Tom Selleck, Robert Redford, Clark Gable, Freddy Mercury, Burt Reynolds, Alex Trebek, Sam Elliott, Errol Flynn, Charles Bronson...
But ... I mean ... that doesn't ... er ... actually, y'know, never mind.
†
... and all these traits are considered universally attractive by virtually all women in our society.
Sort of ... but more than picking nits from Swedish meatballs and maiden merkins, part of what you're onto—
e.g., lack of facial hair—is an aura or projection of being mostly harmless; a slender boy, china-fine pale Dresden doll blond and blue, can seem the cutest thing in the world but there is precisely nothing precluding him from being mortally dangerous. Likewise, the lumpen, fireplug shouting macho Scotsman could be the best friend a woman could ever have, but he's going to need more than them blue eyes to overcome the untamed danger implied by what we have long redeemed as
rugged.
In a law of the jungle, perhaps rugged is suggestive of a stronger presence in a hostile environment; in the concrete canyons of glazed civility and neon-lit ambition, yeah, actually, someone that
looks, according to our own prejudices, less harmful might well have a particular aesthetic appeal. I mean, really, defeminize the ugly drunks hollering about getting it on with all sorts of women—(once upon a time we called it all sorts of stuff, including glam, and these days we recall it by "hair" or "butt" rock)—and they wouldn't have been nearly so appealing. I mean, sure, without the glitz and glamour, rock and roll love songs aren't exactly hopeful affairs, but if the singer is pretty enough it becomes somehow sweet. And let's face it, put a mostly ugly dude up onstage in a thin t-shirt, with even only a little bit of makeup and hair extensions, and those torn jeans that are supposed to be manly despite tight trousers being a chick thing, and "worship our Master's every need" can start to sound ... I don't know, not sick and harmful?
To the other, in terms of sexy ugly men, Scorpions '88,
e.g.,
"Believe in Love"↱ (
Savage Amusement) is probably better for trying to meet chicks in the bar, while Scoripions '72 (
i.e.,
Lonesome Crow↱) is for blasting loud while having really awesome sex with a woman who really likes to fuck.
(Point of inside history: In high school, we actually had a weird joke about "Believe in Love" that we would now describe as meanish-girl bullying, but in its full glory it has something to do with how white girls at concerts they don't like stand in one place and not quite dance and softly clap not quite in time to the music, and it was after the Scorps rolled through town we spent three or so days watching a bunch of girls with outsized coiffes juke their hips just so while stiffly, quietly clapping their hands in time to a song nobody was listening to, but we all knew was "Believe in Love". And any woman of my generation will tell you, it was also slut-shaming. Honestly, the kids today have no effing clue how brutal their parents are.)
Nostalgia: Gorky Park, the band, with two mandatory power ballads on their Mercury Records debut:
"Try to Find Me"↱,
"Sometimes at Night"↱.
Oh, right. The blonde and blue soul boy from Birmingham. Yeah, you want creepy vulnerability? Tommy Shaw's
"Kiss Me Hello"↱ is right up there, and there is
nothing about that haircut that
doesn't look predatory.
Anyway, women have been telling men for years to lay off the macho-aggro, and men, as such, just plain refuse. And as we've seen in recent days, one response is to complain about everyone else—
e.g., women, queers, liberalism, &c.—for not stopping men. It is, however, true that what men and thus the societies they have led value of masculinity is often its most dangerous faculties. Masculine virtue in its own context is horrific vice if one is the woman expected to accommodate its full power. No, machismo isn't attractive to the people who will die by it.
And at some point the question of what girls or women want is best answered by paying attention to what they tell us. This actually stands out to me, these days, because I just witnessed some rather incredible human behavior reiterating a complicated suspicion I feel about identity masculinism being incapable of actually recognizing other people as anything other than characters playing assigned roles in story and screed.
But if we watch the rest of nature, there is virtue to be assessed in the raw force associated with masculinity. Pissing elephants beat the hell out of each other, and to the victor goes the spoil of mounting a female. That's just not how it works anymore. Courting a woman by pissing himself and head-butting other men would only remind her how powerful, dangerous, and uncontained he is. And, quite frankly, living through the night should not, within pretenses of civilized society, need to be explicitly enumerated on the checklist.
