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Hell Yeah, I’m Checking Out Your Hot (or Ugly) Dad

We don’t talk about the Hot Dad = Future Hot Husband equation, but we should

The first time you meet your partner’s parents is an important milestone for your relationship, but it’s also one of the first chances a woman gets to do some serious detective work. Namely: Is your dad a DILF or what?

We’re looking for critical biographical data points like how you grew up, what room in the family house you masturbated in (hint: all of them), whether you get along with your family, and what kind of decorating taste your mom has. But possibly most importantly, we finally get to find out if your dad is hot.

Weird, huh? A little gross, maybe? Sorry. But we need to see if your dad is hot so we can find out if you’re going to be hot later, too. Normally we don’t talk about the Hot Dad = Future Hot Husband equation, but we should. We’re going to check out the goods. We are human people, with blood pumping to the genitals. We are going to look at your dad, and his entire body— possibly his dick print — and decide if he is hot or not.

Hell, we are looking at every single member of your family to see which way the apple might wrinkle from the tree.

I know I’m not the only one. I asked some other women to confirm this: Did you look at your dude’s dad and specifically wonder if your dude would age like that or not?

“Yes,” one woman told me. “And really hoped it’s not true.”

“Oh yeah,” another woman said. “He’s already more bald than his dad was at his age though.”

We don’t really hear about this, though. We do hear how men live in mortal fear that women will morph into their hideous mothers. As a result, most women have heard the maxim that the only way to tell how she will age is by looking at whether her mom is busted. It’s been awhile since I’d heard it, but I checked to see if it was still circulating.

Sure enough, voila, same-day edition:

https://twitter.com/UnaverageJoe_/status/1019980519990276102

“Thom-ass” above doesn’t seem to realize it’s a genetic crapshoot, though. You get half of your DNA from each parent, and your looks as you age come down to a combination of genes and, importantly, lifestyle.

DNA may factor into maybe 80 percent of your future weight and body shape, including ability to develop muscle mass, according to Women’s Health. The other 20 percent is lifestyle choices. In other words, if you think looking at a person’s same-sex parent is a slam-dunk indication of how they will turn out, you would be wrong. To say nothing of the fact that a woman can end up looking more like her dad, and a dude can end up looking more like his mom.

Still, men take to internet forums regularly to ask strangers to help predict what is fundamentally a lottery. (Women are vastly underrepresented in STEM fields, yet somehow we don’t need a science course to figure this out.)

On these forums, men are very very afraid women will get old and ugly later and they won’t know what to do about it, as if being promised a banger of a wife4life is a constitutional right.

  • “Should you wait to get married or not at all simply from a standpoint of your wife aging too soon?” “Look at her mother. If her mother is overweight, lacks self-control and smokes, then that’s what you’re getting.”
  • “Should I dump my girlfriend if I think her mom is ugly? My girlfriend’s mother looks horrible for her age. She is fat which is fine with me. But she is also burly and mannish looking. My girlfriend is very pretty and feminine, but I predict she will look like her mom some day.”
  • “If you were looking for a serious relationship would you dump your gf after seeing her mom is ugly?” “I dumped a girl once cause her soap made her smell like wood chips.”
  • “Will my girlfriend for surely end up being fat?” “Yep, get out now.”

My personal favorite answer to the question above: “The real question is…WHERE ARE THE FUKING PICS!?!?!?!1” (Seriously, bruh, where are the fuking pics.)

I cannot find the female equivalent of this post.

Let me be clear: Women absolutely write about being upset and turned off that their boyfriends and husbands have gained weight, and how they are ashamed for being so shallow.

What I can’t find are women worrying or soliciting public opinion on whether a boyfriend’s dad predicts the likelihood of the boyfriend turning gross, all so they can pre-emptively bounce out of this marriage before things go south.

The only instances I can really find where women are dumping oldsters for aging badly are when they, say, marry a man decades older and then realize they will be playing nurse, and not in a sexy way. Or when a woman files for divorce in her 60s because her husband got boring, but not because he committed the crime of physically aging.

Part of this is because gender bias denies women a certain humanness — the right to age and still be considered valuable. But it denies men a certain humanity, too — having to care about anyone’s needs but their own, and getting to be super-shallow about women’s value.

Proof of this is that in dating preferences online, 20-something men tend to be most attracted to women in their early 20s, but so do 30-something men, and 40-something men, and 50-something men. Women tend to continue to be attracted to their same age in a man, even as they age.

It is not because older men are objectively hotter. It’s because our culture decided they are. The more women can maintain the illusion of inhabiting a body that hasn’t been on earth very long, the more desirable they are. But we grant men a hotness that comes from experience, wisdom and literal time on earth.

Also: beards. “Men can grow a beard and hide half of their face anyway,” one woman told me.

Speaking of hot men, many stories about women turning into their mothers cite a famous Oscar Wilde quote from The Importance of Being Earnest. “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”

But I’d probably use another Oscar Wilde quote when it comes to this conundrum, from Lady Windermere’s Fan: “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

In other words, it’s not that women aren’t base, shallow horndogs who want hot dudes with hot bodies, whatever their idea of a hot body is. It’s not that they don’t wish for that body to stay hot as long as possible. It’s that it wouldn’t be the only metric by which to judge a mate. There are simply other values on this earth.

“I wouldn’t not marry someone because I thought their dad was ugly,” a woman told me. “Besides, so as long as you like their eyes, you’re good.”