Inkhaven Spotlight: “Dispelling Beauty Lies” with Aria Schrecker
Episode E11 of Inkhaven’s “Readings from the Archive,” hosted by Ben Pace and published by Eneasz Brodski (Apr 28, 2026). Guest: Aria Schrecker, an editor at Works in Progress who also writes a “How to Find a Husband” Substack series. Sponsored by WordPress.com. Format: Aria reads an excerpt of the essay aloud (the preamble), then discusses it with Ben. Note: this is a summary of the conversation, not the essay itself.
Why she chose the essay
- Aria picked J. Sanilac’s “Dispelling Beauty Lies” as the least famous of the essays she often talks about — a recent discovery (~6 months prior, near Christmas), which she says “totally changed how I think about men.”
- She stumbled onto Sanilac via his comic fiction (Memoirs of an Evil Vizier), then found this essay “highly relevant” to the “getting sexier” installment of her husband-hunting series, calling it “the best summary I’ve come across” — more comprehensive and persuasive than anything else she could find.
Caveats they raise
- Aria doesn’t agree with all of it: the author “clearly has some degree of conspiratorial thinking,” which is prominent in the preamble they read, but she “mostly trusts his empirics” on men’s preferences once he reaches the substance.
- Only an excerpt is read because the essay is “massive,” “very controversial,” and image-heavy — Aria jokes she couldn’t read it in public (tilting her screen on the Tube, “I’m not looking at anime girls, I swear”).
- She has written her own Substack summary of the practical advice (noting where she disagrees, e.g. she thinks he doesn’t understand what beauty products are actually available to women), got “blowback” and attention, and is writing a part two with more of the empirics.
On the author (J. Sanilac)
- Anonymous; identifies as a “starving artist” and sometimes as an “evil vizier.” Aria donated money to him and emailed him, but he’s “very protective of his anonymity,” so getting him to appear publicly seems unlikely. Ben muses about flying him out to Lighthaven.
- They read two quotes showing his open contempt for academia (claiming academic “sex doll” studies copied his method without citation; calling professors “morally weak conformists”). Aria: “he has a lot of hate in his heart” and doles it out in every direction (also the fashion industry, which he frames via “gay pedophiles ruining beauty”).
- Gender ambiguity: people variously insist the author is a man or a woman (his old Twitter avatar was an “Undead Odalisque” from his fiction). Aria is confident it’s a man (his co-host on a podcast makes that clear); Sanilac himself won’t confirm or deny and enjoys the ambiguity.
- His fiction is mostly comedy — e.g. a 5th-century-Arabia tale of an odalisque-purveyor to a sultan who fakes a zombie apocalypse using dead sex slaves after a plague quarantines his redhead supply; and an unfinished story about future “incels” as a social class with AI waifus while women run the state.
Substance of the essay they discuss
- His noble motive (as Aria reads it): a coming tide of “AI waifu girls” will “one-shot” many men, and the pro-humanity response is for real women to become more competitive against AI girls to preserve love and relationships. Ben thinks the advice is meant in earnest.
- What changed Aria’s mind: she “didn’t really realize men liked breasts” and had over-updated on slimness; she cites shifting celebrity norms (Sydney Sweeney as an “innovation”; Scarlett Johansson’s reported breast reduction “to be taken more seriously”) as evidence something shifted in norms — which she says makes Sanilac’s conspiratorial framing more understandable.
- The typical-mind problem: a big reason people get angry at the piece is that when a man’s preference isn’t exactly the median on some axis, he assumes others are lying (they invoke Scott Alexander’s “typical mind fallacy” and Ozy’s “typical sex life fallacy”). Aria recounts a heated group-chat fight between “slim blonde who looks 16” and “curvaceous Latina” camps.
- BDSM/dominance: influenced by Aella’s writing, both now think aggressive sexual dominance is largely female-driven (a large minority/majority of women are “very kinky”), contrary to the “50 Shades” narrative; Aria’s evolutionary explanation is non-monogamy (a few dominant men, more women per man).
- Did she change her life? Not much — she argues a lot of it isn’t actually tractable (fat distribution, facial youthfulness). Her one concrete step: measuring her waist-to-hip ratio at different weights to find her “curviest,” which she plans to publish. She already dressed somewhat as he’d recommend (“preppy girlish”), and has sent the essay to nearly everyone she knows (comparing the excitement to discovering Scott Alexander).
- Craft praise: his separate essay on trust networks / epistemology is a good sign for taking his stranger claims seriously; his image use is unusually effective (oval, fading-in images rather than jarring blocks) — good general advice against walls of text. Many images were reader/Twitter-poll submissions; he includes an aside of his personal favorite images to rebut “this is just your taste.”
- They note his other opinionated essays (e.g. a 5,000-word piece arguing attached garages are ugly — “he’s right”; an anti-YIMBY piece Aria finds “not that ridiculous” despite being a YIMBY).
The rest of the conversation (tangents)
- Aria’s work at Works in Progress: she prefers editing to writing (co-creating and structuring ideas with knowledgeable experts rather than doing research from scratch); ~half their pieces are outbound commissions, half inbound pitches. Proud of a piece explaining South Korea’s low birth rates as an extreme version of universal trends — notably the motherhood earnings penalty combined with high female earnings (Sweden/US have small penalties and more robust birth rates). Mentions forthcoming pieces on Orthodox Jewish high birth rates (Sonja Trauss) and hunter-gatherer vs. agriculturist violence.
- Inkhaven / Lighthaven: Ben’s team (which built and runs LessWrong) built the residency’s software portal; playful features shame writers who haven’t posted (profiles turn red, then “bleed”). They discuss writing strategy (interleave small research posts with a later thesis piece), “speed haven” timed-writing games, and the venue’s deliberately “nook”-heavy design.