(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.