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Why are conservative women so pretty?

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Henry Scanlon, a man, has noticed something: There sure are a lot of purdy conservative women! What’s up with that? Scanlon says:

They are beautiful and stylish in the way French women often are, which is to say in their own way, not in a conforming or predictable way. They all look like the girl the high school quarterback wants to date, and they are confident, relaxed, and smart, joking amongst themselves.

This is perplexing! The fact that they “all look like” one thing implies that, perhaps, they are “conforming.” Might they be conforming to a classic standard of beauty, one that Scanlon, as a man, has been socialized to find attractive?

After a long rumination punctuated by a thought experiment about thugs murdering pregnant women, some lines from Girls, and a knock against the famously hideous Gloria Steinem, Scanlon concludes:

Maybe what I’m noticing is simply women who have been liberated by their worldview to be who they are, uniquely and confidently, unabashedly and apologetically, unencumbered by the politically correct constraints imposed on women of the Left, and the result is a kind of essential womanhood that, far from being oppressive, as the Left would have it, is instead, miraculous and quintessential, and, you could say, God-given.

Henry, I’m glad the patriarchy is working out so well for you.