Because “men” have never been very particular or discerning as a breed, there frequently comes a time when he will opt for the phenomenon of a woman known as a “butter face.” You know the trope: a woman with a “hot” body but a rather unfortunate visage to go with it. As in: “She’s got a great body–but-her-face…” Well, never has there been a better time for “men” with low standards to thrive. To “clean up,” as they say, on the unwanted dregs of women now forced to conceal their butter faces in public with a surgical mask–usually “required” in most stores, though that’s a word that has remained as loose with most Americans as the classification of American beauty. To some, so long as it’s a woman with the right body specifications, she’s “beautiful enough.” In fact, “[insert adjective or noun here] enough” is the low bar Americans set for themselves long ago when they decided to settle in a shithole wasteland with terrible weather (yes, that’s shade at the East Coast and its colonial settlers). 

So long as something just barely qualifies as satisfying, an American–particularly an American “male”–is pretty okay with it. I mean, just look at the U.S. president. Not even qualifying as satisfying, yet still, that’s what was pursued, asked for. Just as it is with the butter faces of this world. For who wants a pretty face, let alone anything resembling a “healthy mind,” when one can simply rail the physique that best suits his fetishes? Ones that might further amplify when she chooses to keep her mask on even while indoors. After all, it’s better than using a paper bag instead (see: Nip/Tuck, season three, episode eleven: “Abby Mays”). Indeed, maybe it adds a bit of much needed kink for both parties trying to ignore the elephant that is her face in the room. 

Because women do not have an option to call a “man” something like a butter face in normal circumstances, the victory of the surgi mask in terms of covering a countenance once too unbearable to look at in comparison to a “sick” body (if the body matched the face, of course no one would be looking in their direction at all–also known as: The Fat Person’s Invisibility Irony) isn’t as triumphant for them as “men.” Just another effortless vindication that seems to be merely congenital with having a so-called penis. In one of the many glaring examples of sexism in the English language, there is no official name for a man with a bangin’ body and just an okay, if even passable, face. And no, “butter face boy” or “justicebody” (“just his body”) do not count. Are not nearly as tailored or insulting. 

Which is rather what makes it all the more upsetting that he’s profiting from the labeling of this type of woman during a pandemic. But hey, that’s patriarchy, innit?