I’ve been ruminating over my own experiences as a pretty woman for some time now. On the one hand it has definitely benefited me in some ways. I understand that it can benefit me in larger ways that I don’t necessarily notice or know about because of the reaction our society has to attractive people. Here’s the thing, some days the positives probably do outweigh the negatives, but at 2 in the afternoon when I’m having to threaten to cut some guy on a bus to get him away from me and random bystanders are ready to victim blame because I had the nerve to wear shorts on a hot summer day it doesn’t feel like it.
I know street harassment (hell misogyny in general) knows no bounds and that women of all races and sizes deal with some version of it. I’m not trying to downplay anyone else’s experiences. I’m just focused on what I’ve noticed since I gained enough weight to move from a B cup to a D cup. I’m pretty in that way people are when they have symmetrical features, the genes for straight white teeth, and a socially accepted body type. Please note, I am not saying this is the only way to be attractive, it is simply the way in which I am attractive.
My decision to go natural, and put my hair into comb coils means that I now have longish hair with a minimum amount of effort. In the past when I was the aforementioned B cup and had a habit of wearing my hair short I’d run into harassment probably once or twice a week. Now? It’s pretty much daily. Some of it is definitely because I present as very feminine now (I have a grown up job that requires business casual attire and in the summer that means a lot of skirts because I hate long pants when the sun is trying to broil me alive) and that seems to make some men feel as though I’m dressing to attract their attention. Some of my harassers have gone so far as to claim that everything I do is to attract their attention. The other day I actually had a guy insist that I wouldn’t have sat in the same row as he did on the bus if I wasn’t interested. Apparently the concept of public transport eluded him. Then again so did the idea that he wasn’t entitled to my being receptive to his overtures so we went the standard misogynistic insult route when I didn’t play my part of his internal script.
And it’s not just street harassment (though I’m at a point where it feels like a one way forcefield would be a good look so I can traverse the city in relative comfort) I also find myself being taken for an airhead on sight. I’m having to prove my intelligence over and over again to people who should have a clue. Someone at my current job was so amazed that I knew anything about computers that he broke into a conversation another coworker and I were having to tell me of his shock and awe. Twice. I don’t have the fanciest job title in all the land, but I do employ a fair amount of critical thinking skills on a day to day basis. Granted the case could be made that his shock was down solely to race and gender, but I’ve got my doubts since his hands couldn’t stop making certain gestures while he was expressing that shock and awe.
Is this a “It’s not easy being pretty so you should feel tons of sympathy for my plight” post? No. Well, at least that’s not what I’m trying to convey. I’m just feeling like some of the people in this article who are both reaping the rewards and suffering from the side effects. It’s easy to talk about pretty privilege, but the reality is that (like a lot of other facets of life) being attractive is a double edged sword. Just as white privilege doesn’t remove the oppression of sexism, or male privilege doesn’t remove the oppression of racism, being pretty doesn’t do away with any of those oppressions. In fact it can heighten the incidence rate (at least that’s been my experience) and then any comments about why it is happening are met with derision. Because we as a society seem to think being pretty is a cure all, so there’s a huge focus on becoming attractive without any discussion of what happens when you are attractive. Misogyny is a hell of a drug in general, and it seems to get particularly potent when it can be justified by pointing at a woman’s appearance as being such that it attracts the male gaze so she deserves whatever happens to her. Fetishization of attractive POC lends a certain nasty edge to the racial component, and that’s before we start getting into the intersectionality of class with this topic. I know it’s a tricky area to discuss, but I want to start having the discussion any way. You in?
The Dark Side of Being Pretty -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman
I think that being hot is so valued, revered even, that people think that it must make up for all of life’s woes. That is plainly stupid and untrue, but it makes people resentful. I am very average looking, but I have seen so many pretty girls ripped into by someone who imagines they must have a charmed life to go with that nice face and they don’t deserve either. Men also treat beautiful women as public beauty objects, but they resent the power they imagine those women to have too. “They must have the world wrapped around their finger,” they think.
I know being attractive affords some serious privilege and I know personally the painful longing that a lot of women feel wishing they were more beautiful (though, I’m pretty sure even supermodels suffer from this to some degree), but that doesn’t excuse bad behavior.
I think the same thing about being famous. Most people dream of fame in one form or another, but think nothing about the reality of how difficult it is… because people like themselves make life difficult for famous people. They think because Kristen Stewart has everything they’ve ever wanted, they can make her life miserable if she steps into public space. And that it’s her fault for being an actor!
Everyone longs to be beautiful and famous, but no one is allowed to enjoy their fame and hottness in peace. And they have to deal with it silently, because no one gets targeted more than a charmed one who has the gall to complain about the treatment they receive. It’s so hypocritical and mean.
Never underestimate the power of sexual frustration to turn to rage. It’s just a nasty part of the human brain. When the hindbrain is screaming “WANT… but can’t have… BUT WANT… but can’t have” over and over again, the mind goes to some stupid and dark places, and the source of the desire too often ends up a scapegoat.
@karnythia
Personally, I’m all for your fashion choices, but I’d avoid complaining about the heat to your male coworkers who don’t have the luxury of those choices. On a hot and sunny day, long pants do, indeed, suck.
I am ‘lucky’ enough to be just a bit of the “straight teeth, socially acceptable body type” pretty, but I’m smart enough to know that once it starts wearing off I’ll have to be 1. much higher in the corporate food chain 2. wearing makeup 3. thinner (I have T&A but we all know what time does to them), if I want to continue advancing in my career. There’s a point in corporate hell where looks don’t matter as much, but they still matter, and I’m racing a long slow race against that.
And still getting harassed on the street for aforementioned T&A.
Yeah, looks suck, no matter if they’re “good” or “bad”.
ElleDee wrote:
When I was in my twenties, I ran the drama specialty in the teen division of a sleep away camp in upstate New York. Over the course of two summers, it happened that the girls in the drama unit were among the prettiest girls I had ever seen. More than a few of them talked to me about having this experience, but what was most painful for them was the fact that so few people were willing to believe that they were capable of feeling insecure or lonely or sad or rejected or whatever. The way one them put it to me: it wasn’t just that people seemed to think she derived her entire self-image and self-worth from being pretty; it was that people seemed to think the privilege that came with being pretty–this is my paraphrase of what she said–deprived her of the right to the full range of her emotional life.
I have never been pretty, and as a teenager I minded a lot. As I near my mid-forties, I can safely say it has been a bonus. I do a very masculine (i.e., 90%male) job, and being perceived as not so feminine has helped my colleagues to focus on my intellectual skills, and hence my career. I never got into trouble of unwanted attention – and still managed to find a husband whom I like very much (and who thinks I’m beautiful, possibly because we’re ethnically not very close and he finds my looks exotic).
I think it’s worth pointing out that it is sexism (and racism, etc…) that makes both being pretty and not being pretty problematic in different ways.
I was once a conventionally pretty young woman. However, I’m now older and fatter, and have become invisible to most of the world. Almost all of the time, this state (for me at least) is far preferable to being pretty. I’m respected in the field that I entered as an older & fatter person, and my non-made-up looks, wrinkles, and plain clothing haven’t prevented me from getting jobs…plus in 10 years of looking like this I’ve gone to the top of my payscale. I’d rather have done without any “pretty privilege” I may have had as a young woman. It limited me in university (too much attention as a pretty woman in a man’s field was too uncomfortable for me). I’d rather have just been plain, and been left alone to do my own thing.
For some people, compassion is a response that (nearly) any sentient being may feel toward any other. An individual, regardless of demographic category, may feel compassion for the circumstances of another individual, regardless of demographic category.
Yet when I feel compassion for someone whom I regard to be above me on a social hierarchy – especially if I feel envy for that person, or feel aggrieved that I don’t occupy a similar status – I feel cognitive dissonance. These feelings sap my feelings of righteous indignation — my oppositional, competitive us-vs.-them mode. I find it so much easier to regard such people as Others, not to focus on our common humanity.
Consequently I sense some people regard compassion as a feeling reserved exclusively for those whom they believe to be lower on the social hierarchy than themselves. This dynamic can manifest in a “pity Olympics” or a competition of “more oppressed than thou,” where people make a conspicuous display of their subordinated circumstances before making an appeal for compassion.
While I feel some understanding for this latter point of view, I really do not like it. Really.
With this background, I read this post describing problems that beautiful people encounter. And karnythia asks,
This provokes the following question in me: Why the hell not? Does karnythia think her beauty renders her unworthy of compassion? Or is she afraid that such a bold appeal would be mocked by those who place a value on hierarchy? Well, fight the dominant paradigm; screw the hierarchy-worshipers. Speak your truth, girl!
I love these personal accounts.
Yet may I humbly suggest that karnythia pulls her punch a bit? I sense karnythia’s argument really supports the idea that male privilege doesn’t remove the oppression of sexism, just as being pretty doesn’t do away with the oppression that comes from being pretty. There are both an up side and a down side — just as there are up and down sides to, say, being male.
In brief, I have a strong urge to “other” the people I envy. And ultimately I don’t find that urge helpful. I hope you can share that view as well.
Thanks for sharing this. Serendipitously, while pretty people generally have advantages in the workforce, a new study suggests that conventionally attractive women face discrimination when seeking archetypically male jobs.
I have no profound statement to make, just want to say that it stinks that you can’t even enjoy something as simple as feeling pretty and liking the way you look without people #$%@$ing it up for you.
Well said. Being conventionally pretty means you aren’t subject to certain kinds of patriarchal attacks, but it doesn’t mean you’re free of all of them. Or even most.
I think it’s a lot like being a mother, versus being childless. Patriarchy and sexism make both states problems (although this is sharply inflected by race and class). Being a mother seems to subject one to, by far, the lion’s share of the oppression–but there are ways in which childless women get the boot, too.
Whether you’re a pretty woman, a plain woman, or an ugly woman, the boot is there.
‘being pretty doesn’t do away with any of those oppressions. In fact it can heighten the incidence rate.’
No, I don’t agree.
Yes, it is good that you can post about your experiences. I have yet to see a post about what an unattractive/ugly person actually goes through. And this I feel has a lot to do with the humiliation that they will face if they discuss what has occurred to them.
Being ugly or unattractive does not stop the harassment in fact the abuse just escalates to a new and horrific level.
You will be told that the only sex you will get is rape (stranger rape – date rape) so you best appreciate it should it ever happen to you.
You will be informed and any violent assault or violence (accident etc) resulting in your death will be seen as a source of amusement to them.
Any interactions that you have with males will be interpreted as you chatting them up (this includes asking for directions etc).
Access to activities is fraught with accusations that you are just there to chase men.
All of these statements and actions are committed by men.
Some of my harassers have gone so far as to claim that everything I do is to attract their attention. The other day I actually had a guy insist that I wouldn’t have sat in the same row as he did on the bus if I wasn’t interested. Apparently the concept of public transport eluded him. Then again so did the idea that he wasn’t entitled to my being receptive to his overtures so we went the standard misogynistic insult route when I didn’t play my part of his internal script.
Tell me about it! As an unattractive women I have the same problem. I should be receptive to their sexual advances as I am a dog who is desperate even though they hold me in contempt. I am viewed as convenient there until something better comes along.
I’m having to prove my intelligence over and over again to people who should have a clue.
Yep! I have had this too. ‘You are ugly so you must be stupid.’ ‘I am amazed that someone as unattractive as you can achieve something like this.’
Because we as a society seem to think being pretty is a cure all, so there’s a huge focus on becoming attractive without any discussion of what happens when you are attractive.
The reason women would like to become pretty or attractive simply is resources. Better access to resources in general and also not having that feeling that society would rather see you dead.
A few years ago I took out the words ‘pretty, beautiful, ugly and plain’ out of my vocabulary to describe the physical appearance of another human being. It works wonders in changing the way I perceived the world.
I don’t consider myself “beautiful” yet I am constantly harassed on the streets. I’m not sure it has really anything to do with physical attractiveness though maybe the words used against you might be a little different. It’s worse when it gets dark when I’m walking past 9 pm. That’s the only difference.
When I was a young thing, I was prettier and it was about the same level but maybe more entitlement type “you should be smiling” or “I said hi to you, why don’t you say it back” kind of speech.
I think the people who exercise it, their contempt and hatred of women is so strong that they’ll find a way to nail you with it, regardless of whether they think you’re in their ideal of physical attractiveness.
A lot of it is words but some of it’s horn honking or just screaming nonsensical to make noise to startle a person kind of behavior.
You do get leery about it. Leery of cars driving slowly by, driving quickly by or parked ahead of where you walk with windows open. I guess I look leery because one time recently, had a motor cop pull up by me and ask me if I got bothered or harassed by people in a parked car I passed (which had actually broken down). But sometimes I do feel that I have to brace for it, expecting it even when it doesn’t happen.
Rebecca – nobody has suggested that being “unattractive” (the quotes are deliberate) means freedom from harassment. In fact, this was specifically disclaimed in the original post.
Beauty is always a double-edged sword. I’ve gone in and out of pretty privilege, and then back in again, just by gaining and then losing weight. Which just proves how narrow the standard is – I have the same face. In terms of men I think there’s no point on the pretty scale where women don’t get harrassed, it’s just that the particular form the harrassment takes changes. In terms of women is where it gets really tricky to talk about, because there’s a lot of hurt there between women, and a lot of distrust. So I read, say, Rebecca’s comment and get the urge to snap back initially, and then I stop and think about why she had the response she did, and it makes sense.
The single biggest impact of pretty privilege may well be it’s ability to drive a wedge between women, which is why the patriarchy is all for it’s continuance.
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‘In terms of women is where it gets really tricky to talk about, because there’s a lot of hurt there between women, and a lot of distrust’.
I am not sure if I agree with this either. Is there a lot of hurt between women? Just because Karnythia says something that I don’t agree with doesn’t mean I hate her. Her points are valid just as mine are. It just means that I see the situation from another point of view.
I think that it gets really tricky to talk about more cause it is never really taken seriously. The real hurt comes from the way men trivialise pretty much what is their abusive behaviour. Effectively what both Karnythis and I have described is objectification.
I don’t have a problem with attractive people, unattractive people, pretty people, ugly people whatever. What I do have a problem with is the abusive behaviour that occurs when people are objectified and the trivialisation of this abuse.
I also have a problem with the way women are silenced and are unable to speak about what has occurred to them due to the ridicule that they will face from men.
I find it very interesting that on this blog you talk about being against women being silenced while you’re calling me (albeit backhandedly) a bully elsewhere for the same post. That would be Silencing 101 on the list of tricks right?
Karnythia, with all due respect, I honestly don’t know who you’re addressing or what you’re referring to. Are you saying that I or one of the other bloggers here has called you a bully? If so, can you please say where, or provide a link? Thanks.
Amp–I think she’s talking to Rebecca.
Oh, I get it — it’s an argument that began on ABW, so I didn’t have the context to understand. Never mind my comment, please.
Sorry Amp. I came over here to read comments (I don’t get the ones from here emailed) and was surprised by the drastic difference in tone. Didn’t mean to confuse you or anyone else.
Once when my friend was seventeen, a woman stopped her in the shopping mall and said, “Do you want to be Miss Teen Santa Clara?” And she said yes, because why not, and she came in runner up that year for Miss Teen California. She took the modeling contract they offered her, too, and stood thin and blonde and flushed in front of the fan, wheat-blonde hair blowing out behind her.
She auditioned for a role in a musical adaptation of The Ugly Duckling, and they cast her as the beautiful swan, and she drove every day across the hill into Santa Cruz for the long hours of rehearsals. Sometimes they didn’t need her while they ran the other numbers, sometimes for hours, so she went out on drives, wandered the beaches.
“Hey there, pretty,” shouted one man, who was with a group of men. “You a mermaid?”
She was walking the shore, alone. Dusk drew dark to the horizon. Some of the men sat on the pier. Some stood.
“You look like a mermaid,” he said. “Why don’t you give me your number?”
The men clustered around her, and my friends heart pounded, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to get away to the silver honda her daddy bought her for high school graduation. She smiled and acted calm as she wrote out her number, like she wasn’t a fish they’d caught on their line, like they might not decide to reel her in and gut her.
#
“Just shut up and enjoy it,” my friend’s mother said to her, when she went in for her first temp job. She’s twenty-two and just out of college, very pretty, with long dark hair, and dark eyes, and pin-up curves accented by her pencil skirt. Men have been talking; have been leering; have been gearing up to touch.
“Just enjoy it,” her mother repeats, “You’ll miss it when you’re not pretty anymore.”
*
“Why are you even trying?” The girl is blonde, tan. The letters “UCSC” are printed in yellow across the butt of her trim blue sweat pants. She stands next to the treadmill on which my friend is working out, her hands on her hips, a white towel tossed over her shoulder.
She sneers at my friend’s ass, the shape of which she can’t even discern underneath the baggy sweats that hide the fact that my friend is much smaller than she looks. She’s slender, though not as painfully thin as when she was at her most anorexic. After years of sexual abuse, she hides the contours of her body underneath clothing made for much larger women, each bulge and billow and fold suggesting flesh that isn’t really there. She feels like it’s there, though, still has the anorexic’s view of herself in the mirror, the conviction that her body is spilling everywhere, uncontrollable, insatiable, massive.
The blonde’s eyes flick derisively from shrouded ass to bared face. “It obviously isn’t working,” she says. “Leave the machines for someone else.”
*
“You act well enough,” the art director of the musical theater institute I’m attending tells me, “but your singing is really incredible. You could play any kind of roles, as long as you lose weight.”
Every day, there’s the toilet, the calorie count below starvation, the hours of exercise. Emotional control has slipped away–I cry when the wind blows, and then rage a second later. I’m not eating enough to run my brain. The pounds won’t shed, won’t shed. I can’t be the person I’ve always wanted to be. My body refuses, hoards its energy, would rather pitch into a faint than burn any more of its stores.
“Why are you eating that?” mom says, when I’m back on food again. “You really need that?” She’s furious about something else, and she wants to make me hurt, and this is such a good way. I throw away the food and she complains about the wasted money.
*
My friend is very skinny and very tall. She’s the kind of tall that attracts your eye across a store. She’s the kind of skinny that draws bad remarks. “You play basketball?” “Are you anorexic?” No one asks if she’s a model; she’s not that kind of tall and thin. Turns out you can be stretched too much, drawn too narrow. People watch her bones and her back.
She wants to stretch free and become the thing she feels she’s growing into, but her mother wants her home in the nest. Her heart is fragile. There are health reasons to keep her home. It’s not health that makes her mom insist she wear makeup on her way out of the house, that makes her police her clothes for any hint of something too butch, too goth, too hard.
My friend argues for leaving home. Going to a college far away. Getting to meet new people. Getting to choose her own clothes. “I don’t want to be here forever,” she says.
It’s the end of a long argument that, in her mother’s opinion, should have been over a long time ago. Her mother can’t believe she continues to press. Decisions have been made. The shoe has been dropped.
She fixes her daughter with hard eyes. She grabs away the half-eaten bowl of cereal. Milk spills over the edge onto the table. “You’re as ugly on the inside as you are on the out.”
My knee-jerk reaction to the idea of this blog post is to compare it to a hypothetical post titled “The Dark Side of Being Wealthy”, but that would be unfair.
@Ampersand & Mandolin.
For clarification this is what I wrote in response to the other blog.
Karnythia – has now accused me of calling her a bully. :-
…You look good and you enjoy looking good. Unfortunately a lot of men also enjoy the fact that you look good which makes you uncomfortable. So they then proceed to harass you then blame you because in their minds you are the one who has brought this behaviour onto yourself though your desire to look attractive.
These men have now made you feel bad for wanting to look good.
Have I summed up what it is that you are saying in your blog?
There is noting wrong with wanting to look good. No one should dictate to you what you should look like.
What these men do is what I refer to as TRICKS. A classic example of a trick is the compare and contrast method of humiliation.
He says (Just say he is a boyfriend or whatever)’I don’t understand why women go to so much trouble with their make-up’ or the classic ‘You must be vain if you are going to so much trouble to look good’.
You then go out and he then starts leering or even making appreciative comments about the women around you. He could also make disparaging comments about you and your appearance or disparaging comments about other women who do not meet up to his standard….
IT’S A TRICK….
He is endeavouring to remind you that your appearance is important not only to him but to all men without directly stating it. His accusation of you being vain ensures in his mind that it is you, not he, who has the problem.
This is just one of the many tricks that they pull. It is designed to keep women in their place.
Each one of use including you have had these tricks pulled against us. It is bullying behaviour. It is also objectification.
It is all about entitlement. This is what I have written in another blog about bullies.
Bullying really is the expressed contempt for another creature who is viewed as inferior. Howls of indignation rise from bullies when the inferior creature protests or attempts to defend him or herself. It becomes the old mantra of “put up and shut up”. Bullies use the line of “Everyone has bullied and been bullied it is just the way things are” to justify a hierarchy in their world view and legitimise unacceptable behaviour. I don’t think a lot of bullies have experienced bullying and when they eventually do they are indignant that they have been treated in such a manner. The disturbing aspect of this mindset displayed by that of the bully is they honestly believe that they are better than others, which in their minds justifies the treatment they are dishing out.
Does this sound familiar?…”
Very familiar to me. My last boyfriend would make comment after comment about how “hot” I was, how “hot” certain (thin, conventionally attractive) friends of mine were…and then he’d make comments about less-thin, less-conventionally attractive friends of mine, how “she should shave her armpits” or “I’d never want to have a threesome with her” (not that it was ever an option…it was just his fucked-up way of expressing how he did not find somewhat-bigger women attractive). When it was winter and I was going out for my volunteer work in below-freezing temperatures, he’d tell me that all my layers of clothing made me look like a freak. For some men, “attractive” comes before “kind,” before “intelligent,” before “comfort,” before “survival,” no matter what their relationship to the woman in question is.
I find the problems with being pretty a lot deeper than that.
I am pretty, but when I was younger I had very bad skin and never grew much self confidence. Now that I’m older my skin has cleared up and I get a lot of attention that I don’t know how to handle.
All I really want is to sink into the crowd and not be noticed.
My biggest problem is not with men, but is with other woman. When I was young I was always the tomboy, playing with the boys and now that I’m older I still have a tendency to get along with men more than woman. I don’t see myself as attractive even though I know I am, and then things always just end up going sour. Girls feel threatened when I’m around their boyfriends, male friends confess that they like me. People get angry at me because they think I’m flirting but I’M NOT, I just want friends.
I got a new haircut and died my hair this last weekend, because I was feeling a little insecure and needed a boost. I got lots of compliments but then somebody told me that I “power playing” at work, and I do it to be threatening.
A woman I considered a friend seems to think I’m luring her husband or something pathetic like that and I just want to stay away from everybody.
There days I cover myself up completely, I don’t show my legs and when I’m around other woman’s husbands I make sure that I show very little skin, I even wear scarves just to be sure.
People actually tell me “you problem is that you are pretty” – as if I’m suppose to take it like a complement.
I like being pretty, I like being feminine and looking beautiful, but sometimes I wish I could just lock myself up in a room to be pretty for my boyfriend or future husband and put a mask on for the rest of the world.