"Mid" is unfalsifiable

A lot of men call women they’re not particularly attracted to, and often dislike, “mid”. Obviously, it is a mean thing to say to a person and is often motivated by misogyny, but all that aside, I found myself wondering why? Why not just call the target ugly?

I think I’ve figured it out, it’s because the claim someone is mid is unfalsifiable- it allows you to insinuate that someone is a bit ugly in a way that is almost impossible to argue with. There are plenty of people on the planet who can prove, that, according to conventional standards, they’re definitely not ugly. However, to prove that you are definitely so far above average no one could reasonably call you average- that is a much harder if not virtually impossible task.

Let’s say I claim Henry Cavill, a man who is clearly not mid, is mid. I post the middest looking photo of him I can find:

Then say something like: “Haha, Henry Cavill fans just won’t face that he’s mid yo. Cope and seethe.”

If I’d said he’s ugly, you’d be able to knock me flat in three seconds, but mid? How could you prove that he’s objectively well above average given the famous flightiness of such concepts?

Add to this that everyone is now looking for ways the speaker could be right- searching for every possible flaw…

Plus ‘mid’ is such an elastic concept, and can be made to stretch very, very far. Anyone who’s not at least two standard deviations from the mean can be said to be mid, and to account for individual differences, better make it three standard devs.

Also I’ve insinuated that people who don’t think he’s mid are engaging in self-deception, so if you try to deny my claim it’s going to sound like… self-deception.

Under these conditions, it’s virtually impossible to refute a claim someone is mid. By calling people mid, the internet has found a way to snipe with impunity to refutation. Note though that while mid is a very different thing to being ugly on paper, in practice the implications of a person being mid is often taken to be the same as being ugly- get them out of our sight. This is especially true when it comes to roles for which certain men feel every woman filling that role should be spectacular. Some men- no joke here- actually seem to think any woman in a public-facing role who is not, to their particular tastes, cosmically beautiful is an attempt to castrate them and by extension western civilization.

Other than online misogyny, it’s interesting to think about why the concept of ‘mid’ has become so popular circa 2023. A lot of it, I think, is because a bunch of rightwing men have convinced themselves that they want to settle down for life with a wife and have kids except they don’t actually want to do this- they’re afraid of commitment, of missing out on an even better wife or on casual sex. So they’ve invented a series of increasingly tough demands- youth, virginity, beauty, political and religious convergence, etc. all to hide from themselves the reality they don’t actually want to settle down at all.

This bear isn’t mid, No bear is mid.