Good morning John. Now you may have heard that young women are insecure. And also young men. And also old men and old women and kite surfers and musicians and CEOs and you and me and everyone deals with insecurity. But there are a lot of young women here on YouTube and also I think that they’ve been told their entire lives to base their self-worth on whether or not they are admired by men. So there’s an entire genre of video on YouTube dedicated to the idea of telling women what men like to see in them. So I figured, since those videos do very well, I should hop on the bandwagon myself and tell you what boys look for in girls.

In Ethiopia’s Karo tribe, women scar their bellies as a form of sacred ceremonial tattoo that is found to be very sexy.  In the Kayan tribe of Thailand, women use brass rings to compress their chest and clavicle so that their neck appears very long. The Mursi of Ethiopia insert ceremonial plaques into their lips to attract a man. In Japan, women have their teeth cosmetically unstraightened because crowded teeth is seen as endearing while a tribe in Indonesia thinks the height of sexiness is pointy teeth so they sharpen their teeth with files. In 19th century Europe, women wore garments that squeezed their waists to tiny, tiny shapes while in Mauritania, women send their daughters off to fat camps to eat ten thousand calories a day because there stretch marks are seen as the height of sexiness. Meanwhile in America, women appear beautiful by painting their faces and shaving their bodies. Likewise, different cultures have different standards of beauty for men. In England, they wear really tight pants for example. And I wish I could pull those pants off, I can’t.

I have a point… several. But my main point is that there is very little objectivity when it comes to human mate selection. We’re crazy, we don’t make any sense. And thus, since whether or not someone wants to date you is apparently based on complete randomness, it’s kind of a super terrible thing to base your self-worth on. And this is regardless of your gender by the way. But I do think that it’s more of a problem for women. I saw a post on Tumblr the other day, it was wonderful. It said ‘How do boys look so hot and they never have to wear makeup?’ It was one on those moments where suddenly you notice the water you’ve been swimming in your whole life, right. Like we’re always surrounded by culture, we never notice it’s there, that’s how culture works. But in that moment, you’re like ‘Yeah! How come boys don’t have to wear makeup to look hot and girls do?’ ‘Cause boys without makeup don’t look better than girls without makeup, but in our culture they do and I think that’s because we’re pretty adamant about the fact that women’s value is based, not entirely but significantly, on their beauty and that a lot of their purpose is to be attractive to men which is messed up.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to express yourself through your physical appearance, everybody does that to some extent. Makeup and fashion are super cool ways to express yourself. We should express ourselves in all of the ways that we can find to express ourselves in with our words and our actions and our ideas and our clothes and our fingernails and our haircuts. Don’t let anybody drag on you for expressing yourself however you want to do it. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be appreciated for how you look. I want to be appreciated for how I look but there is so much more to you that that. There’s so much more to life than that. Girls are not the photons that hit the corneas of boys. Regardless of your gender, regardless of their gender, you do not exist to please someone else. You exist for your own sake. John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.

(Music plays over end scene)
Did you ever wanna go
To back where we were before
Smell that pot smoke wafting out
From under your dad’s door
And the steak-knives by the bedside
Jokes cracked in the black light