While there is a timeless component to beauty, such as in classic art or Venetian sculptures, there is also a dispositional component. This accounts for variance in individual tastes and helps decode the reasons for the cultural “it” girl or man of any given moment. It explains why someone like Kim Kardashian could have only had her distinct moment in the early 2010s after the social obsession with thinness reached its point of cultural saturation.
Though he is tall with piercing blue eyes, J.D. Vance isn’t particularly hot. His facial hair conceals a soft jawline, which hides the fluctuation of a few extra pounds here and there. Yet the responses to him from the young female audience after the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate were positively gushing.
This reaction seizes on a moment in which white men have been particularly villainized by the left — something the Democrat Party is notably struggling with as it’s made various attempts at outreach to capture this exact demographic. It’s a signifier that perhaps we’ve hit another moment of cultural saturation.
The debate was an interesting contrast between two different expressions of white masculinity: strong, confident, and composed Vance juxtaposed with Walz, who referred to himself as just an “old guy” and a “knucklehead” and is fond of his self-portrait as a modest, small-town teacher. The latter characterization rings hollow among the Democrats’ coveted demographic of young white male voters.
In this particular moment, when economic uncertainty looms large and nuclear war has
