Gawd, that DianaG, she’s so freakin’ arrogant, thinking she’s pretty and all that. I bet she’s got warts on her feet. [/mean girl] 
Seriously though, believe me, I’ve been called all those things. And my reaction has always been “I’m terribly sorry that my lack of self-loathing makes you uncomfortable. Oh wait, I’m not. Fuck off.”
I doubt I have any better sense for who is talking shit behind my back than you do. What I do is identify those people whose opinions are important to me. Those people I listen to and pay attention to and care what they think. Everyone else, I sort of take what they say at face value, and if I find out later they said something different behind my back, stop paying attention to them altogether. Fortunately, no one important to me (family, real friends, bosses, whatever) ever dissed me behind my back.
ISTM that there is a middle ground between dismissing all criticism out of hand, and thus believing that I am perfect and superior, and internalizing negatives from assholes and thereby being afraid to do things I want to do.
Maybe, in a way, it’s like being Pitted. Being Pitted by someone whose opinion you respect is one thing. Being Pitted by assholes who are just trying to needle you is another.
Some people really aren’t worth bothering about, at least not once you find out what their motives are.
I think you are correct that it is different for women, but everybody runs into bullies sooner or later.
Regards,
Shodan
Dogzilla, that’s some powerful black and white thinking. Your choices aren’t only 1. give in to the bullies and not show your face or 2. be deluded. Lots of responses (even some healthy ones) in between those. CBT or one of the many excellent books using CBT principles would be a tremendous help to you.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. IME anyway; I have a lot of friends/aquantances under 30 who think this way. It seems to get better the older you get.
Furthermore, a lot of women seem to have trouble understanding that a lot of men are physically attracted to a lot of women. Yeah, Megan Fox and porn actresses, etc are considered hot; but so are 80% of normal young women. And few guys are going to be comparing the women they date to women in the media, in any way.
Dogzlilla, you are probably right that the anonymous quotes are closer to what people really think. But it’s nothing to do with you - it’s everyone.
I’ve been trying to find the blooming quote for half an hour now, I think it was Johnson or Swift but in any case it goes something like this “if a man knew how his friends spoke about him behind his back, he would have no friends”.
In other words: who cares if that is how people really think? We have managed to build a rather nice alturism called society or culture on top of these base thoughts, and that is what matters.
I know all that, and while I appreciate the concern of the poster who recommended CBT therapy for me, I’m beginning to be a tad sorry I posted in this thread. I was merely trying to offer up one viewpoint to answer the OP’s question, which seemed to boil down to “Wha? Women have body image issues? How do they get those?”
I really, really didn’t mean for this thread to degenerate into “Diagnose and Treat Dogzilla’s Neuroses.” :smack: I gave very little information and spun it to make my point. So to answer your question, “Who cares what people really think?” Evidently, a lot of attractive women who think they aren’t attractive care. A lot. Most of us are bombarded with “you aren’t enough” messages from all sides, most days. Some of us internalize those negative messages more than others. DianaG is able to laugh in the face of it and good on her, says I. Some days I can too, and other days, not so much. Other women are further down the spectrum from me on the self-loathing scale. There have been a lot of great ideas in this thread about how women get warped ideas about themselves. Can we please take the microscope off mine?
I understand DogZilla. I stopped posting pics not of myself but of my family, too, because of the nastiness out there. She’s just trying to explain how we come to where we are.
Say we do something to ourselves. A new haircut, or whatever. Everyone to our face tells us it looks great and we think it looks great. We post it online and people come out of the woodwork to tell us how fugly we are.
So next time we go out in public, we have both ideas in our heads - and often it comes down to “Our friends tell us we look great to be nice but when people don’t have to filter they tell us the truth - we look like shit.”
Now if you have enough self-confidence you can just shrug and move on with your life, and most of the time we do…but it stays there, that memory, and sometimes it keeps eating at you. And if you don’t get a lot of compliments in real life, you start to just accept that you are not attractive.
I agree, sometimes you do care what people think, even if you don’t want to.
It’s posts like this that make me love you, even though I don’t think we’d be very comfortable as friends. That’s not intended to be insulting, just an admission that we are very different people.
But I like your style.
Whoa. I never intended that at all. I just meant they hurt me once, too, but fuck them.
Agreed. For me, it was kinda scary. It seems that Dr. Gray has followed me around secretly all my life, because every screwup that I’ve had in a relationship with a woman is in that book. I want royalties, dammit! :mad:
My apologies if I came across as picking on you, or anything like that. That was not my intention, and I am sorry if that’s how I sounded.
Regards,
Shodan
Thank you, I accept!
It wasn’t just you; it just felt like a pile on for a minute there and I was all set to get all defensive and decided it just wasn’t worth it. I could probably post on this board that my biggest problem is this: my new dog has learned how to open drawers and has discovered that inside those drawers is a treasure trove of delightful tasty little plastic things that she must KEEL! (So she steals all my measuring cups and chews them to bits.) And within 5 posts, someone will point out that I could benefit from CBT to help me recover past the Post-Dog Traumatic Chewing Disorder. :smack: 
Dr. Gray might have some men figured out, but I assure you, he’s completely wrong about a lot of women.
Actually, you would probably benefit more from buying some of those child safety latches. I had a German shepherd who mostly lived inside the house (she went outside to potty, but otherwise preferred to be inside with her family) who was incredibly smart. And she was tall enough to get into every drawer we owned. Including the one with a pound of Hershey’s kisses, which she devoured, foil and all. Everything came out all right in the end, but still I’m sure that foil ingestion isn’t great for dogs.
Funny you should mention those. I had them on every drawer and door when I moved into the house and took them off. I will be spending my Saturday digging through little plastic baggies with that sort of thing to find them all again and re-lock down the drawers. Damn dog.
If they’re kitchen cabinets that open away from each other elastic bands could be a temporary solution until you find the child locks. It successfully thwarted my dog 
No handles or knobs. She knows how to open the drawers by sticking her paws in the groove.
I just stand over her with a spray water bottle until she wanders off to another room.