My Beautiful Friend
thepointmag.com
thepointmag.com
In today’s world, the scrutiny of men’s appearance will never even come close to the microscope that women live under. Truly. An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman.
And worse, women are brought up to really care what others think of them, and to make everyone else comfortable at their own expense. So you can’t just “stop caring what people say”. That would really screw you over in this world.
I imagine that beauty is for women what money is for men. It’s our currency and often what makes us valuable to the group of the shallow “others” in this society.
Men don’t really study that much into looks. They are less sharp about it. But ugly men get less attention too. If they don’t dress well, they get less noticed. In such cases, the surviving men who don’t look great have something else that sets them apart: high level of intellect.
What sets women apart, if not looks, is discipline and reliability.
While perhaps a little more crude, doesn't "MILF" convey the same intent with respect to women? All of the above speak to an attractiveness found in those who are considered older. There are plenty of women in their later stages of life who are still considered very attractive.
> aging is the enemy.
I posit that becoming "boring" is the ultimate enemy. Indeed, becoming boring is correlated with age. People tend to settle down as they become older, and that is what is considered least attractive. The movers and shakers don't want to associate with someone who thinks watching TV on a Saturday night is a good time.
> An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman.
It does appear to be true, statistically, that it takes men longer to mature. In fact, stereotypically, there is an idea that men will never grow up. The longer you keep at doing "stupid kid things" the greater the chances that you will eventually strike gold.
This is somewhat the key to success as a man, and what they're evolved to do.
Men don't get to live a life staying safe in the cave. Men are the species' tool for throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That's why the bell curve for male success/failure is much flatter than it is for women. More extreme successes and more extreme failures. Men are the element of the human tribe that take on huge risks to discover new and valuable things. When it works, the success can be massive and disproportionate. When it fails, it fails hard, often in death. And usually, there's no (or little) safety net for men. There's a reason why 75% of the homeless are men.
This does seem like a necessary outcome of the harsh reality of supply and demand of sexual reproduction, that eggs and wombs are scarce and valuable while sperm is abundant and cheap.
Women and men have very different burdens, and its extremely clear the grass is not greener on the other side. Most people are not the high performing ruthless psychopathic type A personality common in Silicon Valley, New York, Miami, etc.
I'm a Korean woman that grew up in a white Surburbia, the meanest people to me were brown haired "average" white girls. They insulted my hair, my eyes, my nose, and my lack of nasal bridge, literally everything you can think of.
I believe the primate social hierarchy at play, and at our core many of us are trying to "win" that hierarchy. At the same time, I think certain types of people gravitate to cities and certain lifestyles.
It's true that being conventionally attractive made my life 1000x easier - it's almost like the trees lowered their branches to make the fruit easier to pick. I'm pretty sure it made it easier to get a mortgage and a job and definitely a partner. But I still think about what my life would be like if I had a different nose, different hair, different build.
Even in my late 40s, I still get a lot of attention from much younger women. A few weeks ago, a woman, maybe 25, openly flirted with me while she made my cappuccino. This has happened many times before, but I never make a move.
All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw me naked. Or how fast she would disappear if she saw my crooked upper teeth. Or all my gray chest hair. Or my hairy back. Even if I played ball and gave her my number, even if she thinks I'm handsome, older-and-wiser, I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her.
Used to being beautiful all their lives, one day there's a chink in the armor: a wrinkle, a white hair, a stretchmark, that same feeling you have starts to sink in. The emotional impact might be worse than for people who had a lifetime to be at peace with how they look like.
This seems to be the author of the article [0]. Your first reaction is probably that the real picture doesn't match at all the picture you built in your mind while reading the article. I hope that helps you realize you are not alone in feeling that everyone else must be thinking of you what you think of yourself. They're probably not.
Germans calls it FKK [0] and it’s a think our civilization would highly benefit to incorporate. Also if anyone visit Belgium/ Netherlands, highly recommend an afternoon in a nude sauna garden. (For those wondering, no sex involved neither allowed). Naturist beaches in other places are great too but a bit harder to get when you’re a “beginner” : they tends to be public space that are also frequented by clothed-people and you may find yourself weird to undress among them, the first times at least.
To be clear, the women I've loved weren't really ordinary; they were intelligent, eloquent, kind, and beautiful in their own way.
Grooming, keeping up on trends, working out, shopping, etc. It's takes hours weekly at a minimum.
So it's easy to let it take over your personality if it becomes a defining characteristic. Especially for women because often that is the societal expectation. If you're pretty that's enough.
"Let it pass like water off a duck's back." became a little bit of a mantra until I truly wasn't worried about it, even as I age.
Accepting that, if people wanted to be with me they would. If they didn't, I didn't want to waste my time with them. Trying to get somebody who didn't like me to like me, ceased being anything I was concerned about. Prior to hitting this point, I'd had multi-year crushes in high school on a couple of girls who were nice and friendly but just weren't interested in me.
After having this realization, it made it a lot easier to date because you can ask people out without fear of rejection. If somebody said no, great! That saved a lot of time. Don't take it personally.
The other thing that young men definitely have to learn is the gossip pipeline. Don't participate in it, but realize it is out there. Word got around in college that I "wasn't looking for a serious relationship" and it made it a lot easier for me to date. Turned out that a lot of young women worry about overly clingy men if they go out one time and then decide not to pursue it further. There's a lot of pressure on women there. People even tried to set me up on blind dates.
Eventually, I met my wife of 20 years so far.
The act of simply going on a lot of first dates is fairly validating in and of itself. Learning all of this stuff added to my own confidence too. But the absolute first step is simply self acceptance. Control what you can control, don't worry about what you can't.
And to be clear, control what you can control means that you can control improving yourself (diet, exercise, grooming, mindset, humility, faith, education, courtesy, reliability, family relationships, etc). A lot of self acceptance advice suggests that you shouldn't be trying to get better. I'm not suggesting that at all. We can all improve and we can all be better for the people we care about. That's a big piece of showing we care.
Whenever we went for lunch together, it was like I entered another world and it was fascinating to me. Girls would walk up to him and say “hi”, stand around and make awkward conversation and then leave. This happened ALL THE TIME. I can say that this has never happened to me not even once in my life. I’m the type of guy where a girl will ask me where I work, and I’ve been working with her for a year. It doesn’t bother me one bit but I’m also in my 50s.
I’m not particularly handsome so sitting with him felt like I was gaining a secret pass to the lifestyles of the beautiful. When we were in line, I would look around and see girls just staring at him without him noticing.
The complete contrast between his life and mine in terms of how women treat him was really fascinating to me, especially since he’s a good guy and a rising star because he’s smart and hard working.
> Since tresses and cheeks show a sign of that drop, kings keep licking the ground.
> Delicate earth has received a drop of Beauty, so you kiss it night and day with a hundred hearts.
> Though mixed with earth, a single drop can drive you mad—what then will that wine do to you when pure?
(Rumi M V 372-375)
Note "earth" here is a reference to human beings, as Muslims believe humans were created from earthly clay.
Patriarchy is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for men"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is possible in patriarchy, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from above.
Feminism is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for women"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is impossible in feminism, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from below.
Women care a great deal about social norms/"brutal" hierarchy, but we can also get a lot more from it. So it tends to be enabled at every rung of the hierarchy. When I was a young girl, the worse bullying came from "average" looking girls rather then the very beautiful ones.
I get the impression that complaining about ones physical appearance is more accepted in women than men. I can imagine a man writing the OP piece would be labeled a few topical terms for his entitlement and toxic envy.
It's become impossible for me to ignore how often social hierarchies order themselves to a significant degree on the basis of physical appearance. I would implore anyone to consider physical fitness, fashion, skin, hair care and even cosmetic surgery if they inexplicably fail in social or romantic endeavors while bearing no other obvious faults. It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance.
The most depressing part was when I in my early 20s realized there are people in this world and seeming quite many of them who have it 'easy'. They live their life's without struggling with the small stuff, everything just comes. The big stuff takes time of course. Not that they don't have their own subjective experience of struggle, its just on another level both personal and materialistic.
As you say physical fitness it maybe the only thing one can do in order improve ones standing unless one has some innate talent which can be exploited.
When stuff like this comes up I always have to think of two people, Machiavelli and our last chancellor, Angela Merkel. She was by no means attractive, a woman, an East-German physicist and yet managed to become arguably our most significant post-war leader and governed over 16 years.
Machiavelli tells us why. In social hierarchies it's not looks, wealth or even intellect that matter, it's Virtù, that is martial spirit, or ambition. All other traits are just up to luck. People who accept the notion that their role in hierarchies comes down to how they look or how others perceive them have already given in to passivity. People who climb hierarchies literally do ignore why they're not supposed to be there.
- On the political chessboard, she could usually see 2-4 moves further ahead than any other German politician.
- She attracted and retained an extremely capable, loyal, and tight-lipped inner circle.
There is a story by Ted Chiang on a device that makes you blind to the physical attractiveness of other people, "Liking What You See: A Documentary" (https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-...).
I can't believe how much I deluded myself when I was younger about the nature of social hierarchies. There was some research (can't find it now) about childhood aggression showing how, if a kid is better looking, then aggression actually improves their social standing, while if the kid was not good looking, the opposite happens.
Whatever you do, just make sure you don't allow your kids to repeat the same mistakes.
Would highly recommend the books to anyone who is still wondering - the torrent of raw humanness coming out from those books is, for a better word, brilliant.
But embedded inside of its message is a deep, I think, and fundamental misunderstanding of beauty, as immutable, objective, so easy, obvious and self-evident to rank into an unambiguous ordering of things. But this kind of lowest common denominator simplification makes it possible for a society to create rules and structure, so it becomes a cultural default.
But I think that aesthetic beauty is multi-dimensional and temporal. A fine wine or a brandy; a sublime cheese and not a fresh glass of milk. There is a very specific kind of electric, youthful beauty which is ephemeral and fleeting. But there are other kinds of beauty which can be subdued and hard to miss, which can appreciate over time. I don't even mean that in a subjective "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but rather, that beauty objectively can come in more than one form.
Is a bombastic Wagner opera more or less beautiful than a simple, haunting, short song by The Cranberries? The question doesn't even make sense, they're apples and oranges. But if you ask me, I prefer the song by The Cranberries and for the kind of beauty it holds deep inside of itself, the Wagnerian opera would never come close.
I wish society would accept and circulate this truth rather than the other simpler, convenient, and yet so very wrong lie reflected by this article. I may not be a woman, but I've felt so many similar kinds of body dysmorphia of this sort living in NYC surrounded by conventionally attractive male models for so long until I stopped trying to be a conventional kind of attractive that would never sit right on my skin and instead embraced the one that felt like home to me.
I sometimes regret that I didn't realize this sooner. But on the other hand, I'm glad that the experience taught me a lesson and imbued me with a confidence that now cannot be taken away from me by anyone or anything.
I think the opposite. I think the higher level ideal is the illusion. What our base instincts tell us is beauty is the actuality and it's embedded in our biology.
For much of humanity woman have always been valued for their youthful beauty. Pregnancy is costly health-wise and men value youth and beauty because natural beauty conveys better physical genes and youthfulness conveys higher success to conceive a child.
Women are objectified for their beauty by men beauty for real biological reasons. And as a result women who obsess over their own physical beauty also end up being more successful in the mating game. Most of this behavior is the result of evolutionary psychology. This definition of beauty is cold, but it is reality and it is delusional to call it a "misunderstanding" of beauty.
The author writes this article and is drawing upon millions of years of evolutionary instinct and behavior.
>I wish society would accept and circulate this truth rather than the other simpler, convenient, and yet so very wrong lie reflected by this article.
Society doesn't need to circulate anything. Any person with a brain recognizes physical beauty and they know the meaning of the quote "Don't judge a book by it's cover". What's going on is just people are continuously lying to themselves when convenient.
You're saying it here as if someone let's me know of the "truth" and suddenly my instinctual definition of beauty will completely do a 180 and change? No. Unfortunately the cold hard truth is this: You have minimal choice in what you find beautiful. Culture and biological instincts shape your preferences far more than individual choice and you have little control over it.
It's like choosing to find the female form beautiful or the male form beautiful. If I had that choice I can be gay at will. It's convenient to define beauty on your terms when you encounter a woman lamenting the fact she's not beautiful, but your definition of beauty completely flips when talking about sending homosexual people to training camps to train them to be straight... yeah as if they or anyone has a choice. Like I said, your definition is a lie we tell ourselves unconsciously when the situation is convenient.
Sorry to be a downer. But hacker news is a level up above other sites. I think we can handle the truth. In fact I think we prefer it. I prefer to talk about the actual science behind why she feels the way she does and how evolution and biology has shaped this behavior.
Keep in mind it's not one sided. Women objectify men as objects of success and this no doubt shapes mens behavior as much as mens preferences shape women. I have more interest in the interplay of behaviors between men and women then I do idealistic re-definitions of beauty.
Beauty IS in the eye of the beholder, but that eye is built by DNA by which ALL humans share 99.9%.
Why do feminine beauty ideals contrast across not just cultures but socioeconomic class? Thinking just about feminine beauty, can you create a uniform rule about why certain strata and societies have historically prefer a more androgynous look and others prefer the more "bombshell" look? Why does what vary over time and wax and wane as certain looks go in and out of fashion?
Could you create such a rule which is consistent over time? Do you think those rules would have been consistent by era, or would they have varied in times of famine versus times of surplus, and could you create anything consistent across civilization? How about by geographic areas which shaped the city states which served as centers of power in those civilizations, IE how feminine beauty may exist on the steppe vs on the coast, or in the mountains?
Why don't we take it one step further and ask about such a rule in primate sociology that varies in, say, one great ape spicies versus another? How about archaic hominid differentiation between H. Neanderthalensis vs H. Florensiensis vs H. Naledi vs H. Sapiens?
> Unfortunately the cold hard truth is
Speaking about cold hard truth is challenging when working from a basis of archaeogenetic ignorance. You risk overestimating how universal your priors are.
Socioeconomic class is basically another culture in terms of influence. These two terms can be used interchangeably as they both have the same effect on the perception of beauty. Your question is something I can answer. It differs across cultures because the minds interpretation of beauty involves external experiences. That is why.
As for your comment about universal rules. Well that's also easy. Universal rules involve symmetry and youth. Possibly more, but those are some of the biggest rules of beauty extend past "culture" so we know it's part of biology.
>Could you create such a rule which is consistent over time?
The answer is no. None of these rules are created by anyone or anything.
>Do you think those rules would have been consistent by era, or would they have varied in times of famine versus times of surplus, and could you create anything consistent across civilization? How about by geographic areas which shaped the city states which served as centers of power in those civilizations, IE how feminine beauty may exist on the steppe vs on the coast, or in the mountains?
These rules vary by culture, culture varies by environmental circumstance and genetics. You're getting into a redundancy here. I think you misinterpreted my post. I DID not say that culture does not influence beauty. Quite the opposite. I said Culture DOES influence someones perception of beauty. Read my post, it is there. However and this is a big "However" you do not have a choice in the matter. You do not choose your culture and you do not choose the ideals that are imprinted onto your brain by that culture. Once imprinted on your brain you cannot change it. If the culture values skinny bombshell models then that ideal will be seared into your brain. There are variations and anomalies but overall it is generally consistent.
It's the same way that a baby bird imprints on the first thing it sees as it's mother. It does not have a choice. Your brain is evolved to assimilate itself into it's environment and culture without conscious choice from you.
That being said outside of this as I previously mentioned there are beauty standards that are universal that are not created by culture, two examples already mentioned are symmetry and youth (for women). We know this because surveys show that these ideals do not shift when observing different cultures. Additionally, quite obviously: men are generally attracted to women and women are generally attracted to men, there is some genetic influence making this opposite sex attraction preference generally consistent across all cultures.
Do not discount these universal rules. They are powerful biological instincts and overall... When in conflict they usually override cultural imprints of beauty.
>Speaking about cold hard truth is challenging when working from a basis of archaeogenetic ignorance. You risk overestimating how universal your priors are.
Except this statement doesn't make sense. If everything I say is logically correct and everything you say has issues with correctness, then who's the ignorant one?
Skinny and bombshell are different. Even a bombshell model that is skinny is curvy and not the kind of neotenous androgynous ideal I referred to. You missed the point and clearly don't understand the significance of the difference.
> If everything I say is logically correct and everything you say has issues with correctness, then who's the ignorant one?
It doesn't matter if what you say appears to be logically correct to you because it's overfitted to a small subset of history that makes sense to you and actually falls apart under a larger evolutionary timeline. Thank you for proving my point.
You don't actually grapple with divergent local evolutionary pressures creating different, competing and often conflicting ideals of feminine beauty each of which make sense for a given evolutionary context, because it's easier to be intellectually lazy than to actually build a model that accounts for that evidence.
Who's the ignorant one? The one who continues to ignore full evolutionary context, so still you.
Doesn't even matter, that's not the point. There are cultures in Africa that value obesity as beauty and those definitions are valid. https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937... You think I'm fixated on a western style definition of beauty. I am not fixated on it. I am simply saying that the western definition of beauty is a VALID definition. It is not a "misunderstanding", your initial post claimed it is a "misunderstanding."
You're emphasizing too much on specific examples with your preconceived notions.
>You don't actually grapple with divergent local evolutionary pressures creating different, competing and often conflicting ideals of feminine beauty each of which make sense for a given evolutionary context, because it's easier to be intellectually lazy than to actually build a model that accounts for that evidence.
Except I never said anything on the contrary. When did I say that there aren't competing ideals of beauty? I'm glad there's a word for intellectual laziness because I clearly don't fit it.
Is there a word for making stuff up? Imagining that someone meant something when that person never said anything to that effect? What's the word for that? Delusional? No you are not delusional, but you need to understand that I never said anything to contradict your statement here.
>Who's the ignorant one? The one who continues to ignore full evolutionary context, so still you.
Except you haven't given any arguments to contradict my stance. Your arguments here are in full agreement with my point. I really don't understand what you're getting at here.
In 10 years' time we'll be laughing at today's trend of Kardashian-style duck lips, Brazilian butts and fake eyelashes, but the funniest will be the plain people who desperately tried to become attractive through aping the style, not the objectively beautiful people like Kim herself who could actually pull it off.
One thing that you're wrong about is that it's a choice or a truth. A human cannot reinterpret or redefine what he or she thinks to be beautiful. Much of this definition is created by genetics and cultural imprinting.
It's amusing that you try to make this point by comparing extremely talented musicans. For every cranberries there are millions of rightfully forgotten medicore bands just as for every beauty there are many, many more medicore or unattractive people.
I think there is a chart to be made, of the universality/popularity <-> personal axis, vs the duration of appreciation axis
platonic solids/pop songs/memes are popular/commonplace but their appreciation is usually short
I don't make the point that there are /not/ millions of rightfully forgotten mediocre bands any more than I make the point that ugliness does not exist; ugliness certainly does exist and it certainly is common.
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Anyway, I've always wondered if something similar is the source of the famous Gender-Equality Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
There is a larger gap in more gender-equal societies. Perhaps it is because absent socioeconomic survival (which the West has largely solved), mate competition is solely in how gender-conformant one is. The more feminine woman, the most masculine man, etc. A refinement of the normal competition but now with survival necessities removed.
Anyway, I am somewhat hopeful that I can do something for any future daughter of mine, but it does strike me as pointless in some way. Immersed in this society she cannot be otherwise. Still, it's obviously worth a shot at identifying some method of innoculation.