By Steve Sailer
05/18/2011
From my movie review in Taki’s Magazine:
The biggest laughs in Bridesmaids, the Judd Apatow-produced female buddy comedy starring Kristen Wiig, come from the odd man out among the five bridesmaids-the groom’s sister (Melissa McCarthy), a hefty force-of-nature lesbian who dresses like 1950s golfer Ben Hogan. The metajokes are that, first, lesbians are clueless about what most women like; and second, because nobody else much cares what obviously butch women think, the other bridesmaids never react (either positively or negatively) to her inordinately off-target conceptions of feminine fun.
For example, when the girls are arguing over a motif for the wedding shower, the lesbian interjects her conception of a crowd-pleasing theme: "Fight Club! We get there early, oil up, then when the bride arrives, we beat the crap out of her!" The ladies listen politely, then immediately go back to debating whether the Parisian theme suggested by Wiig hasn’t already been done to death this season.
Read the whole thing there.
That reminds me of a general point: people only get extremely mad at you when you are at least pretty close to being right. If you suggest an April in Paris theme for a wedding shower, the people who favor, say, a Breakfast at Tiffany’s theme might attack you pretty relentlessly because your idea is a plausible enough contender to be a threat to the acceptance of their idea. On the other hand, if you suggest a Fight Club-themed wedding shower, well, it’s not really in the running enough for most people to spend too much time worrying about.
Thus, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa finds himself widely hated today for posting an item on Psychology Today asking "Why are black women rated less physically attractive than other women, but black men are rated better looking than other men?" It caused such a furor (described here) that the magazine deleted it, so only a screenshot survives. Of course, the reason the whole world got so angry with Dr. Kanazawa is because black women are rated less physically attractive than other women on average.
So, you aren’t supposed to say that. If he had said "Why are Slavic supermodels rated less physically attractive than other women?" nobody would have much cared.
By the way, speaking of half-black women whom I've always liked, the bride in Bridesmaids is played by Maya Rudolph. I've always enjoyed her performances on Saturday Night Live (especially "Tennis Talk with Time Traveling Scott Joplin"), but I never looked up who her mother was before. You have to be of a certain age to recognize her mother’s name, but it was a very sad event when she died of cancer in the 1970s when Maya was a little girl.
Her white father was a good friend of movie producer Bruce Paltrow, so she presumably grew up playing with Gwyneth Paltrow, then went to UC Santa Cruz. Thus, she can do this huge range of characters from black to white, which makes her invaluable in an ensemble show with a limited cast.
Also, she’s a funny person who doesn’t appear to be crazy, which is rarer than it seems. Jimmy Buffett argued in Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes: "If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane." But when it comes to making other people laugh, that doesn’t seem to hold true all that much.
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