Not even Barbie herself is safe from the opinions of unwashed weirdos who live in their parents’ basements and only come out at night to inhale a bag of Cheetos and chicken tendies before scurrying back below ground, as the internet learned last week when several men decided to take to Twitter to share their unsolicited opinions on Margot Robbie’s appearance.
 

All of this appears to have started when one user tweeted his theory that Robbie was cast in Barbie because “she isn’t pretty enough to alienate a female audience.”


This prompted someone else to tweet two photos of Robbie and argue, “If this is mid you mofos lost the plot,” which led to Florida’s Nicholas Verola to tweet a different photo of Robbie and adding, “This is her without makeup. Definitely mid.”



Another user said of Robbie, “She is a hard 7. You used to find a Margot Robbie in every Blockbuster Video in 1995.”


As many have pointed out, the men calling Robbie mid aren’t exactly oil paintings themselves — it’s never men who look like Chris Hemsworth and have healthy self-esteem that go around rating women on a scale of 1 to 10.

@jackmacbarstool #greenscreen #barbie ♬ original sound - Jack Mac


Barstool’s Jack McGuire argues that tweets like these are the result of porn addiction, as well as “Instagram model addiction” — that is, men becoming so fixated on women who are surgically and digitally enhanced to within an inch of their lives that other women look worn out and haggard in comparison.

 Considering many of the incels insulting Robbie took issue with the fact that her breasts aren’t as huge as they feel Barbie’s should be, there does seem to be some merit to this argument.


Whatever’s causing it, the culture of rating people, namely women, based on an “objective” list of qualities seems to have amped up in recent years. Subreddits like r/truerateme exist solely so people can have strangers rate them based on a truly unhinged set of criteria. 


This obsession with rating women’s appearances in particular is by no means new — let us remember that Facebook started out as a way for Mark Zuckerberg to pit women against each other so others could vote on who was hottest. 


But it’s clearly never been more ridiculous.

Or to put it in terms these critics will understand, it’s very much only a one or two on a scale of 1 to 10.