It would only be vain if they’re not beautiful. If a woman is beautiful than she should be able to recognize that just as she should be able to recognize if she’s tall.
But these survey results, along with other anecdotes, say that many women are unable to recognize their own beauty. Even in cases like where a woman is a model and has objective evidence that people find her to be beautiful, the woman will say she doesn’t think she’s beautiful.
Society seems to teach women to denigrate themselves.
Also, bear in mind that this is a soap company survey. It says that 4% of women are prepared to say that they think they’re beautiful, but it doesn’t say how the data were collected.
I bet there’d be considerable variation between the number who say that by just ticking a box on a website compared to in person. Even anonymously, declaring oneself to be beautiful is going to feel vain as hell to a lot of women, even if it’s what they really believe, and it doesn’t say what the other survey options were.
That 4% number sounds exactly right to me. The more I speak with women, and hear about women in the media, the more saddened I am that 1) So many women place such emphasis on physical appearance and 2) So many women have a negative self image because of how they view their physical appearance.
Just want to say, women don’t place this emphasis on ourselves. Society does. It just gets ingrained in our minds at such a young age, it feels like it’s how things are supposed to be. But I agree, it is quite sad that we’re still judged by our appearance and how ‘sexually appealing’ we are to men.
You’re half right. They expect you to make the effort to buy their products. You must buy our product. it’s the only chance you have of feeling better about yourself. Trust us. We’re in advertising. We wouldn’t get caught lying to you again.
My wife and I were talking about it - for women, apparently there’s a difference, or at least can be, between “handsome” and “pretty”. She was saying that there are handsome men who are also “pretty”, but that there are also handsome men who are not pretty. Examples would be that Matt Bomer is handsome and pretty, but Daniel Craig is handsome but not pretty.
There’s not really a female equivalent, speaking as a straight man. Attractive/pretty/beautiful just usually signifies the degree of pleasingness to the eye- I can’t think of an example of women who aren’t pretty but who are good looking. I guess the equivalent might be that women can be sexy in spite of their looks.
Not only this, but that the recent (100ish years) ideal of beauty is bizarre, pairing neotyny, like small size, thin limbs and big eyes, with signals of fecundity, like lush hair and extreme waist-hip ratios.
Try thinking about women who are over the age of 50. Some of them are very good looking, but not typically “pretty” because (in general) they are no longer attractive to younger men.
Women have a long history of being valued primarily for their appearance, particularly as it relates to finding a mate, while men have been valued more for other qualities. So a man can be good looking without needing to be attractive to women, while historically a woman must specifically be attractive to men, which would include the ability to bear children. A good looking woman who can no longer bear children isn’t pretty because she is not desirable as a mate.
And yes, all of this is in general – I know that there are a limited number of older women who are pretty and even beautiful.
This is a bunch of misogyny-based falsehoods or at least wishful thinking. Studies show that the closer a society is to gender equality, the more the age gap between partners shrinks.
I’m not sure how that disproves my point. Historically, when the standards for beauty that exist in modern U.S. culture were developed, there was a low level of gender equality. Ask the average U.S. male under fifty to identify ten pretty women, how many of them do you think would be over 50?
And on top of that, there are plenty of good looking, pretty older women. But they’re still pretty - it’s part and parcel of feminine beauty in a way that it’s not in male beauty(?). Maybe it’s just admitting that some handsome men have more feminine features than others, since that’s ultimately what it boils down to I’m starting to think.
I saw this a few years ago. It was an interesting look into the women’s perceptions of their own looks. There’s a video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=litXW91UauE .
The number doesn’t surprise me. Our advertising-driven culture continually tells people, especially women, that they should look better. (And if you wear this, paint this on your face, use this, buy this, buy this, buy this, you will look better! ) If you read interviews of women who nearly everybody would call beautiful, many of them don’t think they’re beautiful. It’s terrible, the effect this scam has on people. It drives some to anorexia, depression, plastic surgery, and suicide.
I don’t pretend I’m immune to it myself, so don’t think I’m looking down on anyone as suckers.
Eh, “beautiful” is to appearance as “genius” is to intelligence. Am a beautiful? No. Cute, yes. Good-looking, yes. Pretty when I wash up, yes. But not beautiful and I’m 100% OK with this. Just like I’m 100% OK with not being a genius. I’m tired of people acting like a woman must have low self-esteem if she gives her physical appearance a rating less than a 10.
Almost everyone people I see in my day-to-day life are cute, good-looking, pretty, or handsome. It’s only when I turn on the TV that I see the “beautiful” or “gorgeous”.
bump, Anjelica Houston currently wouldn’t be what I would describe as “good-looking”. But back in the 90s, she was a perfect example of a “good-looking but not pretty” woman. She was quite “striking”. Viola Davis is another woman with striking looks, IMHO.
Women have a socially/biological driven desire to be attractive, therefore they tend to see their own flaws because that’s how you maximize something. It’s a basic rule that the more easily satisfied you are with something, the lower its quality will be. Somebody who is obsessed with flaws in their physical appearance will put much more effort into their appearance than somebody who isn’t, just as somebody paranoid about failing at any other task will put more effort into it.
It’s rather similar to “imposter syndrome”, how really successful people often feel like fakes. Meanwhile incompetent people are often sublimely confident in their own cleverness and accomplishments. The world is full of miserable successes and happy failures.
So given that and how women seek to be attractive, it’s to be expected that women both put much more effort into their appearance than men, and are less satisfied with the results. While men put less effort into their appearance, but are much more confident that women find them handsome. Human nature is perverse like that.
I’m surprised it’s even 4%. Every single thing in this culture tells women to be critical of their appearance, to be obsessed with their looks, from as soon as they are born until the day they die. Because it is entirely about external opinion, it will never be under your own control, it can always be taken from you. If you do exactly what society tells you to do, you are shallow and vain. If you don’t, you must be a dyke or maybe just depressed.
The point of the thread is not whether women seem ‘beautiful’ to men (something a lot of male posters seem to think is the question) but to themselves, right? But that is really impossible, because the only real judge is a man.
So, since a lot of blame is put on modern TV, social media, magazines, etc., does this mean that women from a century or millennia ago would have been likelier to see themselves as beautiful than women of today?
And anything other than perfectly smooth, evenly-toned skin is a flaw. Oh, and we shouldn’t have curves but we should have curves but we should be tan but we shouldn’t spend too much time in the sun but we should be blondes but we should be redheads but we should be raven-haired (for some reason nobody seems to think it’s ok to have brown hair; then again, how many book characters have brown eyes?)…