It has been 34 years since Weird Science hit screens and yet, it seems some people are still obsessed with the concept of being able to design their ideal lady.
As insulting and even dehumanising as the whole thing sounds, that is exactly what a bunch of porn fans have gone and done.
Image credit: Universal Pictures
According to reports from Cosmopolitan, a porn site has revealed what the “perfect” woman looks like, based on survey results received from some 50,000 users.
While we don’t have a breakdown of the exact demographics, the data is said to have come from men, women, and nonbinary folk from 150 different countries… and the results are hardly surprising.
I hope you can hear my eyes rolling as you read this, but the responses indicated that the “ideal” woman is a 25-year-old Eurasian woman named Shy Yume.
Shy is said to be five-foot-five with long, straight dark-brunette hair. She has blue eyes; D-cup boobs and an “’average’ waist and butt” (whatever the hell that means).
Want to hear more?
Great.
Based on users’ responses, Shy has also been revealed to be bisexual and not a feminist.
Image credit: NBC
Now, as Cosmo has aptly shared, there are many problems with this whole stunt.
A lot of the results read as fetishistic (voting on race and sexuality feels very gross), and the idea of a woman being designed purely for intention of pleasing those attracted to her makes me cringe so hard that it’s causing my organs to shut down.
But beyond that, it shares damaging messaging to every woman who doesn’t fit the profile.
Some may brush it off as just a playful tool that allowed horny peeps to voice their preferences. But in creating Shy, the impossible standards women are held to are just reinforced.
An equally disturbing result – if you ask this writer – was the fact that 60 per cent of survey participants said they did *not* want their perfect gal to be a feminist.
Can we talk about this for a second?
Over half of these people stated that their dream woman would not be keen on equal rights for women. I’m aware that this went down on a porn site and not the New York Times, but I think it’s truly time that we corrected the messed up perception that feminism is anything beyond “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes”.
That was Merriam-Webster’s definition, by the way.
The fact that this result came in with such high numbers expresses to me that the word ‘feminist’ needs some seriously good PR right now. And I truly hope that’s what we’re looking at; a case of mixed wires. Because if not, if the people who gave feminism a big red cross actually see the term for what it truly is, then that means 60 per cent of these people view women supporting equality as explicitly undesirable.
That’s a far more terrifying alternative.