Looks don’t always match the personality. What I mean to say is that even “nice”, non-creepy attention can bother some people…even attractive people. Maybe they are extremely shy and self-conscious. Maybe they are just deeply introverted and don’t feel like being friendly. Or maybe they are just big ole snobs. Regardless, not everyone likes to be seen.
You can’t always tell this by the way a person looks. An attractive person may or may not want to be “attractive”.
I try to dress and carry myself in a way that makes me feel good. I’m not hot or cute, but I am comfortable with the way I look. But there’s this small group of women at work who always want to pretty me up–put me in heels, do my nails, make up my face, etc. If I just did X, Y, or Z, they tell me, I would be more attractive. But I don’t want to deal with the headache of looking more attractive. Pleasant-looking, fine. But not attractive. Trying to figure out if someone’s flirting with me…or having to reject someone’s advances…I just really really hate doing these things. I freak out a little when I do.
I’m not a hottie or anything. I just want to say that being a hot woman is probably just about as much of a PITA as being a woman in general. Whether we are attractive by conventional standards or not, a large number of us feel physically inadequate and self-conscious about our appearance no matter what we are told by how many people. I know very few attractive women who actually feel attractive. There is always this beauty standard we can never attain. It is a part of our psychology regardless of how hot we are.
I mean, I’m average-looking to cute depending on who you ask, and I’ve never really felt envious of more attractive women. I’ve had this idea in my head of how I might look more attractive, but I’ve never looked at a pretty woman and thought, ‘‘She has it made.’’ It seems like it would be even harder to be that attractive, because you’d have to deal more with superficial people who are only interested in looks. I also know that sometimes extremely attractive women are assumed to be stupid. That would get old fast.
Being an attractive human is a trait that has been studied pretty hard by the social sciences and overall it’s a huge leg up in life unless you have some sort of mental dysfunction associated with it.
Also, just as a real world caution with respect to mature adults there are very few people who are effortlessly attractive. Most people who are noticeably attractive have put some serious work into their appearance and overall fitness, so getting noticed is something they see as a desirable thing. Their appearance is very important to them.
It’s trivially easy to ug yourself up if you don’t want to be noticed.
It you get fixated on by a nut it can be a huge burden, but overall being attractive is a big benefit in most interpersonal scenarios.
One downside appears to be being a target for criticism.
I ain’t all that, I’m OK looking- a bit fat, a bit weird, and I put basically zero effort into appearance most of the time- I own neither heels nor makeup, but I can’t remember a stranger ever seriously insulting my looks to my face unprovoked.
However, friend of mine who’s way better looking than me gets constant comments, especially from other women, including complete strangers, about what she ‘should get sorted’ to make herself prettier, and gets told she should lose weight all the damn time by random people- she’s thin, very athletic (she’s a contortionist), and pretty impressively hot.
Most of the people who say this stuff to her are way worse looking than she is, needless to say. I can see how it would be very easy to get completely insecure about your looks if you got that sort of a reaction often- which is presumably the aim of the people saying it, almost as though they feel her being pretty is showing off in itself.
Oh yeah, I’m hot like summer. Just kind of muggy and uncomfortable.
I kind of feel this way sometimes. I’m average, and on a good day mildly-to-moderately attractive, and I think like most women who aren’t hideously unattractive, I have to deal with a lot of men’s bullshit that was tiresome when I was 14, and is a downright thorn in my asshole at 30. But attractive women have to deal with a lot more shit than I do, so I don’t know if it’s equal on the PITA scale. I’m not going to pretend that beauty is some kind of curse, because in more or less every area of life it is a good thing, but I would find the downside to be more crap from men and more having to carefully weigh whether he’s into you for you or because you’re sparkly. I have to concern myself with that now and I’m a fleshy black girl with a drinking problem (NOT in high demand, folks).
And then there’s this (I’m quoting you out of order):
Meh, that sounds like a problem for insecure people. I’m friends with several very pretty women, and the levels of scrutiny some of them put themselves through is some combination of laughable and sad. They fret far more over every minor skin blemish or quarter inch of waistline than I ever could, possibly because when you’re that freaking pretty, the only things to obsess about are barely perceptible to the rest of us. But I also know very pretty women who don’t obsess and take a fairly nonchalant approach to their looks. And then there are not so pretty women who are bogged down by their appearances, while others are fine with what they look like, and so on.
I think it may stick out in our mind’s more when a very pretty woman is insecure about her looks, as we may think, “Is she insane?” but I don’t think inadequacy is some kind of constant among all women whose intensity only increases with her attractiveness. I’ve found this kind of thing to be completely independent of looks, but then again, I don’t know anything and people I’ve known are not a random sampling of women everywhere. Your model is different and so on.
I’ll chime in, I am not the hottest chick on the planet, but I can generally hold my own, and I will say usually it’s a PITA. I work in a job where it’s not really a benefit, and due to the last of women in general, it can be an issue. Last year, on a military ex in a different country it was downright dangerous.
I am certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but I tend to carry myself with a certain amount of confidence and that alone can be fairly attention-grabbing.
I’m not hot now, but I was pretty attractive when I was younger, if more along the lines of the “girl next door” type. And of course it’s a pain in the ass. Very few men actually want to talk to you or care what you are saying. And women never take any of your concerns for real. “Oh, you don’t have to watch what you eat, you’re so beautiful!”
And the women in my circle who were ten times more beautiful than me (I was a semi-professional dancer, so I met a lot of them) had it much worse. Creepster men hanging around, extra hard to differentiate the real men, etc.
That doesn’t mean that if I had a magic wand to turn myself beautiful, I’d turn it down. It’s just that every perk has a negative.
For most women I’ve known who get a lot of attention for their looks, I’d say the main perk of being considered attractive by most people is that it enables you to have attractive romantic/sexual partners who you consider very sexually attractive. Of course, it’s hard to measure the more nebulous advantages (most of us have heard by now that scientific studies prove that being conventionally attractive means everyone likes you more, is nicer to you, considers you more trustworthy, and will do more to help you). And the negatives, like scary guys harassing you or people treating you like a brainless pair of breasts, are more obvious.
Speaking of, I’ve seen similar convos over there and women say:
Worrying over whether or not they got somewhere because of their looks or their brains/other people assuming they got the job by being pretty, not smart. People will go to another coworker for help because they assume the woman doesn’t know anything.
People harping on their weight, telling them to eat a sandwich or that their salad is rabbit food. I know thin != pretty, but there’s a correlation between perceived attractiveness and weight.
That doesn’t even require her to be pretty. Many people who see a man and a woman sharing an office will assume she is his subordinate; many think the little blonde chick is a nursing student (nope, oncologist) and the bearded dude is the doctor (nope, nurse). It isn’t even a matter of sexism as one of jumping into assumptions hard enough to break both knees.
