11 ms·

My Beautiful Friend

132 points by jger15 3y ago

moshegramovsky 3y ago
I look a little white, I look a little Middle Eastern. When I was young, I absolutely hated how I looked. I was bullied. Taunted. Tormented. I wanted a nose job. I wanted different hair. I wanted a different build. But as I got into my late 20s, I started to get a lot more attention, and I realized that a lot of people found me attractive. For reference, I look a lot more like Yehuda Amar (an Israeli chef) than Michael Aloni (Akiva on Schtisel). It's true that being conventionally attractive made my life 1000x easier - it's almost like the trees lowered their branches to make the fruit easier to pick. I'm pretty sure it made it easier to get a mortgage and a job and definitely a partner. But I still think about what my life would be like if I had a different nose, different hair, different build. Even in my late 40s, I still get a lot of attention from much younger women. A few weeks ago, a woman, maybe 25, openly flirted with me while she made my cappuccino. This has happened many times before, but I never make a move. All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw me naked. Or how fast she would disappear if she saw my crooked upper teeth. Or all my gray chest hair. Or my hairy back. Even if I played ball and gave her my number, even if she thinks I'm handsome, older-and-wiser, I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her.
- DontchaKnowit 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - yowlingcat 3y ago
    Are you sure you're saying GP should "work on that" out of a genuine desire for them to improve, rather than a way to puritanically assert a perceived lack of virtue that you think they should mediate? Because if not, maybe there's something /you/ "really really should work on."
    - nequo 3y ago
      It did read like the former to me. Maybe we all should just work on “that,” whatever it is that upsets us.
    - croisillon 3y ago
      i thought it meant "you should work on your naivete if you believe the barista sincerely flirted with you"
      - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
        Definitely not. I meant he should work on his unfounded insecurity. Its a terrible waste and will eat you alive. I know cause im workin on it too.
    - tome 3y ago
      What a thread. None of this sniping about people's personal situations belongs in an HN discussion.
      - lacrimacida 3y ago
        We all struggle more or less with imaginary problems which talked about could go away. I see this a lot on HN and it’s what makes this space more human.
      - yowlingcat 3y ago
        Did you read the article? This is an HN discussion of feminine standards of beauty. The whole discussion is going to run straight into the rocks of people's personal situations and I have no idea how one could expect otherwise.
    - petesergeant 3y ago
      I think by "that" he means the author's: "All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw [real me] ... I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her" That's not healthy, it's almost uncertainly untrue (we all have bodies!), and it's something therapy could help with.
- buran77 3y ago
  Maybe it won't come as consolation but a lot of very beautiful people suffer from the same. Like how people who are already skinny can very well be hit by anorexia. Used to being beautiful all their lives, one day there's a chink in the armor: a wrinkle, a white hair, a stretchmark, that same feeling you have starts to sink in. The emotional impact might be worse than for people who had a lifetime to be at peace with how they look like. This seems to be the author of the article [0]. Your first reaction is probably that the real picture doesn't match at all the picture you built in your mind while reading the article. I hope that helps you realize you are not alone in feeling that everyone else must be thinking of you what you think of yourself. They're probably not. [0] https://muckrack.com/grazie-sophia-christie https://muckrack.com/grazie-sophia-christie
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  Definitely recommend any “nude” cultural stuff you may find. It empowers you with self acceptance and body(ies) awareness. Germans calls it FKK [0] and it’s a think our civilization would highly benefit to incorporate. Also if anyone visit Belgium/ Netherlands, highly recommend an afternoon in a nude sauna garden. (For those wondering, no sex involved neither allowed). Naturist beaches in other places are great too but a bit harder to get when you’re a “beginner” : they tends to be public space that are also frequented by clothed-people and you may find yourself weird to undress among them, the first times at least. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikörperkultur https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikörperkultur
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  From my experience I found most ‘perfect’ looking people when getting to know them better a bit boring, bland. Perhaps it’s this lack of struggle or soul searching that made then slow down their growth in other dimensions. Many of these folks suffer most when getting older and their looks fade.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    I prefer the company of "ordinary" people. I have always avoided beautiful women, even if they fancied me; I wouldn't want to become jealous. Also, I've found some (not all) of the beautiful women I've known to be be rather shallow, as if "beauty is enough". To be clear, the women I've loved weren't really ordinary; they were intelligent, eloquent, kind, and beautiful in their own way.
  - nkjnlknlk 3y ago
    Is it that good looking people are boring or most people are boring and you do not have enough of a sample size?
    - solarmist 3y ago
      Being good looking takes a lot of work and time. Time that cannot be spent doing other things. Grooming, keeping up on trends, working out, shopping, etc. It's takes hours weekly at a minimum. So it's easy to let it take over your personality if it becomes a defining characteristic. Especially for women because often that is the societal expectation. If you're pretty that's enough.
- brightball 3y ago
  We have a similar path from how we were growing up vs getting better as we got older. One benefit I saw from being an overweight, out of shape, nerdy kid growing up is that I learned not to worry about what other people think or say. "Let it pass like water off a duck's back." became a little bit of a mantra until I truly wasn't worried about it, even as I age. Accepting that, if people wanted to be with me they would. If they didn't, I didn't want to waste my time with them. Trying to get somebody who didn't like me to like me, ceased being anything I was concerned about. Prior to hitting this point, I'd had multi-year crushes in high school on a couple of girls who were nice and friendly but just weren't interested in me. After having this realization, it made it a lot easier to date because you can ask people out without fear of rejection. If somebody said no, great! That saved a lot of time. Don't take it personally. The other thing that young men definitely have to learn is the gossip pipeline. Don't participate in it, but realize it is out there. Word got around in college that I "wasn't looking for a serious relationship" and it made it a lot easier for me to date. Turned out that a lot of young women worry about overly clingy men if they go out one time and then decide not to pursue it further. There's a lot of pressure on women there. People even tried to set me up on blind dates. Eventually, I met my wife of 20 years so far. The act of simply going on a lot of first dates is fairly validating in and of itself. Learning all of this stuff added to my own confidence too. But the absolute first step is simply self acceptance. Control what you can control, don't worry about what you can't. And to be clear, control what you can control means that you can control improving yourself (diet, exercise, grooming, mindset, humility, faith, education, courtesy, reliability, family relationships, etc). A lot of self acceptance advice suggests that you shouldn't be trying to get better. I'm not suggesting that at all. We can all improve and we can all be better for the people we care about. That's a big piece of showing we care.
yowlingcat 3y ago
What an unfortunate article. Not because the content reveals anything wrong or abnormal about the writer; rather because it is so commonplace and so very normal. But embedded inside of its message is a deep, I think, and fundamental misunderstanding of beauty, as immutable, objective, so easy, obvious and self-evident to rank into an unambiguous ordering of things. But this kind of lowest common denominator simplification makes it possible for a society to create rules and structure, so it becomes a cultural default. But I think that aesthetic beauty is multi-dimensional and temporal. A fine wine or a brandy; a sublime cheese and not a fresh glass of milk. There is a very specific kind of electric, youthful beauty which is ephemeral and fleeting. But there are other kinds of beauty which can be subdued and hard to miss, which can appreciate over time. I don't even mean that in a subjective "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but rather, that beauty objectively can come in more than one form. Is a bombastic Wagner opera more or less beautiful than a simple, haunting, short song by The Cranberries? The question doesn't even make sense, they're apples and oranges. But if you ask me, I prefer the song by The Cranberries and for the kind of beauty it holds deep inside of itself, the Wagnerian opera would never come close. I wish society would accept and circulate this truth rather than the other simpler, convenient, and yet so very wrong lie reflected by this article. I may not be a woman, but I've felt so many similar kinds of body dysmorphia of this sort living in NYC surrounded by conventionally attractive male models for so long until I stopped trying to be a conventional kind of attractive that would never sit right on my skin and instead embraced the one that felt like home to me. I sometimes regret that I didn't realize this sooner. But on the other hand, I'm glad that the experience taught me a lesson and imbued me with a confidence that now cannot be taken away from me by anyone or anything.
- formulathree 3y ago
  >But I think that aesthetic beauty is multi-dimensional and temporal. A fine wine or a brandy; a sublime cheese and not a fresh glass of milk. There is a very specific kind of electric, youthful beauty which is ephemeral and fleeting. But there are other kinds of beauty which can be subdued and hard to miss, which can appreciate over time. I don't even mean that in a subjective "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but rather, that beauty objectively can come in more than one form. I think the opposite. I think the higher level ideal is the illusion. What our base instincts tell us is beauty is the actuality and it's embedded in our biology. For much of humanity woman have always been valued for their youthful beauty. Pregnancy is costly health-wise and men value youth and beauty because natural beauty conveys better physical genes and youthfulness conveys higher success to conceive a child. Women are objectified for their beauty by men beauty for real biological reasons. And as a result women who obsess over their own physical beauty also end up being more successful in the mating game. Most of this behavior is the result of evolutionary psychology. This definition of beauty is cold, but it is reality and it is delusional to call it a "misunderstanding" of beauty. The author writes this article and is drawing upon millions of years of evolutionary instinct and behavior. >I wish society would accept and circulate this truth rather than the other simpler, convenient, and yet so very wrong lie reflected by this article. Society doesn't need to circulate anything. Any person with a brain recognizes physical beauty and they know the meaning of the quote "Don't judge a book by it's cover". What's going on is just people are continuously lying to themselves when convenient. You're saying it here as if someone let's me know of the "truth" and suddenly my instinctual definition of beauty will completely do a 180 and change? No. Unfortunately the cold hard truth is this: You have minimal choice in what you find beautiful. Culture and biological instincts shape your preferences far more than individual choice and you have little control over it. It's like choosing to find the female form beautiful or the male form beautiful. If I had that choice I can be gay at will. It's convenient to define beauty on your terms when you encounter a woman lamenting the fact she's not beautiful, but your definition of beauty completely flips when talking about sending homosexual people to training camps to train them to be straight... yeah as if they or anyone has a choice. Like I said, your definition is a lie we tell ourselves unconsciously when the situation is convenient. Sorry to be a downer. But hacker news is a level up above other sites. I think we can handle the truth. In fact I think we prefer it. I prefer to talk about the actual science behind why she feels the way she does and how evolution and biology has shaped this behavior. Keep in mind it's not one sided. Women objectify men as objects of success and this no doubt shapes mens behavior as much as mens preferences shape women. I have more interest in the interplay of behaviors between men and women then I do idealistic re-definitions of beauty. Beauty IS in the eye of the beholder, but that eye is built by DNA by which ALL humans share 99.9%.
pseudepithet 3y ago
The elegance of this authors words makes me fathom how she could possible feel so inadequate. The entry certainly explains it, so I make no attempt to reduce or abstract. But as another commenter has mentioned, there is beauty found in more than just appearances.
- ycombinete 3y ago
  Those most eloquent on our problems are often those who feel them most acutely.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  I'm afraid I didn't find the writing "elegant"; I found it overly flowery. But then she let on that she's a poet. I don't enjoy poetry much, but some people do, so I decided to let it pass. Until I saw your comment...
rushabh 3y ago
My reading of Neapolitan quartet is completely different. It is not Lila’s external looks that make her irresistible, but it’s her spirit - a force of nature that she has. I think the Lenu considers herself better looking than Lila, so it was not so much about a beautiful face and body. Remember it’s “My Brilliant Friend” not “My Beautiful Friend”. Would highly recommend the books to anyone who is still wondering - the torrent of raw humanness coming out from those books is, for a better word, brilliant.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  The TV series L'amica geniale is pretty fabulous too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Brilliant_Friend_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Brilliant_Friend_(TV_series...
  - bb101 3y ago
    Hands down the best TV show I've ever seen, and so well matched with Max Richter's soundtrack. Very much looking forward to the last season.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JonasJSchreiber 3y ago
That was beautiful. Thank you for posting that link. I will synthesize all of it into something cohesive as I sleep, but all I know is it was powerful.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
The hierarchy of physical looks seems inexorably tied to the human social order. It seems that there is a separate world that opens up when you meet a certain threshold of physical attractiveness. I get the impression that complaining about ones physical appearance is more accepted in women than men. I can imagine a man writing the OP piece would be labeled a few topical terms for his entitlement and toxic envy. It's become impossible for me to ignore how often social hierarchies order themselves to a significant degree on the basis of physical appearance. I would implore anyone to consider physical fitness, fashion, skin, hair care and even cosmetic surgery if they inexplicably fail in social or romantic endeavors while bearing no other obvious faults. It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance.
- Seanambers 3y ago
  As I have grown older(early 40s), I too have observed this effect. Not that it is absolute, but there is certainly a correlation between looks/attractiveness and whatever they want, money, attention, partners and so on. The most depressing part was when I in my early 20s realized there are people in this world and seeming quite many of them who have it 'easy'. They live their life's without struggling with the small stuff, everything just comes. The big stuff takes time of course. Not that they don't have their own subjective experience of struggle, its just on another level both personal and materialistic. As you say physical fitness it maybe the only thing one can do in order improve ones standing unless one has some innate talent which can be exploited.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance. When stuff like this comes up I always have to think of two people, Machiavelli and our last chancellor, Angela Merkel. She was by no means attractive, a woman, an East-German physicist and yet managed to become arguably our most significant post-war leader and governed over 16 years. Machiavelli tells us why. In social hierarchies it's not looks, wealth or even intellect that matter, it's Virtù, that is martial spirit, or ambition. All other traits are just up to luck. People who accept the notion that their role in hierarchies comes down to how they look or how others perceive them have already given in to passivity. People who climb hierarchies literally do ignore why they're not supposed to be there.
_xnmw 3y ago
Rumi talks a lot about the pain of unattainable beauty, in both men (as desire) and women (as envy or desire to be desired). That brand of Sufism really breaks down, both philosophically and psychologically, the "meaning" of painful beauty. For Rumi, the beauty that drives people insane is an infinitesimal ray of God's beatific manifestation. Witnessing unattainable beauty is supposed be painful, and the pain is there for a reason, to draw one to what is Higher, and eventually drawing one to the Source of beauty to find that within oneself. > Since tresses and cheeks show a sign of that drop, kings keep licking the ground. > Delicate earth has received a drop of Beauty, so you kiss it night and day with a hundred hearts. > Though mixed with earth, a single drop can drive you mad—what then will that wine do to you when pure? (Rumi M V 372-375) Note "earth" here is a reference to human beings, as Muslims believe humans were created from earthly clay.
azangru 3y ago
.post-container { width: 100vw; } .post-container .post-body article img { width: 100vw !important; } Grrr. And this is why there is this superfluous horizontal scrollbar on the body.
bell-cot 3y ago
This reminds me of a very cynical old quip about the difference between patriarchy and feminism: Patriarchy is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for men"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is possible in patriarchy, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from above. Feminism is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for women"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is impossible in feminism, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from below.
- dublinben 3y ago
  Can you explain the second half of that quote any further? It's not obvious to me how feminism fits that description in the way that patriarchy does. The intended irony of the statement is clear, but I fail to recognize how the second half of the statement bears any resemblance to feminism in theory or practice.
- stuckinhell 3y ago
  Very true. It seems men just don't care as much about social norms, which I just chalked up to autism when I was younger. Now I realize after getting married to a wonderful husband, and having kids, that's it's a survival mechanism. They don't get nearly as much societal help as women, and so social norms are far less relevant to them. Women care a great deal about social norms/"brutal" hierarchy, but we can also get a lot more from it. So it tends to be enabled at every rung of the hierarchy. When I was a young girl, the worse bullying came from "average" looking girls rather then the very beautiful ones.
remote_phone 3y ago
One of my former coworkers is objectively very, very handsome. He looks like a blond 6’4” model. On top of that he’s young, very smart and a genuinely nice guy too. Whenever we went for lunch together, it was like I entered another world and it was fascinating to me. Girls would walk up to him and say “hi”, stand around and make awkward conversation and then leave. This happened ALL THE TIME. I can say that this has never happened to me not even once in my life. I’m the type of guy where a girl will ask me where I work, and I’ve been working with her for a year. It doesn’t bother me one bit but I’m also in my 50s. I’m not particularly handsome so sitting with him felt like I was gaining a secret pass to the lifestyles of the beautiful. When we were in line, I would look around and see girls just staring at him without him noticing. The complete contrast between his life and mine in terms of how women treat him was really fascinating to me, especially since he’s a good guy and a rising star because he’s smart and hard working.
- formulathree 3y ago
  [dead]
eimrine 3y ago
Tangential but the first popup was with left close button (macos style) and the second popup was with right close button (windows style). I haven't seen this kind of inconsistency before.
thechristine 3y ago
I really wish men and women could body swap for a day so we could better empathize with each other. Most men don’t really see that the world tells women “the most important thing you can be is pretty”. Whatever else you might have accomplished in life really pales in comparison to your looks. It’s just the way it is. This holds especially true outside the Bay Area bubble. Many of my wonderful male friends are just astonished at how much time and energy and money that I spend to be beautiful. I don’t think they understand how much society judges me on my looks. How it forces me to constantly compare myself to other women. How awful those moments are when I feel that I don’t have it. How women are acutely aware of and expected to “fix” our physical “shortcomings”: the hair on our face and legs and armpits and bikini lines and backs, our even-slightly-blemished skin (how dare we have pores), our thick ankles, our fleshy arms and stomach, our facial features (everything from thin lips to nose shape can be “fixed”), our hair color and texture, cuticles and unpainted nails on both hands and feet, callused feet, moles, under eye darkness and bags and wrinkles, thigh cellulite, breast shape, flabby arms, creased forehead and cheeks, short or saggy neck, unlifted lashes, low cheekbones, eyebrow shape, jaw and neck definition, etc etc. and especially, any signs of aging. We don’t ever become “silver foxes” or look “distinguished”- aging is the enemy. In today’s world, the scrutiny of men’s appearance will never even come close to the microscope that women live under. Truly. An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman. And worse, women are brought up to really care what others think of them, and to make everyone else comfortable at their own expense. So you can’t just “stop caring what people say”. That would really screw you over in this world. I imagine that beauty is for women what money is for men. It’s our currency and often what makes us valuable to the group of the shallow “others” in this society.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  Women communicate in a variety of ways. One of the prime ways they communicate, even with other women, is through looks. So enhancing looks is the first step of communication. And so there is also competition. I have noticed in a large group of women, if there is someone who comes to work highly focused in looks, the other women begin to do the same. And in similar style too. Men don’t really study that much into looks. They are less sharp about it. But ugly men get less attention too. If they don’t dress well, they get less noticed. In such cases, the surviving men who don’t look great have something else that sets them apart: high level of intellect. What sets women apart, if not looks, is discipline and reliability.
renewiltord 3y ago
Oh that's terrific. Really sinks in with the kind of emotions described. Quite relatable in its pathology. Anyway, I've always wondered if something similar is the source of the famous Gender-Equality Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox There is a larger gap in more gender-equal societies. Perhaps it is because absent socioeconomic survival (which the West has largely solved), mate competition is solely in how gender-conformant one is. The more feminine woman, the most masculine man, etc. A refinement of the normal competition but now with survival necessities removed. Anyway, I am somewhat hopeful that I can do something for any future daughter of mine, but it does strike me as pointless in some way. Immersed in this society she cannot be otherwise. Still, it's obviously worth a shot at identifying some method of innoculation.
ladygirl 3y ago
[flagged]

132 points by jger15 3y ago

I look a little white, I look a little Middle Eastern. When I was young, I absolutely hated how I looked. I was bullied. Taunted. Tormented. I wanted a nose job. I wanted different hair. I wanted a different build. But as I got into my late 20s, I started to get a lot more attention, and I realized that a lot of people found me attractive. For reference, I look a lot more like Yehuda Amar (an Israeli chef) than Michael Aloni (Akiva on Schtisel). It's true that being conventionally attractive made my life 1000x easier - it's almost like the trees lowered their branches to make the fruit easier to pick. I'm pretty sure it made it easier to get a mortgage and a job and definitely a partner. But I still think about what my life would be like if I had a different nose, different hair, different build. Even in my late 40s, I still get a lot of attention from much younger women. A few weeks ago, a woman, maybe 25, openly flirted with me while she made my cappuccino. This has happened many times before, but I never make a move. All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw me naked. Or how fast she would disappear if she saw my crooked upper teeth. Or all my gray chest hair. Or my hairy back. Even if I played ball and gave her my number, even if she thinks I'm handsome, older-and-wiser, I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her.

DontchaKnowit 3y ago
[flagged]
- yowlingcat 3y ago
  Are you sure you're saying GP should "work on that" out of a genuine desire for them to improve, rather than a way to puritanically assert a perceived lack of virtue that you think they should mediate? Because if not, maybe there's something /you/ "really really should work on."
  - nequo 3y ago
    It did read like the former to me. Maybe we all should just work on “that,” whatever it is that upsets us.
  - croisillon 3y ago
    i thought it meant "you should work on your naivete if you believe the barista sincerely flirted with you"
    - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
      Definitely not. I meant he should work on his unfounded insecurity. Its a terrible waste and will eat you alive. I know cause im workin on it too.
  - tome 3y ago
    What a thread. None of this sniping about people's personal situations belongs in an HN discussion.
    - lacrimacida 3y ago
      We all struggle more or less with imaginary problems which talked about could go away. I see this a lot on HN and it’s what makes this space more human.
    - yowlingcat 3y ago
      Did you read the article? This is an HN discussion of feminine standards of beauty. The whole discussion is going to run straight into the rocks of people's personal situations and I have no idea how one could expect otherwise.
  - petesergeant 3y ago
    I think by "that" he means the author's: "All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw [real me] ... I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her" That's not healthy, it's almost uncertainly untrue (we all have bodies!), and it's something therapy could help with.
buran77 3y ago
Maybe it won't come as consolation but a lot of very beautiful people suffer from the same. Like how people who are already skinny can very well be hit by anorexia. Used to being beautiful all their lives, one day there's a chink in the armor: a wrinkle, a white hair, a stretchmark, that same feeling you have starts to sink in. The emotional impact might be worse than for people who had a lifetime to be at peace with how they look like. This seems to be the author of the article [0]. Your first reaction is probably that the real picture doesn't match at all the picture you built in your mind while reading the article. I hope that helps you realize you are not alone in feeling that everyone else must be thinking of you what you think of yourself. They're probably not. [0] https://muckrack.com/grazie-sophia-christie https://muckrack.com/grazie-sophia-christie
aziaziazi 3y ago
Definitely recommend any “nude” cultural stuff you may find. It empowers you with self acceptance and body(ies) awareness. Germans calls it FKK [0] and it’s a think our civilization would highly benefit to incorporate. Also if anyone visit Belgium/ Netherlands, highly recommend an afternoon in a nude sauna garden. (For those wondering, no sex involved neither allowed). Naturist beaches in other places are great too but a bit harder to get when you’re a “beginner” : they tends to be public space that are also frequented by clothed-people and you may find yourself weird to undress among them, the first times at least. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikörperkultur https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikörperkultur
lacrimacida 3y ago
From my experience I found most ‘perfect’ looking people when getting to know them better a bit boring, bland. Perhaps it’s this lack of struggle or soul searching that made then slow down their growth in other dimensions. Many of these folks suffer most when getting older and their looks fade.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  I prefer the company of "ordinary" people. I have always avoided beautiful women, even if they fancied me; I wouldn't want to become jealous. Also, I've found some (not all) of the beautiful women I've known to be be rather shallow, as if "beauty is enough". To be clear, the women I've loved weren't really ordinary; they were intelligent, eloquent, kind, and beautiful in their own way.
- nkjnlknlk 3y ago
  Is it that good looking people are boring or most people are boring and you do not have enough of a sample size?
  - solarmist 3y ago
    Being good looking takes a lot of work and time. Time that cannot be spent doing other things. Grooming, keeping up on trends, working out, shopping, etc. It's takes hours weekly at a minimum. So it's easy to let it take over your personality if it becomes a defining characteristic. Especially for women because often that is the societal expectation. If you're pretty that's enough.
brightball 3y ago
We have a similar path from how we were growing up vs getting better as we got older. One benefit I saw from being an overweight, out of shape, nerdy kid growing up is that I learned not to worry about what other people think or say. "Let it pass like water off a duck's back." became a little bit of a mantra until I truly wasn't worried about it, even as I age. Accepting that, if people wanted to be with me they would. If they didn't, I didn't want to waste my time with them. Trying to get somebody who didn't like me to like me, ceased being anything I was concerned about. Prior to hitting this point, I'd had multi-year crushes in high school on a couple of girls who were nice and friendly but just weren't interested in me. After having this realization, it made it a lot easier to date because you can ask people out without fear of rejection. If somebody said no, great! That saved a lot of time. Don't take it personally. The other thing that young men definitely have to learn is the gossip pipeline. Don't participate in it, but realize it is out there. Word got around in college that I "wasn't looking for a serious relationship" and it made it a lot easier for me to date. Turned out that a lot of young women worry about overly clingy men if they go out one time and then decide not to pursue it further. There's a lot of pressure on women there. People even tried to set me up on blind dates. Eventually, I met my wife of 20 years so far. The act of simply going on a lot of first dates is fairly validating in and of itself. Learning all of this stuff added to my own confidence too. But the absolute first step is simply self acceptance. Control what you can control, don't worry about what you can't. And to be clear, control what you can control means that you can control improving yourself (diet, exercise, grooming, mindset, humility, faith, education, courtesy, reliability, family relationships, etc). A lot of self acceptance advice suggests that you shouldn't be trying to get better. I'm not suggesting that at all. We can all improve and we can all be better for the people we care about. That's a big piece of showing we care.

yowlingcat 3y ago

What an unfortunate article. Not because the content reveals anything wrong or abnormal about the writer; rather because it is so commonplace and so very normal. But embedded inside of its message is a deep, I think, and fundamental misunderstanding of beauty, as immutable, objective, so easy, obvious and self-evident to rank into an unambiguous ordering of things. But this kind of lowest common denominator simplification makes it possible for a society to create rules and structure, so it becomes a cultural default. But I think that aesthetic beauty is multi-dimensional and temporal. A fine wine or a brandy; a sublime cheese and not a fresh glass of milk. There is a very specific kind of electric, youthful beauty which is ephemeral and fleeting. But there are other kinds of beauty which can be subdued and hard to miss, which can appreciate over time. I don't even mean that in a subjective "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but rather, that beauty objectively can come in more than one form. Is a bombastic Wagner opera more or less beautiful than a simple, haunting, short song by The Cranberries? The question doesn't even make sense, they're apples and oranges. But if you ask me, I prefer the song by The Cranberries and for the kind of beauty it holds deep inside of itself, the Wagnerian opera would never come close. I wish society would accept and circulate this truth rather than the other simpler, convenient, and yet so very wrong lie reflected by this article. I may not be a woman, but I've felt so many similar kinds of body dysmorphia of this sort living in NYC surrounded by conventionally attractive male models for so long until I stopped trying to be a conventional kind of attractive that would never sit right on my skin and instead embraced the one that felt like home to me. I sometimes regret that I didn't realize this sooner. But on the other hand, I'm glad that the experience taught me a lesson and imbued me with a confidence that now cannot be taken away from me by anyone or anything.

formulathree 3y ago
>But I think that aesthetic beauty is multi-dimensional and temporal. A fine wine or a brandy; a sublime cheese and not a fresh glass of milk. There is a very specific kind of electric, youthful beauty which is ephemeral and fleeting. But there are other kinds of beauty which can be subdued and hard to miss, which can appreciate over time. I don't even mean that in a subjective "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but rather, that beauty objectively can come in more than one form. I think the opposite. I think the higher level ideal is the illusion. What our base instincts tell us is beauty is the actuality and it's embedded in our biology. For much of humanity woman have always been valued for their youthful beauty. Pregnancy is costly health-wise and men value youth and beauty because natural beauty conveys better physical genes and youthfulness conveys higher success to conceive a child. Women are objectified for their beauty by men beauty for real biological reasons. And as a result women who obsess over their own physical beauty also end up being more successful in the mating game. Most of this behavior is the result of evolutionary psychology. This definition of beauty is cold, but it is reality and it is delusional to call it a "misunderstanding" of beauty. The author writes this article and is drawing upon millions of years of evolutionary instinct and behavior. >I wish society would accept and circulate this truth rather than the other simpler, convenient, and yet so very wrong lie reflected by this article. Society doesn't need to circulate anything. Any person with a brain recognizes physical beauty and they know the meaning of the quote "Don't judge a book by it's cover". What's going on is just people are continuously lying to themselves when convenient. You're saying it here as if someone let's me know of the "truth" and suddenly my instinctual definition of beauty will completely do a 180 and change? No. Unfortunately the cold hard truth is this: You have minimal choice in what you find beautiful. Culture and biological instincts shape your preferences far more than individual choice and you have little control over it. It's like choosing to find the female form beautiful or the male form beautiful. If I had that choice I can be gay at will. It's convenient to define beauty on your terms when you encounter a woman lamenting the fact she's not beautiful, but your definition of beauty completely flips when talking about sending homosexual people to training camps to train them to be straight... yeah as if they or anyone has a choice. Like I said, your definition is a lie we tell ourselves unconsciously when the situation is convenient. Sorry to be a downer. But hacker news is a level up above other sites. I think we can handle the truth. In fact I think we prefer it. I prefer to talk about the actual science behind why she feels the way she does and how evolution and biology has shaped this behavior. Keep in mind it's not one sided. Women objectify men as objects of success and this no doubt shapes mens behavior as much as mens preferences shape women. I have more interest in the interplay of behaviors between men and women then I do idealistic re-definitions of beauty. Beauty IS in the eye of the beholder, but that eye is built by DNA by which ALL humans share 99.9%.

pseudepithet 3y ago

The elegance of this authors words makes me fathom how she could possible feel so inadequate. The entry certainly explains it, so I make no attempt to reduce or abstract. But as another commenter has mentioned, there is beauty found in more than just appearances.

ycombinete 3y ago
Those most eloquent on our problems are often those who feel them most acutely.
denton-scratch 3y ago
I'm afraid I didn't find the writing "elegant"; I found it overly flowery. But then she let on that she's a poet. I don't enjoy poetry much, but some people do, so I decided to let it pass. Until I saw your comment...

rushabh 3y ago

My reading of Neapolitan quartet is completely different. It is not Lila’s external looks that make her irresistible, but it’s her spirit - a force of nature that she has. I think the Lenu considers herself better looking than Lila, so it was not so much about a beautiful face and body. Remember it’s “My Brilliant Friend” not “My Beautiful Friend”. Would highly recommend the books to anyone who is still wondering - the torrent of raw humanness coming out from those books is, for a better word, brilliant.

jjgreen 3y ago
The TV series L'amica geniale is pretty fabulous too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Brilliant_Friend_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Brilliant_Friend_(TV_series...
- bb101 3y ago
  Hands down the best TV show I've ever seen, and so well matched with Max Richter's soundtrack. Very much looking forward to the last season.

deleted 3y ago

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JonasJSchreiber 3y ago

That was beautiful. Thank you for posting that link. I will synthesize all of it into something cohesive as I sleep, but all I know is it was powerful.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

The hierarchy of physical looks seems inexorably tied to the human social order. It seems that there is a separate world that opens up when you meet a certain threshold of physical attractiveness. I get the impression that complaining about ones physical appearance is more accepted in women than men. I can imagine a man writing the OP piece would be labeled a few topical terms for his entitlement and toxic envy. It's become impossible for me to ignore how often social hierarchies order themselves to a significant degree on the basis of physical appearance. I would implore anyone to consider physical fitness, fashion, skin, hair care and even cosmetic surgery if they inexplicably fail in social or romantic endeavors while bearing no other obvious faults. It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance.

Seanambers 3y ago
As I have grown older(early 40s), I too have observed this effect. Not that it is absolute, but there is certainly a correlation between looks/attractiveness and whatever they want, money, attention, partners and so on. The most depressing part was when I in my early 20s realized there are people in this world and seeming quite many of them who have it 'easy'. They live their life's without struggling with the small stuff, everything just comes. The big stuff takes time of course. Not that they don't have their own subjective experience of struggle, its just on another level both personal and materialistic. As you say physical fitness it maybe the only thing one can do in order improve ones standing unless one has some innate talent which can be exploited.
Barrin92 3y ago
>It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance. When stuff like this comes up I always have to think of two people, Machiavelli and our last chancellor, Angela Merkel. She was by no means attractive, a woman, an East-German physicist and yet managed to become arguably our most significant post-war leader and governed over 16 years. Machiavelli tells us why. In social hierarchies it's not looks, wealth or even intellect that matter, it's Virtù, that is martial spirit, or ambition. All other traits are just up to luck. People who accept the notion that their role in hierarchies comes down to how they look or how others perceive them have already given in to passivity. People who climb hierarchies literally do ignore why they're not supposed to be there.

_xnmw 3y ago

Rumi talks a lot about the pain of unattainable beauty, in both men (as desire) and women (as envy or desire to be desired). That brand of Sufism really breaks down, both philosophically and psychologically, the "meaning" of painful beauty. For Rumi, the beauty that drives people insane is an infinitesimal ray of God's beatific manifestation. Witnessing unattainable beauty is supposed be painful, and the pain is there for a reason, to draw one to what is Higher, and eventually drawing one to the Source of beauty to find that within oneself. > Since tresses and cheeks show a sign of that drop, kings keep licking the ground. > Delicate earth has received a drop of Beauty, so you kiss it night and day with a hundred hearts. > Though mixed with earth, a single drop can drive you mad—what then will that wine do to you when pure? (Rumi M V 372-375) Note "earth" here is a reference to human beings, as Muslims believe humans were created from earthly clay.

azangru 3y ago

.post-container { width: 100vw; } .post-container .post-body article img { width: 100vw !important; } Grrr. And this is why there is this superfluous horizontal scrollbar on the body.

bell-cot 3y ago

This reminds me of a very cynical old quip about the difference between patriarchy and feminism: Patriarchy is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for men"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is possible in patriarchy, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from above. Feminism is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for women"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is impossible in feminism, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from below.

dublinben 3y ago
Can you explain the second half of that quote any further? It's not obvious to me how feminism fits that description in the way that patriarchy does. The intended irony of the statement is clear, but I fail to recognize how the second half of the statement bears any resemblance to feminism in theory or practice.
stuckinhell 3y ago
Very true. It seems men just don't care as much about social norms, which I just chalked up to autism when I was younger. Now I realize after getting married to a wonderful husband, and having kids, that's it's a survival mechanism. They don't get nearly as much societal help as women, and so social norms are far less relevant to them. Women care a great deal about social norms/"brutal" hierarchy, but we can also get a lot more from it. So it tends to be enabled at every rung of the hierarchy. When I was a young girl, the worse bullying came from "average" looking girls rather then the very beautiful ones.

remote_phone 3y ago

One of my former coworkers is objectively very, very handsome. He looks like a blond 6’4” model. On top of that he’s young, very smart and a genuinely nice guy too. Whenever we went for lunch together, it was like I entered another world and it was fascinating to me. Girls would walk up to him and say “hi”, stand around and make awkward conversation and then leave. This happened ALL THE TIME. I can say that this has never happened to me not even once in my life. I’m the type of guy where a girl will ask me where I work, and I’ve been working with her for a year. It doesn’t bother me one bit but I’m also in my 50s. I’m not particularly handsome so sitting with him felt like I was gaining a secret pass to the lifestyles of the beautiful. When we were in line, I would look around and see girls just staring at him without him noticing. The complete contrast between his life and mine in terms of how women treat him was really fascinating to me, especially since he’s a good guy and a rising star because he’s smart and hard working.

formulathree 3y ago
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eimrine 3y ago

Tangential but the first popup was with left close button (macos style) and the second popup was with right close button (windows style). I haven't seen this kind of inconsistency before.

thechristine 3y ago

I really wish men and women could body swap for a day so we could better empathize with each other. Most men don’t really see that the world tells women “the most important thing you can be is pretty”. Whatever else you might have accomplished in life really pales in comparison to your looks. It’s just the way it is. This holds especially true outside the Bay Area bubble. Many of my wonderful male friends are just astonished at how much time and energy and money that I spend to be beautiful. I don’t think they understand how much society judges me on my looks. How it forces me to constantly compare myself to other women. How awful those moments are when I feel that I don’t have it. How women are acutely aware of and expected to “fix” our physical “shortcomings”: the hair on our face and legs and armpits and bikini lines and backs, our even-slightly-blemished skin (how dare we have pores), our thick ankles, our fleshy arms and stomach, our facial features (everything from thin lips to nose shape can be “fixed”), our hair color and texture, cuticles and unpainted nails on both hands and feet, callused feet, moles, under eye darkness and bags and wrinkles, thigh cellulite, breast shape, flabby arms, creased forehead and cheeks, short or saggy neck, unlifted lashes, low cheekbones, eyebrow shape, jaw and neck definition, etc etc. and especially, any signs of aging. We don’t ever become “silver foxes” or look “distinguished”- aging is the enemy. In today’s world, the scrutiny of men’s appearance will never even come close to the microscope that women live under. Truly. An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman. And worse, women are brought up to really care what others think of them, and to make everyone else comfortable at their own expense. So you can’t just “stop caring what people say”. That would really screw you over in this world. I imagine that beauty is for women what money is for men. It’s our currency and often what makes us valuable to the group of the shallow “others” in this society.

nashashmi 3y ago
Women communicate in a variety of ways. One of the prime ways they communicate, even with other women, is through looks. So enhancing looks is the first step of communication. And so there is also competition. I have noticed in a large group of women, if there is someone who comes to work highly focused in looks, the other women begin to do the same. And in similar style too. Men don’t really study that much into looks. They are less sharp about it. But ugly men get less attention too. If they don’t dress well, they get less noticed. In such cases, the surviving men who don’t look great have something else that sets them apart: high level of intellect. What sets women apart, if not looks, is discipline and reliability.

renewiltord 3y ago

Oh that's terrific. Really sinks in with the kind of emotions described. Quite relatable in its pathology. Anyway, I've always wondered if something similar is the source of the famous Gender-Equality Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox There is a larger gap in more gender-equal societies. Perhaps it is because absent socioeconomic survival (which the West has largely solved), mate competition is solely in how gender-conformant one is. The more feminine woman, the most masculine man, etc. A refinement of the normal competition but now with survival necessities removed. Anyway, I am somewhat hopeful that I can do something for any future daughter of mine, but it does strike me as pointless in some way. Immersed in this society she cannot be otherwise. Still, it's obviously worth a shot at identifying some method of innoculation.

ladygirl 3y ago

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