If I were very beautiful, would I get more or less of what I wanted in my life? Would people listen to what I said or not, take me more or less seriously? Would I have more or fewer friends?
I feel invisible most of the time. “Invisible” often means “asexual” which often means “unfeminine” which often means “un-pretty.” I often wonder if being an old lady will be easier for me than for very very beautiful people, because I will be sort of…used to it.
What’s the difference between feeling beautiful and looking beautiful? I often feel fabulous and gorgeous when I probably don’t look that good: laughing and dancing come to mind. I don’t think the reverse has ever happened to me: looking good while feeling awful.
Some things that some people think make a woman beautiful I find really annoying or difficult or time-consuming to do: wax any part of my body, be thin, keep a manicure, blow-dry my hair, wear makeup, wear high heels, get a tattoo (although I still secretly want one), dye my hair (even though I think about it all the time) or indeed, even get it cut more than once every three months.
Some things that some people think make a woman beautiful I find really fun and easy and enjoyable: get massage and facials, paint my toenails, wear tight shirts, carry a cool purse, do face masks, wear earrings and necklaces, put product in my hair to make it extra curly, constantly reapply alluringly peppermint-scented lip balm.
The last time I felt really stunning, looks-wise, was probably at my friend Angela’s wedding back in May, in Seattle. I wore a deep pink dress my mom had bought me for Christmas and that one of the many excellent Amys in my life altered for me so as to make it even more awesome. I bought a bag and shoes and earrings and a necklace to go with it and spent a long time in front of the mirror getting ready and looking at myself and hoping that the person who was the inspiration for all this hotness would see me and rue the day. He didn’t, but I still felt really pretty.
I love the bathroom in this flat because, for some reason, I feel like I look really good in its mirror. I’ve often wished I looked as good in pictures as when I’m staggering to the shower in the morning and I catch a glimpse of myself out of the corner of my eye and think, Hey, I look pretty good!
I am not sure if any of the guys I’ve dated have found me physically attractive. I have always sort of assumed that they liked my personality and just put up with my looks until they decided to dump me. Wow. I hate that I just wrote that sentence. I promise I won’t ever say it aloud. (I also promise that I will work on dating guys who are a little more awesome.)
I tell people they’re hot all the time because I really do think they’re hot. I think that everyone I know is hot, literally everyone. Especially the women I hang out with; I can’t think of a single one who is other than stunning. Some of these friends sometimes tell me they think I’m hot too, and it’s all I can do to swallow down the NO I’M NOT YOU’RE JUST SAYING THAT HAVE YOU SEEN THE SIZE OF MY ASS and just say thank you. I wonder why I can believe that all my friends are really beautiful and not simultaneously believe that they think the same about me. I mean, why would they lie?
I feel really drawn to physical beauty but feel sort of shallow for wanting any myself.
Does physical beauty serve any sort of purpose?
I think very smooth glowing skin, interesting tattoos, excellent dance abilities, long eyelashes, well-defined shoulders, expressive lips, cool hair, big freaky smiles, sarcastic eyebrows, delicate hands, crazy inappropriate laughs, pugnacious butts, and high cheekbones are very beautiful.
I tend to be attracted to tall thin men and to short curvy women, although I can think of short curvy men (Jack Black) and tall thin women (Shane from The L Word) that sort of break that mode.
I know that the beauty standards we’re supposed to live up to are unrealistic and false and everything else: even the models and celebrities don’t really look the way they do in magazines and on TV and in the movies. I know this, and I try to celebrate deviations from that not-really-a-norm—but still. I was in Glassons today getting a headband for this eighties’ party I’m going to this weekend and there was this video for some singer whose name was Cheyenne, I think, and she was just amazingly, heart-stoppingly lovely in that sort of boho-long-blond-hair-jeans-and-a-tank-top way, and she was playing the guitar in the video and I immediately thought “What are the chances of her being gorgeous and thin and being able to play the guitar?” And I got really mad and felt bad for a little while, for not being thin and gorgeous and able to play the guitar. And then I wondered why I was actually angry at someone on a screen in Glassons. And somehow I think that has to do with those standards I mentioned at the top of this paragraph, but hell if I can figure out how.
I will often be attracted to someone I meet pretty quickly—I always think of it as recognition, somehow, like, “Oh, right. Hi. You’re the person I’m going to fall for. I’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” Often I will start off thinking that the person is kind of nice to look at or whatever, but by the time I’ve gotten to know him a little more and am knee-deep in the crush, I will be convinced that other people are blind not to see this person’s beauty as clearly (and often inconveniently) as I see it. I notice that the people I love get more luscious the more I love them.
I’m interested in the kind of beauty that is fairly unselfconscious, you know, like the person brushes her hair in the morning or wear his best pair of retro sneakers if he’s going out for a big night but is not obsessed with how hot he or she is. However! I was just thinking of a couple of other beautiful people I know who spend a lot of time on their appearance and how they’re pretty compelling too. With them, it doesn’t seem like they’re trying too hard or being arrogant about it: they just like looking pretty and are interested in stuff like fashion and makeup and product. This seems really different from people who are very beautiful to look at but are kind of assholes about it, like they sort of know they’re hot and do everything they can to make sure you know it too…and that you are not as good as they are because you’re not as good-looking. I hate those kind of hot people.
What are the benefits of not being beautiful?
I wonder if I’ll ever stop thinking about this kind of stuff.
Comments
21 responses to “Thoughts About Beauty”
I feel invisible most of the time. “Invisible†often means “asexual†which often means “unfeminine†which often means “un-pretty.â€
You just wrote my life.
You are beautiful.
Sometimes I wonder, about myself and other people I know who suffer from these sorts of afflictions, just what it would take to convince us of our own attractiveness. Almost any form of evidence that might threaten to loosen a few bolts at the foundation of this edifice of “I’m not hot”-ness comes with its own built-in Plausible Deniability. Friends or lovers who tell us otherwise clearly cannot be trusted since their objectivity is tainted by emotional attachment. And strangers! Well, let’s not even get started on them. Probably they just didn’t get a close enough look, or have some weird ulterior motive for expressing interest. Even the seemingly unimpugnable hotornot.com cannot be relied upon, as you probably just chose an unrealistically flattering picture to upload.
As you were saying, I know that I have a lot of genuine affection for the bodies of the people who are my friends. Why is it so impossible to believe that the situation might be reversed too?
Sometimes I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, studiously examining my pores or my slightly skewed nose, and I wonder if, in fact, I don’t have some deep investment in the idea of not being hot. Could it be that I have arranged things in my head so that there is nothing, literally nothing, that could possibly change my views on this matter? Perhaps I take some secret pleasure in not being one of those people. You know, the sort of person whose smug satisfaction in their body is all too evident.
You really are hot. Defintely on my Top 10 Hot People list. And I will be the first to say that not all of my friends are hot (like apparently yours are). To me, hot is like beautiful, but with an extra bit of fire/electricity added, which you exude from your pores.
I remember the first time I met you I was really intimidated because you were so overwhelmingly electric.
Seema, I suggest that you follow my strategy of only making friends with hot people.
May I remind you that I live in PITTSBURGH!!!
I’m going to pretend you never wrote this, because you are beautiful and so am I. I wish we never had to question that to ourselves. Love!
but.. if i say you’re hot you won’t believe me. but if i don’t say you’re hot i’m lying.
i once wrote a college entrence essay about a life changing moment “the day i learned i was beautiful” it was a story about how i tortured some kid in 1st grade that chased me around the playground and gave me a wooden tulip to express his deepest affection. you know, the kitchy kind of wooden thing that you see as home decor of staged kitchey pictures. so yeah, thats what my looks inspire..
so, i haven’t seen you in person all that much, but i don’t think i ever thought of you as anything but hot. admittedly i haven’t spent nearly as much time staring at your ass as you have, but i’ll have to remedy that in the future. :P
Girl, you’ve always frustrated me because you are a rare person who can see *all kinds* of beauty and attractiveness and hotness in other people, and yet you have so much trouble seeing it in yourself. You find beauty outside of what society says we are “supposed” to find beautiful… and miss it in yourself.
But at the same time, I understand, I do. When Sean tells me he’s attracted to me because I’m smart or because I’m funny or because I’m strong or because I’m drama-free, I can buy all that and say “yes, yes I am all those things.” But in an intimate moment when he says I’m sexy or he touches my belly or my thighs or some other part of me that I don’t like and says how much he likes to do that, I wonder why on earth he would enjoy that so much. When he talks about his “hot girlfriend” I find it hard to believe he’s referring to me. So yeah, I get it. I wish there were an easy way to get over ourselves, but I guess the only thing I can say is celebrate those moments that you feel gorgeous, and try to ignore those moments that you don’t (for me it’s often seeing a photo of myself and thinking “ugh, I looked awful at that moment.”) Eventually, maybe, the fabulous moments will overshadow the less-than-fabulous.
Sadly, it doesn’t matter that the whole world knows that you’re amazingly beautiful. You won’t really believe it until you see it for yourself.
Ok – so my sister is a runway model in NY. And I didn’t believe I was beautiful until I actually said outloud to the person who was telling me how beautiful, “You’re just saying that because you haven’t seen my sister.” and he took great pains to set me straight. Simultaneously, my best friend clued me in that my body looks differently from my sisters and I will never feel beautiful trying to look like them. And them my mom was getting frustrated cause my fashion model sister was convinced she was ugly. And somehow, all of this within a week got through to me that I’m beautiful and now I *know* it. I don’t know how to help you get the splinter out of your eye but you are one of the most beautiful people I know and I aspire to be as beautiful as you are. Like Seema I was intimidated by your beauty. Perhaps unlike Seema, I still am. So…
On the other hand, I know that our beliefs determine our world. I know that no matter how much I dieted I always saw myself as aprrox 250 pounds overweight and even when my body couldn’t help but be a size 8 because of all the good stuff I was giving it, I still had the stubborn persistent roll of fat that refused to go away. I knew if I exercised, it would dissapear and in fact when I was forced to exercise (when Andrew and I were in CR for a month and it was either spend 40 min walking up and down hills or stay home alone – so I chose to walk 4-6x per day) I made sure that I ate a double scoop of chocolate icecream at least 2x a day and also an entire bag of cookies all by myself at least 3x a week so that I didn’t lose any weight at all! And then 2 weeks ago I was invited to a workshop to work on transparent beliefs and I’ll be darned if I didn’t discover that one of my transparent beliefs was that skinny people were shallow and the only way to have a hot body was to spend all your time and energy thinking about it to the exclusion of all else! Naturally I don’t want to be shallow so my unconcious mind couldn’t let be have nicely toned muscles and a trim waist. Well now that we unearthed that unsupportive filter, I am no longer opposed to exercise on general principle and IN FACT, I have actually *lost* *weight* in the past 2 weeks, though I haven’t yet managed to get around to exercising. See how hard my unconsious mind was having to work to create a physical body that matched my perception of being overweight???? I don’t know if this is helpful/interesting/whatever – but I had to share.
Girl, you need to read The Good Body by Eve Ensler, if you haven’t already. I think it will really resonate with you, and the message is so powerful. I’ve performed this piece so many times at retreats, and every time it makes me seriously cry. Please, check it out! And I love you Chiara… All my friends are hot too, and you wouldn’t be my instant fiance if you weren’t in that seriously hot category yourself.
From The Good Body:
“When I was a little girl people used to ask me, What do you want to be when you grow up? Good, I would say. I want to be good. Becoming good was harder than becoming a doctor or an astronaut or a lifeguard. There are tests to pass to become those things– you have to learn dissection or conquer gravity or practice treading water. Becoming good was not like that. It was abstract. It felt completely out of reach. It became the only think that mattered to me. If I could be good, everything would be all right. I would fit in. I would be popular. I would skip death and go straight to heaven. If you asked me now what this means, to be good, I still don’t know exactly. When I was growing up in the fifties, “good” was simply what girls were supposed to be. They were good. They were pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist cinchers and pumps. They got married. They looked married. They waited to be given permission. They kept their legs together, even during sex.
In recent years, good girls join the Army. They climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym. They accessorize. They wear pointy, painful shoes. They wear lipstick if they’re lesbians; they wear lipstick if they’re not. They don’t eat too much. They don’t eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin.
I could never be good. This feeling of badness lives in every part of my being. Call it anxiety or despair. Call it guilt or shame. It occupies me everywhere. The older, seemingly clearer and wiser I get, the more devious, globalized, and terrorist the badness becomes. I think for many of us –well for most of us– well maybe for all of us– there is one particular part of our body where the badness manifests itself, our thighs, our butt, our breasts, our hair, our nose, our little toe. You know what I’m talking about? It doesn’t matter where I’ve been in the world, whether it’s Tehran where women are– smashing and remodeling their noses to look less Iranian, or in Beijing where they are breaking their legs and adding bone to be taller, or in Dallas where they are surgically whittling their feet in order to fit into Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos. Everywhere, the women I meet generally hate one particular part of their bodies. They spend most of their lives fixing it, shrinking it. They have medicine cabinets with products devoted to transforming it. They have closets full of clothes that cover or enhance it. It’s as if they’ve been given their own little country called their body, which they get to tyrannize, clean up, or control while they lose all sight of the world.
What I can’t believe is that someone like me, a radical feminist for nearly thirty years, could spend this much time thinking about my stomach. It has become my tormentor, my distractor; it’s my most serious committed relationship. It has protruded through my clothes, my confidence, and my ability to work. I’ve tried to sedate it, educated it, embrace it, and most of all, erase it.”
“I notice that the people I love get more luscious the more I love them.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen you write a sentence with more truth in it. I’m married to The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, and I sometimes have a hard time convincing her of it. She sometimes gets caught up in the same kind of issues you’re writing about here. She doesn’t see that she’s beautiful the same way that I do.
That’s tough to deal with some days. I want her to believe me when I tell her that she is, in fact, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, but some days she doesn’t buy it. And that’s hard, because I really do mean it.
You just have to trust us when we tell you that you’re beautiful, because you are. We aren’t humoring you to make you feel better. Really, we mean it. And we want you to believe us, too. Some days, we’re perplexed when you don’t.
Yeah. I live in two worlds.
In one, I’m a doer and a feeler. In this world I dance around, all by myself, with my eyes closed, and my body is a miracle because it has all these sensations and all these abilities.
In the other, I have an appearance, and it’s not the right one.
But I guess it’s not always that way.
Since I’ve started art modeling, actually, I’ve become more at ease with the way I look.
And once, my friend Gillian said to me, in her thick Liverpool accent, “Yer a fuckin’ goddess, so fuckin’ *know* it.”
I believed it.
Coming from a not-beautiful-but-feels-certifiably-gorgeous-even-if-it’s-unjustified person, if that made any sense, the benefit of not being physically beautiful (or indeed, not *wanting* to be physically beautiful) is that you don’t have to be beautiful!
And you know that when somebody says you’re beautiful, they mean it… it’s somehow more personal, because *you* are beautiful to *them* by their standards, not those set by a faceless society or magazine editor. You also know that they will continue to think you are beautiful even as you get older and wrinklier. :)
There is cold beauty (purely physical, the beauty of statues and photos) or warm beauty (the beauty of people and life!).
Chiara, everything about you – your thoughts, your physical appearance, the wonderful friends you make – *everything* says ‘life’ and ‘love’… What could be more beautiful?
I find beauty really weird too. I wrote about it today. I don’t think I’m as pretty as I COULD be, if I lost weight and waxed my eyebrows properly instead of just half-heartedly plucking them so they’re all kinda regrowthy and weird, but then again, I LIKE the looks stuff. I like the fact that I spend time on my hair (although I haven’t washed it in 10 days, I’m not kidding, so maybe not so much right now). I was a beautiful kid, I was a model, but I was REALLY awkward and ugly in high school, and now I’m a weird inbetween…I don’t think I’m hideous exactly, in fact the only thing I really worry about appearance-wise is my weight. But then again I’m VERY self-conscious. It doesn’t make much sense. I guess I’m glad I look the way I do, I wouldn’t want to look like anyone else. I’m glad that no matter how much I diet, I will be thin but still curvy. I like having blonde hair even though my natural hair is dark brown and I like that I can change that. I just do whatever I feel like, I guess, and I like that I’m my kind of pretty and not anyone elses kind of pretty.
Everyone has their own kind of pretty I guess, and I get sick of seeing people who all look the same. I think you are hot btw. There goes me hijacking your website to talk about myself!
Oh, and btw I was talking about this with a friend who has really bad image problems. She was saying how she doesn’t want to go out because she doesn’t see how anyone could ever find her attractive, her other friends actually TELL HER to lose weight in order to get a guy. I mean, this girl is a NORMAL WEIGHT. Way thinner than me. Anyway, I said she must believe shes pretty somewhere inside or she wouldn’t even bother trying. I just feel bad that everyone keeps telling her she needs to change in order to be pretty. Gah. The guys who she knows are the assholes who care about that stuff. The sweet guys who are worth it don’t want that, because they don’t care about that stuff. They’re probably intimidated by her looks so they don’t talk to her! Thats how I see it anyway. It drives me mad that anyone feels they have to look a CERTAIN way. I mean, I may want to change my body, but I don’t REALLY want to change it, you know? I only want to change it to how it should be, which is healhy. If I change it any other way, its going to be because I want to, not because anyone thinks I should.
Gah, here I go again. Sorry! As insecure as I am, I’m kind of not as well. Its weird.
Yes, yes and yes. I never could have said it so well, but you’ve captured my feelings.
I think very smooth glowing skin, interesting tattoos, excellent dance abilities, long eyelashes, well-defined shoulders, expressive lips, cool hair, big freaky smiles, sarcastic eyebrows, delicate hands, crazy inappropriate laughs, pugnacious butts, and high cheekbones are very beautiful.
I would swear you were talking about me, but you left out the big nose, the overbite, and the ginormous feet.
Scott and I were talking about this just the other day. He wondered whether I had ever internalized the fact that I am sexy. Sexy, I get. And sometimes I feel gorgeous. But seldom beautiful, and never pretty. That seems reserved for girls, specifically those with perfect skin and perfect noses and perfect hair.
Beautiful is different though. It’s for people who are interesting, and curious, and adventurous, and fun. It’s beyond skin deep. It’s beyond skin. And yet, why, when I try to apply this to myself does it become so perfectly superficial?
Chiara,
I’ve often wished I looked as good in pictures as when I’m staggering to the shower in the morning and I catch a glimpse of myself out of the corner of my eye and think, Hey, I look pretty good!
A mirror and a photograph present completely different perspectives. A normal photograph negative is printed as others see you, but when you turn the negative around, the picture printed is as you see yourself!
Cheers,
Al “d-x survivor” P
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