At 43, I’m enjoying seeing the women my age catch up to me, looks-wise. I’ve been average looking all my life, too, and I’m just getting more and more comfortable in my skin, wrinkles, grey hair and all. I suppose I should feel a little bad for the beauties who are “losing their looks” and have no inner qualities to deal with it, but to hell with them. Welcome to most people’s reality. Welcome to being invisible!
Why don’t you make a list of all the things about yourself that you like, that other people like, that you are proud of and that have noting to do with your age or appearance, and that would be there no matter how you look.
You’ve got a college degree
You are willing to travel internationally
You probably speak several languages
You’re able to get into top level grad schools
I’m sure you and other people know tons more. But off the top of my head, those come up.
I’m really enjoying this ‘women as cars’ metaphor. Personally I’m glad they discontinued the Ford Pinto because it used to be that if you banged one in the rear it would blow up and kill everyone.
About 10 percent striking looks to 90 percent sexpectation.
I’m not sure at what point beauty was quantified in the modern sense of the word, but I would not be surprised to find it started with Bo Derek’s 10.
Declan
I’ve only been back on this board for about 4 months, but my impression from your posts lately is that you fell madly in love with a guy who was working with you in China and he dumped you to be with Chinese women who were 10 years younger and prettier. And that this is causing an existential crisis and depression.
Plus, you’re almost 30 so I’m guessing your biological clock is ticking, so maybe that is partly why you took things so hard.
But either way. That is my impression of you lately. Do you feel you have no value outside your appearance, or do you fear that nobody else will ascribe value outside your appearance? Because they are not the same thing. Do you think you’re assuming that because the guy you fell for in China thought appearance was paramount that that is making you feel it is paramount too? Did you worry about this stuff 2 years ago?
Do you know what all of this is really about? Can you identify the emotional pain that is beneath all of the issues you are facing? Do you feel forgotten, unwanted, lost or what? Are those feelings 100% due to the breakup or are there other events?
Nothing like being psychoanalyzed on line - a full service message board.
I appreciate that someone like **even sven **can contradict herself within the context of this type of thing - don’t we all “contain multitudes”? Ultimately, yeah, we all need to just deal with the focus on the physical and use/not use the fact of its existence when we see fit. But that doesn’t mean we can’t stop every now and then and just vent a little. That’s how I read the OP…
…just like I prefer to think of myself as an enlightened-kinda-guy who values people on the content of their character first, while also bopping over to the SDMB Picture Gallery to see who my latest Doper Crush is…I am totally stuck in E through J right now…
…humans is weird and contradictory…
Word, man.
That’s some food for thought. I’ve always considered myself somewhere in the middle between opting out completely and feeling shitty about my appearance. When I look in the mirror, I usually like what I see. So yes, I totally agree the problem is judgmental assholes, not me. I don’t blame myself for how I look and I don’t usually feel worth less because of it (unless I’m depressed.)
Nevertheless, it frustrates the hell out of me to be so consistently invisible.
I’ve had guys tell me before, though, that what I really lack isn’t beauty, but confidence. I don’t think the sexiness of self-confidence can be overstated enough… Hell, I once asked Sr. Olives what he thought was the least attractive thing about me, and he rolled his eyes and replied, ‘‘Your insecurity.’’ Maybe the irony is I could be beautiful even outside of society’s norms if I could just stop caring that my beauty is outside of society’s norms.
I wonder how true that is for others who go through the same thing?
It’s a quote from Ode on a Grecian Urn. The poem is about timeless perfection in art being far removed from the transience of real life, and that fantasy is more interesting than reality. The urn is painted with various pastoral scenes, and Keats is fascinated by these little vignettes, with all their unanswered questions, and how they have been preserved for centuries. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ is said by the urn itself; that’s its message to mankind. It’s not exactly clear what it means. Whether or not the urn says the remainder of those two lines as well is open to debate. In any case, the ‘beauty’ in question is artistic or idealised, rather than sexually attractive.
Not really on topic for the thread, but it gave me an excuse to re-read one of my favourite poems!
Urn-hating is discouraged on public property.
Jeeze, I thought I saw the name Vinyl Turnip and then I read Weedy’s post thinking it was by VT - freaked me out, man! Then I saw it wasn’t by VT and things made sense in my world again. 
TLDW.
It does suck but them’s the evolutionary breaks. On a related note, this is the biggest drawback of feminism (which is of course a good thing). Men just don’t give a shit about a woman’s career or status like women do a man’s. If anything it might be a negative. They’re happy to fuck cute cocktail waitresses or a secretary. And thus career women are miserable. Especially when they see the men they’re trying to emulate treated with the utmost respect and taken very seriously.
I wonder to what extent male sexual strategy is dysgenic. If not for the need for T&A and the facile motherly “caring” characteristic would we all have average IQs of 200 by now?
Because eggs are few and expensive and sperm are cheap and practically infinite which cause much different sexual strategies. Bateman’s principle, etc.
Heh, Wesley Clark you are pretty much exactly right. I’ve suddenly realized I’ve gotten a lot older, am thinking pretty hard about what I want and where I’m headed, and living in an environment that really emphasizes the opposite of what I value in myself as a woman and relationships in general. Hard to keep a clear head- but that’s no crime. Sometimes you gotta think about your life and you find things you gotta figure out before you can move forward.
Now that’s taking things a bit far! Do you really think the suburban housewives and bonked secretaries are the paradigm of human happiness? Anyway, I doubt that career women are any more miserable than career men. Life is tough, especially when you have a lot of aspirations.
As a ‘‘career woman’’ myself, I would have to disagree with the characterization of men as basically shallow and resentful of female success. I had no problem finding a guy who was on board with my professional goals. He’s got goals of his own, we’re both driven people, and that’s one of the reasons why it works.
I recognize that not everyone has this nice little arrangement. I was discussing a potential fellowship opportunity back in my hometown for the summer, and one of my classmates said, ‘‘So how is that going to work? Is Sr. Olives going to stay with you?’’ ‘‘God no,’’ I said. ‘‘He’s got his hands full this summer. Maybe we can get him to come out and visit for a few weeks, but for the most part it’ll pretty much just be me.’’ She looked at me like I had four heads. Because how can you spend four whole months away from your husband?
I dunno… because we both have lives?
My greatest source of angst as an aspiring professional is the conflict between rearing children and professional achievement. I don’t know how we’re going to make that work. But I was never that little girl who sat at home playing with baby dolls. I was that little girl who, as a 4th grader, would outline my career strategy. Realizing that I want to have children has been a bit of a personal conflict.
Regarding ‘Sick of beauty’: there have been times when I’ve been weary of always being aware of beauty. Specifically, I’ve been weary of always having sexual attraction to women. There have been times that I just wanted to be able to turn it off, to disconnect it and push it out of the way so that I could get on with whatever else I was doing. The awareness is like an endless yammering useless fire alarm that I can’t avoid.
Other kinds of beauty aren’t as insistent. I can look out the window at a beautiful landscape and then turn away, refreshed. But sexual attraction to people in non-social contexts (such as work) always seems to lead to exhaustion or depression. It’s distorted my relationships with many women such that I never got to simply be with them as people; either I avoided them so that the desire would’t be triggered, or i fell back from asking them out and felt bad, or I looked from a distance just like the poster who started that thread about “I saw a beautiful woman and it made me sad”. Still, in professional contexts, one simply has to suck it up and behave professionally, acting as if the desire didn’t exist.
I’ll admit that on the rare occasions that I’ve actally hooked up with someone, it can be very good. But is that worth 35 years of angst?
They kind of are, though - the myth of having it all for women has been pretty much exploded by now. You can have most of it all, but it is much, much more difficult to have it all as a career woman if you want to have a family. Women still do the majority of childraising and housekeeping, even in our enlightened days. Plus, in Canada you get a full 12 months for a maternity leave as opposed to the much shorter ones in the US, but that presents its own set of problems - your job is waiting for you when you come back by law, but for every kid, you fall a year behind in your career path each time you take a maternity leave. Then because women do most of the child-oriented things, a working mother is often taking time off from work which isn’t doing her career any favours, either. Or a career woman with kids wants to work fewer hours, which often puts them in a position of taking a much lower position instead of what they are qualified for.
Even without putting children in the mix, high-powered women are still not treated the same as men. It can be intimidating for men to date powerful, high-salaried women, and there are still a lot of men who have their whole identity wrapped up in their job who can’t tolerate a woman who is more successful than they are.
And that’s assuming the high-status woman is interested in a lower-status man in the first place - as opposed to looking for a still higher-status man (of which the pool becomes increasingly small the higher the woman’s own status).
Which is assuming that a woman is looking for a man at all. We all know men can be happy bachelors. Why do we assume that women can’t be unmarried, child-free, and happy? I am.
(I don’t want to get married, I’ve been married)
Man there are a lot of broad brushstrokes here…especially for the Dope.
My wife’s working permanent, part-time in her field while the kids are young. That lets her be home for the kids, get the heck out of the house 20 hours a week, gives her Fridays off, and keeps her from having a huge gap in her skillset.
I work at home once a week…twice on the breaks, limiting the amount of money we have to spend on daycare, so for your anecdotal evidence that women have it worse, I think it depends on your defining criteria. I KNOW my wife’s happier now that she’s not coming home at 7pm, stressed from the work and commute, to deal with the family (I usually made dinner).
Sure, we make less money, but I think the family is happier for it.
(IMHO and YMMV)