Advantages and Disadvantages of Not Being Beautiful

[holdouttrout]

Also in the post earlier this week that was not cross-posted, I linked to this post, about beauty. It's been making me think about how the idea of beauty--specifically, a feminine standard of beauty--has played into my life.

A note: This is not a post to tell me how gorgeous I am. The truth is, I have never been a "pretty girl." I don't consider myself ugly, or worthless, or even unattractive... to people who don't judge me by a societal standard of beauty, anyway. I can't count the number of times people have hastened to reassure me that I was beautiful, as if not being beautiful was unthinkable. (I do appreciate the place these comments come from.)

Anyway, I have been thinking about beauty, and the dangers of having/not having it. I remember reading one of the books in the Tales of Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card in which a young, pretty woman has diguised herself as an ugly woman who has found trouble with some men who are harrassing her--and Alvin remarks that she would have been better off if she had left herself pretty, since the men would have fallen over themselves to help her then. This may be true, but it discounts the very real possibility that her beauty would have brought her unwelcome attention of another kind.

To that end, I wondered what the advantages/disadvantages of beauty are. I threw together this partial list. I would welcome more items/thoughts/disagreements.

Advantages of Not Being Beautiful:

1. You don't get as much attention.

2. You can fade into the background.

3. You don't get as many cat calls.

4. If you are with someone, you (possibly) don't have to worry about them leaving just because you are no longer beautiful.

5. You (possibly) don't have to worry as much about your looks going as you get older.


Disadvantages of Not Being Beautiful:

1. You don't get as much attention.

2. You have to respond to people who try to make you more beautiful with well-meaning tips.

3. You have to constantly deny that you are not beautiful, or people will think you are looking for attention and either become frustrated with you or will try to argue with you.

4. If you want to be beautiful, you have to spend more.

5. You have less superficial currency to draw on when creating first impressions.

Comments

[thothmes]

I guess I don't have another item to add to your list, but I do have some stories to share.

I have even features, fair pink-and-white freckled skin, dark straight hair, and hazel eyes. Well, my hair used to be dark. Now it's greying, but not out of what one would expect at 52. While not beautiful, I have been pretty. But for most of my adult life, and especially since the age of 27, when I had my first child, I have been pudgy, and then increasingly fat, until at 45 I was obese. I had a heart attack and was diagnosed as a diabetic. I had a choice. I could have a lifestyle transplant, or I could roll over and die. I had a 14 month old kid. I chose the lifestyle transplant, and over the course of slightly more than a year, I lost 95 lbs. I still have a little bit of middle aged tummy, but it is not noticeable unless I dress poorly. Nowadays I am healthy, vibrant, and energetic in a way I hadn't been since my twenties.

After I lost all that weight, I noticed that people were suddenly much nicer. Store clerks seemed to respond to my every whim. People smiled more. Folks hadn't been that nice to me since I was in my 20's. I couldn't figure it out, until one day the clue bus ran over me, and I realized that I was no longer "fat and ugly", now I was "slim and pretty"! The reason it took me so long to figure it out? Inside I had not changed at all. Now at 52, I'm a little faded, and I'm slipping back into store clerk oblivion, while still remaining the same old me. It kinda makes me mad, not that I'm being ignored, since I tend to shun attention anyway. It makes me mad that people have never been attractive have never received the kind treatment I have. Looks are transitory, and say nothing about whether a person is deserving.

My dad was movie-star handsome. Seriously. 6'1", slender, broad shouldered, with almost-black wavy hair gone salt & pepper at the temples, and a handsome face with dancing light hazel eyes. And he's a poet. Young women (and older ones) used to try to befriend me as a way to gain his notice. Aging was terribly hard for him. His 50th birthday was about as cheerful as a viewing down at the funeral home. He bemoaned getting older. He was never a player, really, but I think he really had a hard time with the way he turned fewer heads as the years passed. Being handsome was part of who he was, and in losing it, he was losing part of himself, and yet there was no way to stop it. It is not only women who are caught in the beauty trap.

Having been obese, and having also had my share of gross guys leaning out of cars on the parkway to shout "Hey, bay-BEEE!" at me when I was a young, shy, and vulnerable teen, and (especially) having a husband who loves me through thick and thin in the most literal sense, and who will love me just as besottedly when I am the pruny-faced liver-spot capital of the U.S., I had no trouble turning 40, or 50. My looks good or bad, are not part of my self-esteem. I'm glad I'm not disfigured and hideous, but if I were, I'd be the same old me, with the same unique self to offer the world.

And my Beloved Husband? He's a looker, and totally can't see it. To him, he is what he is, and that's that. If I praise his looks, he's pleased, but a little puzzled. He thinks it's just because I love him so. He doesn't know how many of my friends and acquaintances agree with me, and to point this out would only make him uncomfortable, so I don't. A dear friend, who was never going to be considered pretty, once told me that with the exception of my husband she just didn't trust good looking guys. In her experience they were never trustworthy, and they were seldom kind. I have not found that to be so, but I have always wondered how much of that was because at 23 I was pretty, and she was not, and that lead to us receiving different reactions and treatment.

I don't envy gorgeous people. I tend to think that what they get in terms of nice treatment and admiring looks is not worth the massive bill due upon aging, and at the price of discovering late in life that some people only value them for something transitory that has little to do with who they really are.

[holdouttrout]

she just didn't trust good looking guys. In her experience they were never trustworthy, and they were seldom kind.

I don't know how much of this stems purely from good-looking guys in high school being utterly awful to me because I wasn't pretty, but I have this same issue. I had a couple of guys who used to flirt with me, and I never could decide if they were serious or if they were making fun of me. After all, I was always the large, awkward girl who dressed in old lady clothes. Probably, looking back, at least one of them was genuinely flirting, but it was hard to take it seriously when other guys used me as the butt of their jokes and/or ignored me completely.

[thothmes]

Yeah, high school kids are not far enough removed from middle school to rid themselves of the meanness. I have my own high school scars, and it took me well into my fourth decade to understand that when I enter a social function, the vast majority of the people present would like to see me succeed, because watching me fail would be painful. I think those of us who were not the popular kids in high school (I was shy, plump, and smarter than most of the others, all cardinal sins) all remember all too well the people for whom that would be delightful entertainment, many of them gifted with beauty and athleticism.

I've also learned to hide my intelligence better so it makes fewer people uncomfortable. I have more feathers to my bow now, so it is no longer my only distinguishing asset. Back then I viewed it as the one thing I could take pride in. Now I understand that there is no particular honor in taking pride in something that was God-given, like a particularly striking eye color, or extremely good balance. These things are all transitory, and not who we really are. I'd still be me and of value after a horrific head injury. In high school I discounted the love in my heart and will to do right, because they were common enough things, and not valued much by my peers. Fortunately we've all grown up, or tried to...

One of the highlights of senior year for me was when I took my opportunity to push one of the football co-captains, a bully who had tormented me for sport since fourth grade, face-first into the water fountain without him being able to figure out who did it. He was literally the son of a Mafia Made Man, who controlled all of the numbers racket and the flow of certain drugs in the county, so there was actually some risk. But, damn! that felt good. And me one of the turn-the-other-cheek types too!

I think that one of the most valuable things I've learned in life is that the things that separate us from both the angels and demons that walk among us are surprisingly slight, and that judging from without is seldom fair or fruitful. I guess it all comes down to the fact that all we truly own is our own souls, and that the only thing we truly control is our own actions. People that understand and practice that and chose to act on the side of the angels are the good guys, and cannot be distinguished from without, but only through extended observation.

Yet who among us can say that they have not assumed that someone is cool/nice/an object of high regard largely based on looks alone? Hollywood could not survive without it.

[bulky-monster.livejournal.com]

I tend to think more about the assumptions people make. I'm quite sleepy now, so it's tough to elaborate, but I think that others assume you're not as interesting, as "together" or as sexual if you're not beautiful. Or that if you're "cute" you must be a certain kind of person as opposed to someone who's beautiful.

People tend to give a lot more leeway to beautiful women. And men.

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Right. There are, in fact, different kinds of beauty, and they all seem to come with assumptions. Most of which are really just a shortcut for people to categorize the people they meet.

[ziparumpazoo]

Beauty standards are a societal construct, changing with location. When I was in Italy I got whislted and flirted with quite a bit, while back home, not two weeks later I was ignored or being called 'sir'. Same clothes, same hairstyle, the only thing that changed was the country I was in. I'd be interested in how you're defining beauty here?

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

I specifically didn't define beauty, because different people/cultures define it differently, and because I didn't really want to list all my physical characteristics... but I meant a US-centric, contemporary standard, as that's where I grew up/live.

I'm also not sure it's a simple matter of describing a specific set of criteria for being beautiful, because there are many different kinds of beautiful, even in the US. (Pretty much all beautiful people are thin, but even that has its (rare) exceptions.)

When I went to Spain, we all got a talk about how Spanish men would whistle at us, and we shouldn't be worried about it. I *might* have gotten one whistle, while other girls talked about how they felt harassed all the time. (Not that I wanted to be whistled at, but it did make it pretty clear that I didn't meet a Spanish or American standard of beauty, since many of my friends who were whistled at didn't look Spanish in the least.)

Anyway, I don't know if that really answers your question.

[ziparumpazoo]

It does. I just wanted a bit more context for your lists so I wasn't wandering off by myself in the woods. :)

I keep coming back to this post because I was at the mall last night, which is probably my least favorite place to shop, but that's where the back-to-school stuff was. Anyhow, I figured that since we were there and I need some new clothes for work, I'd take a look around. I'd have to say that shopping for clothes, especially at the mall, is probably the only time where somebody else can make me feel ugly. I'm pretty average in looks; I blend into the scenery fairly well, but I'm comfortable with it. Shopping at the mall for something as simple as a pair of jeans nearly has me in tears. I'm too tall, hips too wide, wrong shaped... all around just not the right fit for any of the clothes there. And then I get to wondering why I'm thinking that I'm the one who's inadequate for the clothes, and not the clothes who aren't serving me? So I went to two other stores, who happen to sell the *exact* same brands, in the same sizes, and realized, hey, maybe it's not me at all? Maybe it's the corporations designing and ordering the clothes who are thinking about their bottom line and the economies of manufacturing only a certain range of sizes and styles that happen to roughly fit the most common segment of the population? How much do they save by standardizing (which is a very common manufacturing process)?

And yet, we the consumer are left feeling like, well sure these jeans don't quite fit, but I'll buy them anyhow and I'll try to lose those extra five or ten pounds and for sure I'll look great? The company has made money off us regardless! So here we have these corporations basically telling us that if we don't fit their clothes, there must be something wrong with us, and it's up to us to change and work to fit them and wear the *popular* brands so we look beautiful. We let them dictate what we think of as beautiful.

I don't know if this is as prevalent in other cultures, or more of a North American thing? It just feels like the individual is no longer deciding what is beautiful because the corporations (and the media which propagate the message) are already telling them what is and what isn't. Which I guess, speaks to whether or not a person needs to spend more money to be beautiful?

Sorry for the rambly. I'm going to try on my new potato sacks now. ;)

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

*nods* there was a period of a couple of years when everything I tried on fit, and it was fabulous. (I am the same size now as I was then.) Now, I go into the stores and it's all WRONG. I can't find anything!

It's been very hard to hold onto the idea that it's not my fault the clothes (in my size) don't fit me--they are simply made for someone with smaller breasts. ;-)

[shutthef-up.livejournal.com]

I love your thoughts on beauty.

I'd love to expand on those thoughts with some of my own, but I've been cramming math into my brain for the last 3 days, and it's fried. I'm really pleased with my progress, but it's taken a toll.

Love your thinky thoughts!

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Hee! I'm glad you're getting the math crammed in there! *g* Love to hear your thoughts if you have room for them later.

[rowan-d.livejournal.com]

Okay, I started replying to this, and then I started rambling endlessly, so it finally became my own post.:D

So, your reply is here. LOL Great topic!