(no subject)

[feotakahari]

I’m starting to legitimately believe that pretty people don’t exist. Pretty photos of people, sure. Pretty videos of people, sometimes. And if your idea of “pretty” means looking like a Barbie doll, I once met someone who could get there with enough makeup and hair products. But by nature, we’re each kinda fugly in our own unique and special way. 

(Beefy people do exist, but a lot of them use steroids.)

Comments

I should probably blog about this.

[flamingsword]

A few months ago I resolved to take human attractiveness out of the things I notice or think about. I want to not judge people based on how many spoons and dollars they have to spend to fit into a classist, racist ideal. And the cool thing about my brain is that I can do that.

Yay for things you learn from trauma, I guess.

I don't receive any value from feeling attraction to people; I don't feel like it's something I need to know about myself or other people; it's not useful information. It's an old heuristic from childhood that gets in the way of seeing people more than it tells me about them. So I'm just gonna dumpster it. See how that goes and reevaluate in another six months or so.

[discoursedrome]

Pretty people absolutely exist. What you're noticing is that much of our awareness of pretty people through people who are fulfilling a social function by looking pretty, and these people have their attractiveness exaggerated in order to facilitate that work, which in turn creates a warped notion of what "pretty" looks like among people who don't habitually surround themselves by unhacked beauty as part of their lifestyle (e.g. models and performers who see one another when they're not done up). You see the same sort of pattern with other virtues that are "celebritized" and made symbolic, like "genius" and "creativity". But pretty people absolutely do exist, and even if they don't naturally look like what you see on a movie screen, they do have a lot of the benefits (and drawbacks) of being pretty even before they put their kit on.

[feotakahari]

I guess the question then is where all those pretty people are. I met that one person in high school who was apparently a pretty person. She knew her appearance made people do things for her, and she was surprised when I wasn’t immediately helpful to her. But I’ve never met a pretty person on the subway, and there aren’t any pretty people at my job. I don’t recall any pretty retail workers. Where are they all hiding?

Come to think of it, maybe “pretty” is something high schoolers use on other high schoolers. Maybe part of becoming an adult is being more resistant to pretty, such that a pretty adult talking to adults can’t get away with the same things a pretty high schooler can get away with while talking to high schoolers.

Or maybe I lost my ability to recognize pretty after my immune system started trying to kill me. I suppose that’s the simple answer.

[discoursedrome]

I wonder if we disagree about terminology. I've definitely got a few pretty coworkers -- more generally, my coworkers span a pretty broad spectrum from "very unnattractive" to "very attractive" -- and while I haven't seen that many pretty people on subways, I'm reasonably sure I have seen a few who weren't very done-up otherwise? It's harder to judge when there's a wide mix of grooming, dress and makeup levels going on and you're supposed to be averting your eyes from people to begin with, admittedly.

In my experience, pretty people are drastically overrepresented in customer-facing retail, because it's actively sought-after. Like, I'd say that between half and three-quarters of front-facing retail workers are pretty.

[feotakahari]

I’ll be honest; what I was originally thinking of was all those novels about English professors who just can’t help cheating on their wives because their students are so incredibly pretty. “I’m helplessly wrapped around the finger of this manipulative pretty person” isn’t a thing I’ve really seen, even in high school.

[discoursedrome]

Ohhh, I see what you mean. Hmm.
My feeling is that the "wrapped around someone's finger" experience is about being infatuated -- what some people might call "in love" or "having a crush" -- and this is fairly correlated with prettiness, but not directly caused by it, because there are also elements of mannerisms and other visible qualities and what they think of you and so on and so forth. I think people can be good-looking enough to get more positive treatment from people in general, but that kind of dramatic effect isn't something you can activate reliably, I don't think. That said, being really good-looking definitely helps.