Everyone Without My Sexual Tastes Is Virtue-Signaling

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Source: Everyone Without My Sexual Tastes Is Virtue-Signaling
Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her
Published: March 23, 2026 | Archived: March 23, 2026

Last week, I wrote about the idea that straight men’s physical preferences for women’s bodies aren’t as extreme as some people think—basically, while there are men out there who think the maximized proportions of Kim Kardashian, or an anime character, is the pinnacle of female beauty, your average guy will find that to be a bit much for a real-life partner. Beyond the basics, a lot of preferences are down to specific “type,” not a universal ideal. That doesn’t mean all guys prefer less extreme curves, just that there’s more variety than one might think and when a financially well-off guy with options deviates from “blonde anime Kardashian” he is not, in fact, “virtue signaling.”

But some pushback I got—which I’ve seen before—is that you can’t trust how men respond to surveys (including the many reputable ones done, which show a distinct difference in average ideals between men of different socioeconomic statuses) because even anonymously, wealthier men feel pressured to claim to like less extreme curves than they actually like. I’ve been told that upper middle class men dating women with slender “Pilates” type bodies (which is a clear pattern but not a universal thing) is a gigantic prank they’re playing on us (and themselves, apparently!) because they actually like huge breast implants and BBLs, and just don’t want to sound unseemly. This is, apparently, a stated versus revealed preference.

And that’s awfully convenient, because if you ignore all statistics and real-life behaviors as pointless virtue-signaling, you can claim anything is the revealed preference. I hereby declare that nobody actually likes One Battle After Another and it was all virtue-signaling and everyone’s favorite movie is actually You, Me and Dupree.

(I am not implying that any woman’s body is equivalent to You, Me and Dupree.)

The main piece of evidence given to suggest that men’s preferences are near-universal and any variation we notice is mere virtue-signaling: just look at men’s anime porn histories and the body types of the sex dolls they customize. That is apparently the revealed preference, and men are just too chicken shit to admit it in real life. This was also the argument put forth by the famous (and mostly correct) J Sanilac blog post, Dispelling Beauty Lies, which inspired the article to which I was responding last week. He focused very heavily on digitally-generated porn characters, sex dolls and other digitally customized women used for masturbatory purposes, and then made the conclusion that real-life women should get breast implants so they can look more like these characters for the purpose of finding a husband.

He mentioned that people have “for some reason” excluded these renderings from their discussions of male preferences, as if the reason isn’t “most men aren’t customizing sex dolls and watching anime porn in the first place” and “porn doesn’t necessarily reflect what your average guy wants for marriage.” Anime porn watchers and sex-doll-customizers do not comprise a representative sample of men, let alone the upper middle class men who Sanilac claims are shooting themselves in the penises by lying about their preferences and marrying the “wrong” women to impress…fashion designers? Who knows?

But that aside: there is a reason that nobody uses porn history as proof of women’s “revealed” preferences and then leverages it as advice for men. However, Sanilac does disregard women’s stated and revealed preference for men only slightly older than they are, and insists the true revealed preference is for a 14-year age gap. How convenient that no evidence must be supplied, given that everyone is merely lying!

If people turned to porn and erotica to draw “revealed preferences” conclusions about women, they’d immediately understand that porn means very little about your real-life preferences, because porn thrives on taboo and extremes. Women will read goon books about being fucked by minotaurs. Women’s erotica often involve non-consent, sadism or dominance, but only a small subset of women are actually into BDSM or CNC in real life. Women are 155% more likely to watch lesbian porn than men are, and most of those lesbian porn watchers are straight women, not lesbians. (Interestingly, I would venture that men, more than straight women, would be more interested in joining two women in the bedroom—and yet, they watch lesbian porn less often!) These are not women secretly hiding their attraction to other women or a desire to sleep with other women. They are watching lesbian porn for some other reason—the taboo (to them), the fact that it focuses on female pleasure, or just the fact that there might be something off-putting about male porn actors. And what do actual lesbians enjoy watching? Well, for many…uhh…gay male porn? Sure, why not!

Who the hell is this for

Actually, I will concede that people do attempt to use straight women’s porn preferences as an indicator of their revealed preferences, but it’s less of a “men need to do XYZ to emulate the virgin gargoyle” and more “see how depraved and fucked up women are? Let’s take away their right to vote.”

There is also something to be said for AI-generated and anime-style porn being fairly self-selecting. Let’s say you’re interested in moderately chubby girls who look like regular people you’d see on the street—you can find plenty of that via amateur porn, so you’ll probably watch that. If you are into svelte women with boobs and butts anywhere from small to big, you can find an abundance of that via mainstream online porn. As a general rule, if it exists in the real world, you can find pretty much anything online. But if your preference is for women who have proportions and faces that don’t exist in nature, of course you’ll flock to AI and anime to get your fix! If you’re turned on by dress size 4 women with C-cups, why would you bother generating it via AI when there’s so much authentic content featuring women like this?

If you need more evidence that porn is not reality, look toward the increasingly-popular niche of incest porn (or step-incest porn) which can’t even really be called a “niche” anymore. Incest porn is incredibly popular because of the obvious taboo, but almost nobody watching it is actually attracted to their relatives—yes, even Sydney Sweeney’s brother. This is also why I don’t put too much stock in the popularity of the “MILF” or “teen” categories, nor do I believe searches for these keywords says anything about men’s preference for older or underage women. Porn is about extremes and taboos—it can reflect a real-life fantasy, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they want these women in real life.

Note that I do think there’s ample evidence to suggest that in practice, men are more attracted to younger women (duh), but they typically wind up marrying women only slightly younger than they are, in part because women’s preference is usually for men around their own age or slightly older and women have a say in the matter. Again, extremes tend not to manifest in real life the way they do in fantasy.

But either way, I think we can put to rest the idea that porn reflects “revealed preference” for real life. It reflects taboo, fantasy, experimentation, and curiosity. Maybe sometimes there are parallels between porn and what a person enjoys in real life, but someone’s porn history is hardly evidence of real-life desires.

But obviously, I don’t completely disagree with the fact that the 2026 beauty ideal is somewhat anime-adjacent. I’ve written before about how today’s “unrealistic” beauty ideal is that of an extreme hourglass, where proportions not found in nature are valued, especially on social media where you can use Photoshop and filters to achieve them. This has driven influencers to compete in the attention economy by using various forms of digital and surgical enhancements to look as extreme and non-human as possible. So you might be saying, “Hey, you do believe that men idealize anime-tier proportions, ergo, that is what all men want and women should go under the knife to achieve it.” But if you read the earlier article I wrote on this topic, you’ll see that I view this beauty ideal as an exaggeration of the true average male preference (slim with boobs and butt) driven by social media algorithms and financial incentives to be more extreme than competing influencers.

Keep in mind, my thesis was never that “men aren’t attracted to extreme curves” or “rich men don’t actually like boobs” (as it was, bafflingly, repeated back to me by people in bad faith) but rather that “curves with absolutely no upper limit” is not a universal or even majority preference. Moreover, getting plastic surgery to achieve it when your body type (at a healthy BMI) probably still appeals to plenty of men, doesn’t make sense. I think the best example of men’s revealed preferences is not their porn choices, let alone their AI-generated or anime porn choices (limited to the subset of men who watch that type of porn) but rather the women who they marry in real life, provided they have enough options that you can be confident they aren’t settling.

Go to a relatively upper class area and look at the young couples on a night out—the Chads and Stacies. Find the Chads, and take a look at who they are with, especially toward the beginning of the night when established couples are apparent, as opposed to last-call hookups. (I never made a habit of doing this deliberately—I’m not that much of a creep—but my husband and I go on enough date nights that it happens.)

Most likely, you will see some variation, especially depending on where you live! A Korean Chad will likely have a girlfriend who looks pretty different from a Mauritanian Chad (let alone, a Chadian Chad). Even sticking within America, you will notice variation in urban centers, East coast, West coast, North versus South. But in America, what you will most likely notice are some patterns—these women will typically be slimmer than your average American woman, they will have more symmetrical faces, better skin, and hair below their shoulders. They will typically have some visible muscle tone, but not look like Olympic wrestlers. I do not think you will notice a predominance of extreme augmented-looking curves or breast implants. You may see some, especially in areas or cultures where that’s more idealized, but it’s unlikely to be an established pattern everywhere or even in most places.

And like I said, there are cultural differences and regional differences. If you look at the wives of men working in finance in Manhattan, they will look different from the wives of professional athletes, and both of those groups of wives will look different from the wives of wealthy Mormon businessmen or the wives of tech entrepreneurs. This doesn’t mean any of these groups are “virtue signaling” and marrying women they don’t like for some stupid reason. Culture, including subculture, can influence the minor tweaks of what we find attractive, and it doesn’t mean anyone is lying. And even within those cultures, there will be variation. A sexual preference doesn’t need to be biologically hardwired for it to be genuine.

But the famed Sanilac post (which again, was overall pretty accurate, so this is not by any means a “takedown”) insists that any pattern for slim, subtly-curvy women among upper middle class men is pure virtue signaling and they secretly want women who look like voluptuous anime characters. Why would men with so many options screw themselves over like this? Are we really supposed to believe that powerful, wealthy men are lying about what they like—to the point of marrying women they find unattractive!—to gain the approval of the fashion industry? All while women are virtue-signaling by dating men their own age instead of men fourteen years older as they secretly desire! Sheesh, why is everyone engaged in such egregious self-sabotage?!

In fact, Sanilac uses this visual example of a bizarre “minority taste” that women, for some reason, “really wish to believe” is the mainstream as some form of self-preservation (how many women look like this? lol. I think lots of women would LOVE to hear that this ideal was not mainstream, actually.) Anyway, this is quite literally what the girlfriends of every Chad I see in my region look like, I’m not joking. It’s as if someone mashed them all up together to create the prototypical Chad Girlfriend, and then made them all a little hotter. And we’re supposed to believe only niche weirdos are into this:

Her waist and hips have less than a 20 inch difference, you sicko!!!

(Let me be clear that I look nothing like her, so this is not a matter of my own self-preservation. I would be the first to acknowledge, in fact, that I am not the hottest woman at the supermarket. If you’re still worrying about that at my age, especially if you are already married, you need to stop reading articles like this and go plant a tree or something.)

Some people (including Sanilac) are convinced that aside from some outliers, every man (secretly or not so secretly) wants a woman who looks like an anime character, and if he’s not married to a woman who looks like that, it’s because he had to settle. And yes, surely some men and women do compromise on certain physical attributes to obtain a partner. But when people like Sanilac look at rich, handsome and famous men, who have loads of options, but who are married to conventionally attractive but non-Kardashian-looking women, the new script becomes: he chose her for vague acceptability and class-signaling reasons and isn’t really attracted to her. The same way women dating men their own age must secretly wish they were dating men fourteen years older. In this bizarre framework, they’ve made it impossible to disprove a fairly ridiculous point of view because anyone who disproves it is clearly just “lying and virtue signaling.”

I know celebrities aren’t great examples because their live are so different from ours, but because I don’t want to take creepshots of random rich, hot people in my area, look at how some of the most famous heartthrobs’ girlfriends and wives look. It’s not a Dove soap commercial, but there is, in fact, variety (and yes, I’m including some exes or on-again-off-again ones for men who are now single.)

All of these women are conventionally attractive, and there are some consistent patterns. But they have different heights, body measurements, hair colors and styles, ethnicities, and facial features. Although they’re mostly all around the same BMI range, they all have different body types. I find it hard to believe any of these men had to settle.

My point isn’t that everyone is perfect just the way they are, or there are no male preferences that can be generalized (the wives of famous actors do, in fact, look different from the wives of random car dealership workers) but rather that porn, fantasy, and social media are not accurate representations of who men necessarily want to marry, which is usually women’s goal when they think about looksmaxxing. I do not believe that men who claim to prefer anything other than a Kardashian are “virtue-signaling” whether anonymously reporting in surveys or dating in real life. I also do not believe that women should be expected to get plastic surgery to look like a literal sex doll so they can snag an attractive husband, not for “feminist” reasons but because a lot of men, even ones who like big boobs and butts, find breast implants and BBLs to be turnoffs. I also have major questions about the attractiveness of a guy who owns a sex doll in the first place, so there’s that.

I also do not mean that men aren’t attracted to women who naturally look like Kardashians (although to be honest, I don’t think these women exist in great numbers without surgical enhancements, even though a lot of women claim to naturally have this body type.) I also never once said that big boobs weren’t a male preference—I think all things being equal (face, body size, personality) your average man will prefer bigger boobs over smaller boobs, but I also think there’s a lot of variation in this area—more variation than the aforementioned blog posts grant—and a large number of men who just don’t care that much. If you hit the genetic lottery and actually look like a walking anime character, you will have no shortage of men who are interested in you, and I find it hard to believe women actually need validation on this! I just don’t think it’s a good idea for all women to go out and get plastic surgery to look this extreme. Beyond the basics of a healthy BMI, waist-defining attire, good skin and hair, grooming and symmetry, a lot of it is down to type, and type is pretty variable!

I generally prickle when I hear any opinion that begins with, “Society has lied to you and everyone is lying to be politically correct, but I know the truth but my evidence doesn’t exist because everyone is lying.” This is basically the crux of almost any stated versus revealed preference argument, especially as it relates to sexual attraction. But even if you accept the premise that stated versus revealed preferences are different, the best way to understand how to find an attractive husband is to look at the women who have attractive husbands. Define “attractive” however you want, but if you look around at the wives of the best-looking, most successful, most charismatic men you know in real life, you will probably find some consistent variables, and other things that are all over the place. And that doesn’t even touch the fact that as visual as men are, they absolutely have preferences for personality and shared values, and these things are much harder to measure in surveys…or by looking at porn history.