The Beauty Debt, mk 1...

[deathbyshinies]

Murr. Having spent most of the morning fighting with Photoshop and the Wellington Square laundry machines, and having just poured boiling water into my shoe (luckily, I wasn't wearing it at the time!), I am going to throw in the towel and write the post that I've been wanting to write for ages, but haven't been sitting still (and not either

Comments

[deathbyshinies]

It is true. She should get together with Alanna (first explicitly un-pretty book hero I ever read about*!) and they could have an anti-makeover party. It would probably involve riding horses very fast and getting terribly muddy.

* well, except for all those ugly-duckling style stories where the heroine ends up beyootiful by the end of the book/series. Anne of Green Gables, I'm looking at you!

[ayaron]

"well, except for all those ugly-duckling style stories where the heroine ends up beyootiful by the end of the book/series

[deathbyshinies]

And does anyone else think Rudolf should have led the rest of the of Reindeer into the heart of a snowstorm and then left them all to die of frost bite in repayment for years of name calling and ostracising?

Hee, I do now!

You're absolutely right about the fairy tales -- with the added element in Beauty and the Beast that 'if you stick around and love (a male) someone enough, he will eventually stop being (anything from cold and aloof to violent and animalistic, depending on the version you get) and will become the prince of your dreams. Don't be scared if it looks like he's going to hurt you, he just needs your truuuuuuuue love to make him better'.

Yeah, we know how well that usually works out.

[hildabeast]

<3

[deathbyshinies]

<3 to you too. Essay well!

[sols_light]

Two words: Social currency. Beauty is an alternate form of social currency in that it is an effective attractant for a numbr of partners allowing a possessr of a reasonable amount of it to choose from a wider range of potential mates and thus not have to cultivate other attributes to compensate. Society emphasises this through objectification of women, particularly in this case BY women who have far more to gain as rivals than prospective partners need to care about individual women. So what you arrive at is a need to cultivate a certain modicum of beauty out of fear that everyone else around you will do it better and therefore take opportunities in life from you which can't necessarily be earned through other exchanges of currency, either in the forms of money, or other forms of status

[deathbyshinies]

Society emphasises this through objectification of women, particularly in this case BY women who have far more to gain as rivals than prospective partners need to care about individual women.

I know what you mean, but as I think I've said before, that popular image of women as perpetrating the majority of beauty policing on one another just does *not* jive with my lived experience. Since leaving school, I've unquestionably been called ugly/fat/'dog' etc by more men than women, and when I've asked other women about it, some have had the same experience, and some have experienced a mix of beauty policing from women and men. Also, the majority of popular culture and internet images of ugly women as scary/laughable/'offensive' are created by men - from mainstream films like Eddie Murphy's Norbit to the aforementioned Encylopedia Dramatica. Of course, this is skewed to some extent by the sheer volume of popular entertainment texts that are created by men in any case, but it does put a bit of a damper on that 'women are their own worst

[sols_light]

I guess in terms of women objectifying women I'm looking directly at the marketing of Women's magazines, daytime television and the majority of the fashion industry. Direct abuse people recall may have been more direct from men, because men tend to act that way due to their socialisation, but women gossip behind someone else's back as a general rule and destory reputations and connections without necessarily resorting to direct confrontation

[thekit]

Bravo!

[thekit]

Here's a thought, tell me if this rings true:

"Beauty techniques sell better when they are painful and expensive because this helps condition a person into feeling discomfort when they see that the beauty debt has not been paid - they imagine the pain that will have to be gone through to rectify the situation."

It still doesn't explain why men feel discomfort when they see unpaid beauty debt.

I'm pretty sure that men are conditioned to this response of finding ugly women painful - I don't think it is just made up by those who claim it.

The patriarchy is an emergent system. Everyone follows it by example, not by having it explained and then repeating the conventional lies. The patriarchy is truly believed and thought to be self evident by those who practice it, without resort to fragile devices such as doublethink.

[deathbyshinies]

"Beauty techniques sell better when they are painful and expensive because this helps condition a person into feeling discomfort when they see that the beauty debt has not been paid - they imagine the pain that will have to be gone through to rectify the situation."Very much so. When I first saw sight of Susan Boyle's eyebrows, they actually made me me itch in the blank spaces where the rest of my own eyebrows should be

[thekit]

Is it related to a doctrine of original sin, and some kind of twisted purification by self flagellation ritual

[thekit]

Hmm, maybe I'll run with this isolation thing.

A high ranking girl who has paid a lot of pain to not just meet her beauty debt but actually create a surplus can then bless a man by paying him attention.

This raises his status among men.

Men then fight to gather as much "attention from pretty girls" credits as they can... Maybe this is what is known on encyclopedia dramatica as "man points".

A man is unable to generate this kind of beauty capital on his own, and his efforts are only able to modify indirect attributes (his own physical grooming, wealth, power etc) in the hope of attracting female attention.

Does that mean that attention from ugly women actually depletes a man's beauty capital, and thus his status in the peerage of men?

As in "What a loser. He hangs out with desperate molls."

Also with Susan Boyle: Susan Boyle got a huge amount of, er, I guess "Man Points" when the impeccably groomed female judges showered her with teary eyed attention and the male judges followed suit.