Three separate blogging discussions today on attractiveness and body image, three that want to own me, two that want to stone me, and one says she’s a friend of mine. I jest, somebody get these darn ear worms out of my brain.
Anyway, the fems are very much into how it isn’t fair that attractive people have advantages. The entire world must change their “irrational biases” and stop making unattractive people feel bad. All of us must change our “ingrained social conditioning” and start valuing people who show up to job interviews with uncombed hair wearing bunny slippers.
Also, people should be deeply shamed for having any recognition of attractiveness whatsoever. What does it mean to be attractive? “Pleasing or appealing to the senses.” Most importantly, to your own senses! People who feel good about themselves are attractive. People in good health who feel good about themselves are even more attractive. People who feel good about themselves, are in good health, and actually comb their hair and get dressed are exceedingly attractive!
Sorry, my irritation is getting the best of me. I really dislike these discussions because what is presented as a virtue is actually a vice. On the surface it appears as if demanding equality for the unattractive is kind and beneficial for all of humankind, but actually it is very shaming. First we must shame the unattractive and make sure they know they are being discriminated against, then we must shame anyone who might chose to hire or date the person who bothered to put on a clean shirt and comb their hair that day, and then we must shame anyone who is attractive and therefore allegedly oppressing others, abusing their attractiveness privilege.
What we really do however, is to shame all women, and that is something that really begins to tick me off. Men don’t do this, women do this to one another, and feminists, and those who seek what they call “equality.” Young girls get the idea that it is somehow shameful to desire attention and grown women get the idea that it is somehow shameful to love yourself. It is just piling more toxic shame upon more toxic shame, until in the end no woman can feel good about herself, ever. Now we are just in a state of constant misery, never good enough, or if we are good enough, ashamed of being good enough and therefore creating feelbad for others.
Girls, women, from about 6 to 96, feel good about being attractive, making themselves pretty, being delighted in. That is human nature, that is female nature, wanting to be pleasing or appealing to the senses. There is nothing wrong with that! Being rewarded by others for your efforts is also just the nature of human beings. It runs totally counter to biology to suddenly demand that people must now alter what they perceive as “pleasing or appealing to the senses.” It is not rational or fair to suddenly demand that everyone must now either cover their eyes or change what they perceive as attractive. That’s just crazy.
So yes, the more attractive we can make ourselves, the more successful we will feel. Somebody I rather admire said, “you don’t need to feel beautiful to be beautiful.” Yes you do. What is on the inside is often reflected on the outside. That is where our body image issues are often deeply rooted, we can be potentially attractive and yet never feel it, feel so down and out and unhappy and miserable about ourselves, that we can’t even see the truth anymore. We hate everything we see, the physical all becomes a manifestation of what’s really going on inside.
So what happens when we tell women it isn’t okay to place any value on our own appearance? We go against basic female biology and we teach young girls that there is something shameful about the very nature of women. When we praise girls exclusively for their brains or their talents, we are in fact sending the message that we disapprove of who they really are as girls.
Fathers can do a great deal to help prevent this by making sure they remember to tell their daughters they are beautiful. Girls are whole beings, mind, body and spirit.
Paul said:
Awww, IB if every woman on Earth spent the same amount of time dedicated to looking pretty, there would be a continuum from drop dead gorgeous to double bag ugly. How is that fair? Personally I look for kindness and faith and when I see them I see beauty – and honest to God the physical features no longer have any attraction. I will find the faithful and kind (and smart) very attractive.
LikeLiked by 1 person
insanitybytes22 said:
LOL! How charming, Paul. I bet you would 😉
Actually attractiveness is not on a continuum, it doesn’t grade on a curve, it isn’t based on scarcity. 100 women feeling attractive are simply 100 attractive women enjoying themselves. It is only when attractiveness gets perceived as scarcity and therefore competitiveness that problems start.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Paul said:
Ahhhh, actually IB, beauty IS based on scarcity. A woman’s perceived beauty (when men are polled) increases as the population of women decreases. I’ve actually seen articles on this but it was many decades ago when I studied psychology. If there is lone woman being vied for by many men – that woman is perceived by those men as equally beautiful regardless of her “rank” in regular life.
LikeLiked by 1 person
insanitybytes22 said:
Ha! That’s really a great point, Paul, but that is a totally male dominated perception of beauty, almost economic in it’s supply and demand rules. When something is rare, it becomes worth more, perceived as more desirable. That makes perfect sense in a biological context, but in truth beauty is really abundant, infinite, and not exclusively defined by perceived desirability.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Fromscratchmom said:
It’s funny that you said that, Paul. And I’m glad you did. It actually makes me feel a lot better about what my soon-to-be-ex has done to my self esteem. He works with over a thousand women, many of whom had been coming on to him for years… It’s been 18 years of marriage but a lot more in the last ten years, years after he got this job, of the hundreds of jibes and clues to try to steal my joy by deepening my issues with body-image and wounding my ability to feel pretty or feel desirable.
I don’t think my husband ever cared to understand the things I said about it being his job as a dad to validate our girls, but I’ve certainly told them and reinforced for them over and over that they are beautiful on the outside and also where it counts matters the most on the inside!
LikeLiked by 3 people
amommasview said:
Couldn’t agree more. It’s one thing to lead by example as a Mom but it’s also important that the girls are taught the right things by their Dad…
LikeLiked by 1 person
insanitybytes22 said:
Isn’t that the truth? Moms can tell their daughters things, but they tend to just see us as moms, we “have to” say those things.
LikeLiked by 1 person
amommasview said:
Definitely…
LikeLike
emilyy96 said:
Another lovely article 🙂
I think it’s a fine line though. Some radical feminists criticize beauty and making yourself look pretty, and that’s ridiculous. It’s usually motivated by jealousy, not a positive desire to help women. Others take the body positive thing to far and tell obese women they are attractive, when really it doesn’t matter if they are attractive or not, they are unhealthy and need to change.
Thats bad… but, other feminists actually try to help young girls cope with the insane expectations from them. We have photoshopped models looking like angels, and extremely attractive women plastered everywhere as if to tell you, ‘hey, you are not nearly as beautiful as her, but you CAN be if you use this product!’ And then you use that product and it turns out to be nonsense, because the model is actually photoshopped and you CANT look like that. But little girls (and many grown women) dont know that and they end up being depressed and doing harmful things to their body in the quest to be as good looking as possible. I mean… I starved myself when I was 18 cause I wanted a thigh gap like all the IG models.
So yeah, feminists who fight that are doing the right thing. There is a middle ground between a society that discourages beauty and one that idolizes it. But as always there doesn’t seem to be many people on the middle ground.
LikeLiked by 3 people
DebbieLynne said:
I have a similar comment to Emily’s. I know a physically beautiful young lady who’s obsessed with her appearance. She can’t walk past a mirror without preening herself. Little does she know that “beauty is vain and charm is deceitful, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised” (Proverbs 31:30).
Personally, I think people who focus on outward appearance are the most unattractive type of people. I’m no feminist. but I grieve over the emphasis on outward appearance.
Full disclosure: I’m 62, and was born with Cerebral Palsy. Whatever good looks I may have had are long gone! But my husband thinks I’m beautiful because I love and fear the Lord Jesus Christ.
LikeLiked by 2 people
insanitybytes22 said:
You betcha! The beauty of our souls is a real thing, perhaps the only thing that really matters. It’s interesting, you can really see it on the internet. There are lots of beautiful souls out there and their hearts are revealed in their words.
LikeLiked by 1 person
emilyy96 said:
Wow Debbie, I love hearing stories like yours! ❤
The beauty of the soul is forever. Beauty of the flesh lasts less than a second and is worth nothing in comparison. I'm trying to be less vain and materialistic and dedicating my life to the Lord Jesus Christ, and my life is just getting better and better as a result.
And I agree with Insanity. On the internet you can really see the beautiful souls (as well as the black ones.)
Happy Easter!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Malcolm Greenhill said:
All sexual identity is culturally determined so if we change the culture men will not look upon women as objects of desire and women will not want to be desired 🙂 🙂 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Eric said:
Reading some of the idiotic comments here makes me wish that people could actually live in a society where beauty doesn’t exist and nobody has any aspirations to it; and/or ‘we change the culture so there are no objects of desire.’
Understand, Dunces: that is what the Culture looked like when men were still apes. Monkeys even today copulate whenever they’re in heat: appearance, gender, species doesn’t matter in a choice of a ‘sexual partner’ for them either.
Appearance becomes important when people become ummm…you know, civilized. The uniqueness and value of the individual causes them to express this uniqueness and individuality. But today we can’t have people trying to be unique or improving themselves in any way.
LikeLiked by 1 person
superslaviswife said:
We’re not really designed to see the same beauty in everything. When you see that everything is beautiful, you learn that it is for different reasons. A woman who appears to be very ill looks uglier because we value her sexually and determine she is an asexual entity, one that cannot or should not breed. But other asexual entities (children, animals, plants, rocks) are deemed to be beautiful all the time. If someone is not geared towards eugenic reproduction and their sexuality is stripped from them socially, they can still be beautiful. Yet when we force sexuality back onto people who have no sexual opportunity we cast them as completely lacking beauty. Even the macabre is beautiful when you are happy to accep that it is not a matter of life or sex or light.
LikeLiked by 1 person
insanitybytes22 said:
Thanks, I appreciate your comment, well said. I don’t wish to disparage attraction through men’s eyes by any means, that is something that makes the world go round, but there is also a huge and vast wealth of things outside that context that are “pleasing to the senses,” perceived as beautiful, attractive, desirable.
LikeLiked by 1 person
superslaviswife said:
Absolutely. Sexual beauty, in men and women, is still beauty. But even then, we have our disagreements and contrasts between the sexes and individuals. All beauty is important.
LikeLiked by 1 person
silenceofmind said:
During Holy Communion at church as all the people go up to receive the Eucharist it always amazes me how really ugly most people are.
Of course the young people are all gorgeous or handsome depending on gender.
It’s amazing how age and wear burn us all down.
So the ugly young fems just need to know they are way ahead of their time.
And the old, ugly fems just need to realize that they are normal.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Fromscratchmom said:
There are different types of physical beauty, different aspects of physical beauty, different be holders with different eyes. And there are differing personalities and personal experiences effecting us all to perceive others differently than the next person perceives and to put different emphasis on it. Many really good women begin to see men as better looking after they begin to get to know them, think we’ll of them or become attracted to them for some other reason. Many men struggle with objectifying, not only women, but people in general…or for many of them they don’t struggle they just go with it as if anything that feels natural could never lead them astray or be a poor way to operate. The struggle for me is to see my own beauty and appreciate myself inside and out, despite the evils of this broken world trying to take that from me.
On a side note, I definitely think our culture is beyond the pale upside down and backwards and out of their collective minds about weight and body image issues. And even those with the kindest of intentions or the most concern for physical health and the least concern for beauty still make everyone else crazy about it and make people more and more and far more unhealthy. Women should strive to be healthy to the same extent men should. And there will always be a range across both sexes of those who put too much or too little emphasis on it and that should always be much more that individual’s own business than anyone else’s. Bodily exercise profiteth little. We know straight from the mind of God that it does profit but also that it’s not really a big deal or in other words not a hundredth part as important as the exercise addicts and worshippers make it out to be.
My own father was wildly obsessed about this issue and in some ways had good intentions but if not for his influence the health of at least three other people might never have been destroyed. I may never have been stupid enough to move further and further in the wrong direction health-wise nearly destroying myself with wrong ideas that are popularly believed to be good ideas like animal products being bad for humans, the tragic and pathetic calories in-calories-out model, etc etc. there are a million bad ideas out there and many of them are backed up by both popular opinion and “conventional science” with all its terribly flawed studies. Now I eat real food as it was created by God, from plants and animals being raised in ways that work with God’s design for the world … at least more similar to those ways than to the food production methods that have been tinkered around with by mankind, until they are unrecognizable, creating our factory food systems and our factory agricultural systems. And now with natural, non-toxic, nutrient dense foods as a major player in the effort, I am regaining my health…even after a 15-20 year downward spiral. If people would just think about how much they don’t want someone else telling them how to eat in whichever way bothers them the most to hear anyone say it or telling them which Doctor to trust or whether or not to consent to chemotherapy or whether or not to set up a living will…then they should be able to get a clue to get there mind off of every other human’s food, diet, exercise and body-image/health issues. Just back off and learn to subjecty humans so that you can have compassion and love for them; pray for them…and leave their bodies alone as their own to try to deal with.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Citizen Tom said:
Great post and an interesting discussion.
Since I have two daughters, I was a bit concerned about this. They are grown now. They have their own children.
Everyone should be concerned about their appearance, but some folks have very shallow views on these matters.
Some of the feminists want to say beauty does not matter. That’s as you said absurd.
Some people think women are suppose to dress like sluts. Madison Avenue and the entertainment industry seem to be the primary advocates for this view. They just want to make money by exploiting the weaknesses of our flesh. What advertisers and the “artists” want us to believe…., well, one of the best decisions I ever have made is throwing out the television when my eldest was only two years old. In hindsight I wish I could claim some special wisdom, but I just did it because my daughter wanted me to play with her and my wife was complaining about the sex and violence.
The is this parable that Jesus told. I was the judge. My child was a very young “widow” and my wife was beginning to feel like a
“widow.”
Like the judge, I made the right decision, but it was not for the best of reasons. To say the least, God is bit more dependable.
LikeLike
Pingback: My Picks Of The Week #15 | A Momma's View