It’s not every day that I’m watching a TV show that coincides perfectly with my sludgy trough of genderslop, but East of Eden on Netflix (based on the 1952 Steinbeck novel) somehow fits the bill. Specifically, this show answers a question which I’ve always wondered: if a woman truly believes that beauty is her only currency—as prominent manosphere voices repeatedly say—will she behave as they hope she will, by cashing in as young as possible, “knowing her place” and accepting her impending irrelevance?
Perhaps not. (This paragraph contains some light East of Eden spoilers (the TV show, not the book) so be aware.) One of the main characters, Cathy (played by Florence Pugh) is a pretty young girl (at least at the beginning of the series—we follow her over decades) who quickly realizes that her striking beauty is her only form of currency in a pre-feminism world that is stacked against women. Desperate to obtain power through any means possible, she leverages her beauty in particularly machiavellian, if not completely evil, ways. Yes, she marries (but not for long), she has no interest in being a mother, and she quickly realizes that owning her own brothel and blackmailing powerful men (who routinely underestimate her, cozy up to her and trust her because she’s beautiful) is the best use of her currency, setting her up with as much security and wealth as she ages—which she doesn’t have to hand over to a man.
Not every woman is Cathy, of course. Most women want marriage and children, even if they also want careers, and most women can’t imagine doing sex work for any reason. But if you truly believe in the cynical worldview propped up by the manosphere—that no matter what other assets you may have, the only thing that will matter is your beauty, which only exists for about ten to fifteen years—your actions may not follow an especially traditional or nurturing path.
First, let’s start with a contradiction I’ve noticed in my own tour through the genderslop trenches—the inconvenient truth (promoted mostly by manosphere men and, oddly, some radical feminists) that men are primarily attracted to much younger women (often including girls under the age of consent) and lose attraction somewhere around thirty, certainly by forty. When men are talking about this, the narrative is presented to scare women to settle down as quickly as possible (presumably to someone much older, who is not very impressive physically) so they don’t miss their supposedly brief window of desirability. But taking this belief literally—as some women actually do—will yield very different results.
