Was He "Out Of Her League?"

I am probably overly-interested in the downfall of masculinity, and in watching things related to that on YouTube, sometimes the algorithm sends me a bunch of (mostly AI-populated) channels where men find clips of cheating wives, cheating girlfriends, entitled women, etc. and mock them. It is pretty depressing that this exists as a cottage industry. Some of these videos are over 5M views. I myself have mocked an entitled mom or two in my day as a bush-league writer, so I am part of the problem at some level, but I’d be the first to say I’m just societally interested in the “performance” aspect of parenting, probably because of my own mom. Anyway. Enough about me.

A week or so ago, there was some Twitter thread where a girl who I believe is named Alexa — that is her in the screenshot, on the right — and a gamer Christian Nationalist had a little back-and-forth. Alexa had tweeted something about this guy hating women and this guy had responded, “I thought girls were supposed to be pretty.” Alexa had then responded and said, “I’m so out of your league.” Everyone jumped in and found old pics of her where she looked fat, etc. She made her account private. A lot of those types of YouTube accounts I just discussed did videos about this 53M impressions dance, including this one:

I don’t really know what to do with this. My high-level take would be: “No one is really ‘out of someone’s league,’ because ideally we evaluate people off more than just looks and body.” Obviously that’s not true, and this all factors deeply into the recent “high-value man” discussions that dominate TikTok. I guess the idea is that if you keep yourself attractive and tight, you’re entitled to six-feet, six-figures, and six-inches. At some level, that’s probably always been the point of women operating in the “male gaze” ecosystem we keep perpetuating, but now it seems like we discuss it more.

So at the highest level, I think both these people are chuds. He didn’t need to bait her with “I thought girls were supposed to be pretty” and she didn’t need to bait back with “I’m out of your league.” IMHO, neither one of them deserves to be laid tonight. But perhaps I’m in the minority on that one.

What’s more interesting to me is that — well, think back to the original purpose of Facebook. 22 years ago or so, before Zuck had entered his right-wing phase where he dresses like a rapper’s Molly dealer, he wanted to code a site to evaluate whether people at Harvard were hot or not. Purportedly, he wanted to do this because he was rejected by a woman at Harvard long before he met Priscilla Chan. I don’t know how true that last part is.

But in our long journey to this weird gender place where boys cannot talk to girls anymore and sometimes it feels like boys and girls barely respect each other anymore, now it can seem like we’re all living downstream of Zuck’s immediate goal for his eventual cash cow: we’re all weighing in and rating and cringe’ing around people and their looks and appearances and “4s” and “New York 7s” and who “deserves” what.

On that last note, no one deserves anything, and I can think of 12 women off the top of my head who got six figures, six feet, and six inches — and came to despise it to the point of divorce. On a few of those, you can throw in 2–3 kids too. I know plenty of guys who got the tight-looking Instagram girl, and within three dates, they were like, “Uh, new phone, who is this again?” I know both those camps.

I’ve been divorced and am generally a turd, although my current relationship is mostly successful minus infertility. So take all my stuff with a grain of salt, no doubt. It seems to me like the best relationships aren’t starting from a place of who resides in what “league,” but whether you can talk about stuff, can laugh, can feel transparent with the other, and think they mostly care whether you live or die (in the early stages).

It’s fun to ratio people about their looks, especially when you yourself are deeply broken, but I also wouldn’t say it’s the root of anything except maybe a halfway-decent hate fuck.

Am I off base here?