Well said. This comes at the perfect time, as I’ve unfortunately just started slipping back into a beauty obsession (it is summer, after all). At times when external beauty’s self-imposed burden spontaneously springs on me, I always feel myself slipping away. Instead of reading books, I listen to podcasts on “feminine tips” and the like. It is always an effort (though it is the most important) to remind myself that it is not my job to make me palatable for others.
Being gracious with yourself is the most important thing right now. I am in the exact same position as you. A lot of recent circumstances leading me to care a lot more about how I look than I normally do. This might be a sad way of looking at it but I’ve always thought that we don’t have a lot of control over these thoughts. We’ve been conditioned since birth and nearly every aspect of our culture/media works to reinforce that idea. It will be a lifelong work and that is not our fault :)
Thank you, Paris, for writing about your experience and feelings so honestly. I agree. Many men want a pretty girl who is soft, docile, and quiet. I once heard a man talk about a beautiful woman he had met. She was perfect on the outside. The minute she opened her mouth, he was turned off. He wanted to tell her to please be quiet so he could enjoy her fully. As he told this story, all the men around the table laughed.
Your story intrigued me because I have felt exactly the opposite. I have felt that beautiful women have an opportunity to be vocal, strong, opinionated, and trailblazers. If a man doesn’t like them that way, oh well, another man will come along, someone better who wants to know her as more than a sex object. An example is Gloria Steinem. She leveraged her beauty to fuel a whole movement, and men were always attracted to her. But maybe we are talking about two different things here? The difference between a pretty girl and a beautiful woman?
My biggest problems as a pretty girl came from low self-esteem and from not believing in myself. After going through therapy, and healing many wounds, I found that men were more interested in me as a whole person and not just as a pretty girl.
But beauty is power and men are attracted to women who make them feel stronger. The stronger and more beautiful you are, the stronger a man needs to feel to have the confidence to take you on. At least I suspect that is the way it works.
Sorry to go on so long, but this is a conundrum that I’ve been trying to understand for a long time. Thank you for helping me see things from a different perspective. I admire your honesty and your insight.
Stories like that are so sobering but so devastating. It always shocks me how comfortably men can talk about us like that.
I see what you’re saying! I definitely think there is a privilege afforded to beautiful women. They are given space to be seen and self-express, however I wonder how much of that is well-intentioned. Often I think that “quirky” beautiful women are categorized as “manic pixie dream girls” or deeply intellectual ones will be assumed to be disingenuous. There is this fundamental assumption that women can’t be smart/intelligent so any expression of it must be made into a performance or kink for men.
I am glad you’ve taken the time to heal. Even after I went through therapy I found myself looking back at old relationships more fondly. I definitely don’t think what I’m saying here applies to all conventionally attractive women and relationships!
You’re absolutely right about beauty and strength. I often find that men find extremely beautiful women to be intimidating. I think they put more effort into humbling them. I don’t think women have this same response with conventionally attractive men. I think we’re more likely to become self-critical as to how we show up and whether or not we’re worthy.
Thank you so much for your work, and your very thoughtful reply. I appreciate all the effort you put into everything you do. I know the work you do takes a lot of your time and I appreciate your investment.
Even though I have a doctorate in clinical psychology, there were many times people assumed I was a dumb blonde. For a while, I studied the Miss America scholarship organization. There are a lot of strong, intelligent, and articulate women- both as contestants and as managers of the program.
Tiffany Ogle, a tv host of “Morning Blend” filmed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was a Miss Minnesota. That exposure led to her job on television.
She had some great insights about women, beauty and power. She told me that, when she was wearing her crown, men came up to her and said she was the most beautiful woman they had ever seen.
When she took off her crown, they saw her as an ordinary pretty girl, but nothing more. She also told me that beauty opens lots of doors, but you have to keep explaining yourself constantly after those doors are opened.
Some of the Miss America winners I talked to live their lives incognito. They don’t want any of their friends or neighbors to know that they once wore a Miss America crown.
I plan to write about my research into the Miss America organization sometime. The women I met surprised me. They are not at all the way they are often portrayed or what I expected. And yet when I saw the most recent winner on a television program, I was disappointed with her practiced beauty and chirpy way of speaking. I also noticed that two of the blonde winners of consecutive years were almost impossible to tell apart.
It’s a multi layered issue. Initially as a feminist, I had no respect for the Miss America organization. However, would we even know Oprah Winfrey if she hadn’t won Miss Black Tennessee? It was that exposure that led to her first television news anchor position.
Sorry this is so long again. But the study of beautiful women is specialized and I find few people even willing to discuss it. When I find someone open to the concepts, it’s hard for me to hold back from talking to someone who understands.
Yes this is such a complicated issue to unpack, both for women perceived as beautiful and for those who don’t win that “lottery” as you call it. Sometimes, to be honest, I struggle to know exactly how I feel about this issue. Yet I think it’s very important to examine for a number of reasons.
What if people learned that winning the beauty lottery comes with a great deal of pain and self-doubt? As someone who has studied beautiful women, I have found that some of them are among the emptiest and unhappiest women I’ve ever met, not just when they get older or gain weight and lose their beauty, but even while they are at their beauty peak and find that men really only want them for sex. This is only one of the negatives of winning that lottery.
Beautiful women are more likely to be stalked and physically assaulted multiple times. They are more likely to have difficulty making female friends and often lack the social support they need to deal with male predators. Some research has found that they are more likely to marry narcissistic men., and we all know that’s not a great thing.
The pressure to be beautiful is one that haunts women regardless of their appearance. This pressure is insidious and demanding far beyond what we can imagine. For many women, dissatisfaction with their appearance affects their daily lives, almost continually. Such a horrible waste!
I studied contestants of the Miss America pageant because I wanted to understand more about the organization I had so often criticized. I can’t adequately sum up what I learned in a comment, but I have to say I was very surprised to find that most women in the organization are feminist, even though they are criticized by feminists.
One of my biggest goals in studying very attractive women is to highlight that beauty obsession makes no sense. What if we learned that the perceived advantages of pretty privilege don’t really balance out the serious disadvantages? Might we become less beauty obsessed as a result?
I am still learning and unpacking this very emotional and multilayered phenomena. I can tell you that very attractive women I’ve worked with often feel guilty about their advantages. I can also tell you that they’ve often suffered significantly because of the way they are set apart from other women, and the way men objectify them and use them for their own purposes.
I have seen beautiful women get caught in anorexia because they can’t bear the thought of losing their beauty and come close to losing their lives instead.
Annie, Thank you for your comments. Maybe this is a subject best discussed in its own forum? I need to think carefully about how I would write an essay addressing this issue.
I’ve been writing my personal stories which often highlight my personal experiences, but need to write something that encompasses the experience of Miss America and beautiful women more globally.
It’s a challenge like wrestling an octopus that I often back away from due to my personal experiences where I have been harmed on many levels because of my appearance because when I was younger, I was seen as winning the beauty lottery.
As I write, there is pretty privilege, pretty problems, and pretty purpose. What is a beautiful woman to do if her appearance harms other women? How does she handle the challenges she faces that few care to hear about? How can we take away the wedge that puts some women on a lonely pedestal and leaves other women feeling they will never be good enough?
Sorry Paris, for another very long comment on your stack. I don’t mean to be disrespectful.
Agreed that this is so complex (and that there’s probably a better forum, I apologize again as well for the rant comment, just got excited about a topic that’s both so personal and so widespread with all my morning energy).
I focused on struggling to see beauty and beauty platforms as potential solutions due to conversations they *may* lead to (especially since I lost years on that kind of thinking), but to the important points you just made- I think questioning what beauty in our society is really worth by exploring the experiences of women who are positioned to “benefit” the most from our status quo- but ultimately still suffer under patriarchy- will bring about crucial perspective.
Tried to keep this short so if any other thoughts pop up, I’ll shoot you a message. I can’t wait to see the culmination of your personal journey and research experiences !
Thanks Annie! I’d love to have you shoot me a message or maybe continue this conversation via email if that works for you. I’d love to have someone to brainstorm with and bounce ideas off of.
Your work sounds extremely interesting! Sorry up front I also got on a rant reply- I haven’t looked closely at Miss America contestants and messaging, so I probably sound a lot like you did when you started your research. That said, I’m hitting post anyways to express skepticism that beauty is truly power, no matter how powerful it can feel.
It sounds like a crucial question for the research involves evaluating what the reach and impact of the platform is, and whether it is so transformative that it is worth the perpetuation of performance for men. This is probably easiest to explore with concrete examples like evaluating demographics of a pageant audience and maybe trying to capture via survey how they felt when the winner delivered a sanitized message like “all women are amazing and should love themselves” (that does not mention the context of why women often don’t love themselves in the first place, if the contestant doesn’t want Oprah-esque opportunity doors closed on them).
But it gets much trickier to apply the idea- that beauty can allow someone to so much change minds that there’s social progress- in day to day situations like the prettiest candidate getting a job. It puts it on those women to critique the system through which they have progressed and benefitted from by doing everything “right” up until that point. The young women who are rewarded for their beauty may not know how to go about doing this, and even those that do are most often going to be in rooms stacked entirely against them. I think moments that feel affirmative to the widespread belief Paris mentioned about pretty girls being dumb can unfold way too easily if the beautiful woman they so enjoy chokes or backs down- that moment becomes amusing, not impactful. Which I’d further argue is more likely to happen than a movie moment of a beautiful woman speaking truth to power in leaving a partner that has begun to degrade her after a year of love bombing or at her 9-5, since we are socialized to fear and internalize disapproval and confrontation. Women strong and well-read enough to hold ground in those situations, chances are, had to focus less on maintaining a perfect appearance to heal and build those characteristics, and the moment she’s physically flawed, she’s just bitter because she’s ugly or old or fat.
There are certainly women that hit the genetic lottery for our beauty standards AND despite reaping social rewards for this and not directly experiencing patriarchal rejection, sought out feminist critiques and can orate them impactfully under pressure- but for the majority of women, platform via good performance won’t make way for our personhood. It sounds like the incognito winners figured this out the hard way, as most of us eventually do, but only after younger women have already stepped up to perform to be valued- based on the beautiful, hollow women they aspired to be as kids.
I loved this! I've been making paintings about this desire to be accepted vs being myself. I'm not the best at putting it into words but this is everything I've been feeling! Thanks for speaking my mind!
Thank you so much! That is validating. I love prose so much, definitely get in my head about it sometimes because it’s so different from what I normally do and can be so vulnerable. Always so proud of these pieces in the end :))
Thank you for sharing this- it is a crazy realization that the things we are conditioned to really FEEL make us the most valuable entail not having a voice or even a sense of self.
I was well over 25 before I realized how little I knew myself, much less had to contribute because of all the focus that went into chasing “good enough” for patriarchal standards. It’s hard not to worry it’s too late, and focus forward- on the remaining work of catching and unlearning comfortable habits of people pleasing to the extreme, and figuring out how to build myself. It’s hard to process grief for the time lost without falling into further damaging my self esteem over not having it fully click sooner.
Hearing how this same phenomenon was experienced differently is insightful and affirming, I appreciate you putting yourself out there for this discussion. 💕
Well said. This comes at the perfect time, as I’ve unfortunately just started slipping back into a beauty obsession (it is summer, after all). At times when external beauty’s self-imposed burden spontaneously springs on me, I always feel myself slipping away. Instead of reading books, I listen to podcasts on “feminine tips” and the like. It is always an effort (though it is the most important) to remind myself that it is not my job to make me palatable for others.
Being gracious with yourself is the most important thing right now. I am in the exact same position as you. A lot of recent circumstances leading me to care a lot more about how I look than I normally do. This might be a sad way of looking at it but I’ve always thought that we don’t have a lot of control over these thoughts. We’ve been conditioned since birth and nearly every aspect of our culture/media works to reinforce that idea. It will be a lifelong work and that is not our fault :)
Thank you, Paris, for writing about your experience and feelings so honestly. I agree. Many men want a pretty girl who is soft, docile, and quiet. I once heard a man talk about a beautiful woman he had met. She was perfect on the outside. The minute she opened her mouth, he was turned off. He wanted to tell her to please be quiet so he could enjoy her fully. As he told this story, all the men around the table laughed.
Your story intrigued me because I have felt exactly the opposite. I have felt that beautiful women have an opportunity to be vocal, strong, opinionated, and trailblazers. If a man doesn’t like them that way, oh well, another man will come along, someone better who wants to know her as more than a sex object. An example is Gloria Steinem. She leveraged her beauty to fuel a whole movement, and men were always attracted to her. But maybe we are talking about two different things here? The difference between a pretty girl and a beautiful woman?
My biggest problems as a pretty girl came from low self-esteem and from not believing in myself. After going through therapy, and healing many wounds, I found that men were more interested in me as a whole person and not just as a pretty girl.
But beauty is power and men are attracted to women who make them feel stronger. The stronger and more beautiful you are, the stronger a man needs to feel to have the confidence to take you on. At least I suspect that is the way it works.
Sorry to go on so long, but this is a conundrum that I’ve been trying to understand for a long time. Thank you for helping me see things from a different perspective. I admire your honesty and your insight.
Thank you so much!
Stories like that are so sobering but so devastating. It always shocks me how comfortably men can talk about us like that.
I see what you’re saying! I definitely think there is a privilege afforded to beautiful women. They are given space to be seen and self-express, however I wonder how much of that is well-intentioned. Often I think that “quirky” beautiful women are categorized as “manic pixie dream girls” or deeply intellectual ones will be assumed to be disingenuous. There is this fundamental assumption that women can’t be smart/intelligent so any expression of it must be made into a performance or kink for men.
I am glad you’ve taken the time to heal. Even after I went through therapy I found myself looking back at old relationships more fondly. I definitely don’t think what I’m saying here applies to all conventionally attractive women and relationships!
You’re absolutely right about beauty and strength. I often find that men find extremely beautiful women to be intimidating. I think they put more effort into humbling them. I don’t think women have this same response with conventionally attractive men. I think we’re more likely to become self-critical as to how we show up and whether or not we’re worthy.
Thank you so much for your support :))
Thank you so much for your work, and your very thoughtful reply. I appreciate all the effort you put into everything you do. I know the work you do takes a lot of your time and I appreciate your investment.
Even though I have a doctorate in clinical psychology, there were many times people assumed I was a dumb blonde. For a while, I studied the Miss America scholarship organization. There are a lot of strong, intelligent, and articulate women- both as contestants and as managers of the program.
Tiffany Ogle, a tv host of “Morning Blend” filmed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was a Miss Minnesota. That exposure led to her job on television.
She had some great insights about women, beauty and power. She told me that, when she was wearing her crown, men came up to her and said she was the most beautiful woman they had ever seen.
When she took off her crown, they saw her as an ordinary pretty girl, but nothing more. She also told me that beauty opens lots of doors, but you have to keep explaining yourself constantly after those doors are opened.
Some of the Miss America winners I talked to live their lives incognito. They don’t want any of their friends or neighbors to know that they once wore a Miss America crown.
I plan to write about my research into the Miss America organization sometime. The women I met surprised me. They are not at all the way they are often portrayed or what I expected. And yet when I saw the most recent winner on a television program, I was disappointed with her practiced beauty and chirpy way of speaking. I also noticed that two of the blonde winners of consecutive years were almost impossible to tell apart.
It’s a multi layered issue. Initially as a feminist, I had no respect for the Miss America organization. However, would we even know Oprah Winfrey if she hadn’t won Miss Black Tennessee? It was that exposure that led to her first television news anchor position.
Sorry this is so long again. But the study of beautiful women is specialized and I find few people even willing to discuss it. When I find someone open to the concepts, it’s hard for me to hold back from talking to someone who understands.
Thank you, again!
Yes this is such a complicated issue to unpack, both for women perceived as beautiful and for those who don’t win that “lottery” as you call it. Sometimes, to be honest, I struggle to know exactly how I feel about this issue. Yet I think it’s very important to examine for a number of reasons.
What if people learned that winning the beauty lottery comes with a great deal of pain and self-doubt? As someone who has studied beautiful women, I have found that some of them are among the emptiest and unhappiest women I’ve ever met, not just when they get older or gain weight and lose their beauty, but even while they are at their beauty peak and find that men really only want them for sex. This is only one of the negatives of winning that lottery.
Beautiful women are more likely to be stalked and physically assaulted multiple times. They are more likely to have difficulty making female friends and often lack the social support they need to deal with male predators. Some research has found that they are more likely to marry narcissistic men., and we all know that’s not a great thing.
The pressure to be beautiful is one that haunts women regardless of their appearance. This pressure is insidious and demanding far beyond what we can imagine. For many women, dissatisfaction with their appearance affects their daily lives, almost continually. Such a horrible waste!
I studied contestants of the Miss America pageant because I wanted to understand more about the organization I had so often criticized. I can’t adequately sum up what I learned in a comment, but I have to say I was very surprised to find that most women in the organization are feminist, even though they are criticized by feminists.
One of my biggest goals in studying very attractive women is to highlight that beauty obsession makes no sense. What if we learned that the perceived advantages of pretty privilege don’t really balance out the serious disadvantages? Might we become less beauty obsessed as a result?
I am still learning and unpacking this very emotional and multilayered phenomena. I can tell you that very attractive women I’ve worked with often feel guilty about their advantages. I can also tell you that they’ve often suffered significantly because of the way they are set apart from other women, and the way men objectify them and use them for their own purposes.
I have seen beautiful women get caught in anorexia because they can’t bear the thought of losing their beauty and come close to losing their lives instead.
Annie, Thank you for your comments. Maybe this is a subject best discussed in its own forum? I need to think carefully about how I would write an essay addressing this issue.
I’ve been writing my personal stories which often highlight my personal experiences, but need to write something that encompasses the experience of Miss America and beautiful women more globally.
It’s a challenge like wrestling an octopus that I often back away from due to my personal experiences where I have been harmed on many levels because of my appearance because when I was younger, I was seen as winning the beauty lottery.
As I write, there is pretty privilege, pretty problems, and pretty purpose. What is a beautiful woman to do if her appearance harms other women? How does she handle the challenges she faces that few care to hear about? How can we take away the wedge that puts some women on a lonely pedestal and leaves other women feeling they will never be good enough?
Sorry Paris, for another very long comment on your stack. I don’t mean to be disrespectful.
Agreed that this is so complex (and that there’s probably a better forum, I apologize again as well for the rant comment, just got excited about a topic that’s both so personal and so widespread with all my morning energy).
I focused on struggling to see beauty and beauty platforms as potential solutions due to conversations they *may* lead to (especially since I lost years on that kind of thinking), but to the important points you just made- I think questioning what beauty in our society is really worth by exploring the experiences of women who are positioned to “benefit” the most from our status quo- but ultimately still suffer under patriarchy- will bring about crucial perspective.
Tried to keep this short so if any other thoughts pop up, I’ll shoot you a message. I can’t wait to see the culmination of your personal journey and research experiences !
Thanks Annie! I’d love to have you shoot me a message or maybe continue this conversation via email if that works for you. I’d love to have someone to brainstorm with and bounce ideas off of.
Your work sounds extremely interesting! Sorry up front I also got on a rant reply- I haven’t looked closely at Miss America contestants and messaging, so I probably sound a lot like you did when you started your research. That said, I’m hitting post anyways to express skepticism that beauty is truly power, no matter how powerful it can feel.
It sounds like a crucial question for the research involves evaluating what the reach and impact of the platform is, and whether it is so transformative that it is worth the perpetuation of performance for men. This is probably easiest to explore with concrete examples like evaluating demographics of a pageant audience and maybe trying to capture via survey how they felt when the winner delivered a sanitized message like “all women are amazing and should love themselves” (that does not mention the context of why women often don’t love themselves in the first place, if the contestant doesn’t want Oprah-esque opportunity doors closed on them).
But it gets much trickier to apply the idea- that beauty can allow someone to so much change minds that there’s social progress- in day to day situations like the prettiest candidate getting a job. It puts it on those women to critique the system through which they have progressed and benefitted from by doing everything “right” up until that point. The young women who are rewarded for their beauty may not know how to go about doing this, and even those that do are most often going to be in rooms stacked entirely against them. I think moments that feel affirmative to the widespread belief Paris mentioned about pretty girls being dumb can unfold way too easily if the beautiful woman they so enjoy chokes or backs down- that moment becomes amusing, not impactful. Which I’d further argue is more likely to happen than a movie moment of a beautiful woman speaking truth to power in leaving a partner that has begun to degrade her after a year of love bombing or at her 9-5, since we are socialized to fear and internalize disapproval and confrontation. Women strong and well-read enough to hold ground in those situations, chances are, had to focus less on maintaining a perfect appearance to heal and build those characteristics, and the moment she’s physically flawed, she’s just bitter because she’s ugly or old or fat.
There are certainly women that hit the genetic lottery for our beauty standards AND despite reaping social rewards for this and not directly experiencing patriarchal rejection, sought out feminist critiques and can orate them impactfully under pressure- but for the majority of women, platform via good performance won’t make way for our personhood. It sounds like the incognito winners figured this out the hard way, as most of us eventually do, but only after younger women have already stepped up to perform to be valued- based on the beautiful, hollow women they aspired to be as kids.
I loved this! I've been making paintings about this desire to be accepted vs being myself. I'm not the best at putting it into words but this is everything I've been feeling! Thanks for speaking my mind!
Thank you so much! I love all the ways that we can self-express! I’m so happy that you’ve found your avenue :)
Wow , that was so courageous of you to talk about that in a way too beautiful prose
Thank you so much! That is validating. I love prose so much, definitely get in my head about it sometimes because it’s so different from what I normally do and can be so vulnerable. Always so proud of these pieces in the end :))
Proud of you
Thank you for sharing this- it is a crazy realization that the things we are conditioned to really FEEL make us the most valuable entail not having a voice or even a sense of self.
I was well over 25 before I realized how little I knew myself, much less had to contribute because of all the focus that went into chasing “good enough” for patriarchal standards. It’s hard not to worry it’s too late, and focus forward- on the remaining work of catching and unlearning comfortable habits of people pleasing to the extreme, and figuring out how to build myself. It’s hard to process grief for the time lost without falling into further damaging my self esteem over not having it fully click sooner.
Hearing how this same phenomenon was experienced differently is insightful and affirming, I appreciate you putting yourself out there for this discussion. 💕
Paris I've always admired your articles and this one so far is the best 💯 keep the fire burning 🔥🔥🔥
Thank you! I didn’t know it was wlw haha! Just reinforces my defense of it lol