PicoBlog

Someone subtweeted an essay, and someone else directed me to it. (It’s not a snitch-post, I am not revealing the subtweeter’s identity nor linking to that post.) The piece is by Grazie Sophia Christie, a woman who is, going by her own Instagram, better-looking than 98% of humanity, but who is losing a great deal of sleep about that remaining 2%. Once I saw it, I remembered that I’d actually skimmed it previously, directed by BDM’s excellent newsletter post about it.

My favorite part of BDM’s piece:

On the other hand, I do respect any essay that does not do the, to my mind, usually cowardly thing of digging up a study that can be plausibly interpreted to say you’re right according to science, or interviewing three people you crowdsourced on twitter, or whatever.

YES, a ban, forever, on the line about how according to science and the Pew Institute, whatever hyperpersonal thing you’ve got going on is universal. Add in one additional line about how what you’re dealing with would be worse still if you were less privileged and that’s basically what articles are and have been for about 15 years. But editors demand this, claiming that readers insist. It’s a terrible loop and I want nothing to do with it.

It doesn’t seem incidental to the article BDM and I guess now I too am writing about that the writer is good-looking. I sort of think you have to be if you’re giving so much as a moment’s thought to not being beautiful-beautiful.

Or maybe not! Things are confusing for us mids. I have been called “butt-ugly” (by a preppy boy at summer camp when I was maybe 11) and told I possessed “pretty privilege” (I think this was the blogspot era, and that whoever said this had only seen pre-smartphone photos). I’ve spent enough time in the presence of spectacular-looking women to know that I am not that thing, and how wise of today’s youth to come up for a term for the thing I am. I can’t do much with the new sexual orientation and gender identity labels, being neither demisexual nor genderfluid, so let me have mid.

And it sounds as if Christie, the author of the essay in The Point, is, at least, a woman with experience of mid-ness. (“I’m looking good these days, perhaps because I’m finally well-loved, but that’s for another story.”) Instagram shows no one at their worst. I would be the very last person to assume that because a woman looks nice in her mid-20s she was similarly presentable at, say, 14.

I’ve been giving more thought than usual to the beautiful woman question, both because I had reason to revisit Naomi Wolf (not, like, personally visit her), and because of book-stuff. And then there was the Savage Lovecast threesome discussion, wherein someone was suggesting that a woman prone to jealousy—but who, despite not being into women, has agreed to invite one into the bedroom, I guess for her male partner—ought to make sure their third is plainer than she is.

Do straight women get anything out of being around stunning women? Because we do know who they are. We don’t get to be coy (or homophobic) the way straight men do when they claim they can’t begin to guess why Brad Pitt is considered attractive.

Christie writes of “a precisely feminine pain I know well, worse than menstrual cramps. A sense of one’s own plainness. Inferiority. An envy so profound and wistful it is almost sexually charged.” In literature, she argues, “Some of the most exquisite passages of eroticism are in the voice of women envious of other women.”

Is it hot to envy another woman’s looks? And I really do mean to envy them. Obviously if the plain-looking woman is into women, she’d be capable of envy along with other responses. But Christie is talking about the sort of women for whom good looks are a means to getting men.

I think of my own response to seeing a gorgeous woman, and consider the full range of thoughts such encounters have, historically, inspired. These have included, in no particular order:

-Why does she get to look like that, and I don’t?

-If I buy that shirt maybe I get to look like that? (Not how it works, but enough of us imagine it does, thus the phenomenon of beautiful women being hired to advertise clothing.)

-If I spend time with her, maybe the beautifulness will somehow catch. (Nope.)

-If she’s interested in being friends with me, it must indicate that I am in the same league she is, because people generally are about as attractive as their friends, right? This is a thing? (Lol.)

-Think of the men she could get, looking like that.

-What is she doing with that man, when she could get anyone?

What I’m getting at is, contrary to popular opinion, there isn’t a thing where everyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, agrees that “Women are the decorative sex, men are not,” and finds it pleasurable to look at attractive women. The beautiful woman is—for every single straight woman on the planet, according to science, according to Gallup, which definitely occupies itself with things like this—at best a warped sort of affirmation, and at worst a bummer. Sometimes it’s just whatever. But hot? No, that’s what it’s called when the gorgeous person is a man.

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