tall, good hair etc.) did not clear that admittedly very high bar. After their in-person meeting, Jax informed producers that she would not be staying on the show. Asked about his appearance, she said she “didn’t want to be mean”. Oof. Stew was unceremoniously dumped by proxy, let down gently by a man from the production company.
The clip quickly became a talking point online, further inflaming the mutual resentment among X’s embittered men and women. For one largely male camp, Stew had suffered the slings and arrows of what certain corners of the internet call “hoeflation” — the expectations of women rising far beyond their proportionate sexual market value. His being considered a “comically hideous man”, to echo one tweet, was the ultimate blackpill, evidence of the unrealistic expectations of shallow women who themselves routinely overestimate their own hotness. In reality, this group argued, Stew was at minimum “her looksmatch” — the looksmaxxing metric for partners in the same sexual league. Maybe he even mogged her; Jax, they spat, was in fact an “orange ogre”.
For the other camp, mainly women, both Stew’s physicality and personality were unattractive. He was a “freak”; he resembled a frighteningly ugly cartoon character. They took issue with his apparently overabundant teeth, his supposedly dorky manner, his “crazy eyes”. It was all rather cruel. If we’re being reasonable, Stew Stewart is no Jude Law — but he’s no munter either. Many women would be happy to have him.
The clip comes at a time of mutual anxiety around the sexual status of men and women, with vast culture wars intruding on every candlelit dinner. The romantic chasm between the sexes yawns wider by the day. We are told that tumbling birth rates will soon spell the collapse of the West — and that this is the fault of the encroachment of “the manosphere”, or of feminists sabotaging the happiness of other women, depending on your favourite flavour of conspiracy theory. It is somehow never pointed out that this paranoia, enmity and constant squabbling is itself a central cause of the problem. A frank and respectful discussion about the nature of male and female desire does not rake in the clicks as much as scrumptious vitriol.
Instead of taking our culture’s romantic breakdown as a concatenation of factors — the gains and losses of liberal feminism, social-media echo chambers, political bifurcation, the vanishing of third spaces, the ineffectual premise of dating apps — a small-but-vocal proportion of men simply blame women for being picky. Which, of course, we are. In matters of the heart, everybody is choosy. Desire isn’t a sort of public utility, distributed like volts on the national grid. The only remotely common exception is the indiscriminate way in which some men scattergun casual sex — and that is hardly inspiring.
Yet for some reason, women having physical preferences has this week come as a surprise. At least, it was a shock to an X poster called Ryan Lee, who gained a million views and counting with his huffing over a clip in which three charming Christian women yak about whether they’d turn a man down based on looks alone. “I’m telling you, I can look at a photo, and I will know,” says one, who Lee notes with disdain is single at 36. Lee posted: “All that matters is if you’re really attractive. THEN they’ll go on a date with you… they’re seeking Chad.” (Chad, for the uninitiated, is the best-looking masculine ideal originating from incel terminology.) If you’re not hot, Lee raged, “even these women in ministry will swipe left on you in an instant”. Christian women, he implied, should be less sexually superficial; they ought to overlook a weak chin or a hairline in retreat for a man well versed in Ephesians.
In reality, of course, they will not — just as most men will not express interest in an ugly woman simply because she is kind, or virtuous, or whatever. Lee was duly dogpiled for this logical lapse. It was the Kennedy fiasco all over again: men being horrified at the shallowness of women, posting about it, and being told off by other women online. Yet again, nobody wins.
It should not surprise men that women are superficial. It is true that as a sex we have become pickier; changing mores have made partnership optional, and so women are now motivated by desire rather than duty. Women’s metrics have become, in other words, closer to those of men. If men baulk at this, it is because they see an unflattering reflection of themselves. Increasingly today, women are the more educated, higher-earning party, and so implement stricter selection methods so as to conserve their self-made status. Yes, that can hurt. But judging women for exercising preferences — the realistic ones, at least — is pure hypocrisy. Modern male sexual culture is aggressively “lookist”, with men constantly ranking women out of 10. Yet hints of the same attitudes among the fairer sex are framed as evidence of a civilisation in decline.
Men are not shamed for preferring beauty — nor should they be. It is natural, after all… and aren’t we constantly reminded that male sexuality is “highly visual”? Yet when women express similar “visual” preferences, they are called picky. How’s that for a double standard? Castigating choosiness as a feminine pathology is naive. Nevertheless it’s all the rage. One popular meme at the moment plays on the idea of a state-mandated girlfriend, though clearly restricting choice will not furnish the way for true love — unless begrudging toleration is your thing.
The fate of Stew Stewart is what happens when we indulge the fantasy that love is blind. In the absence of ambient traditionalist pressure, women must have active incentives to date. Telling them they must suck it up and go for the kinds of men who look like they’ve been asked to leave several garden centres is not an attractive proposition. The sexes must find one another again; the romantic isolation of 2026 is depressing and unhealthy. But the solution isn’t to turn back the clock to a time when women had no other choice; instead, it’s to train for the league in which you want to play. In this, perhaps the looksmaxxers are right after all.
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