Beauty matters, but we find it difficult to talk about

Something that feels weird to me: beauty matters a lot socially, but it’s often considered gauche to talk about it honestly.

On the one hand, lookism is clearly everywhere. Ads, film and TV overwhelmingly feature beautiful people. Nominally ‘plain’ or ugly characters are invariably played by hot actors, because god-forbid audiences have to look at someone actually-ugly for an hour. Fat, old, or average-looking people seldom feature as romantic leads, or in sex scenes. People assume that more physically attractive people are also kinder and smarter.

And this fact is not exactly a hot (heh) take. Most people would agree that, as a society, we value beauty.

(Beauty and sexual attractiveness are different, but in this post I’m going to conflate them, because I think that the point I’m making applies to both).

Yet there are weird taboos around discussing one’s own beauty, or the beauty of others.¹

You can say that others are beautiful, both behind their back and to their face; but it’s really rude to say that others are ugly, especially to their face (even if you say it in a neutral way). It’s even pretty shady to say that people are average-looking.

If you want to talk about your own appearance, you can talk about your subjective feelings of beauty (‘felt cute, might delete later’) — though my impression is that this is easier for women than for men. On the other side, if you feel like being vulnerable, you can admit that you’re self-conscious about your appearance, that you have a negative self-image or even dysphoria. But you can’t compare yourself to others (‘I’m more/less beautiful than X friend’); and if you do describe yourself as ugly or unattractive, people will immediately think you have low self-esteem or are looking for reassurance.

This seems weird to me: I don’t think I’m particularly beautiful, but I also don’t feel super bad about this. Maybe it would be *cool* to be more beautiful and have some of the advantages that beautiful people do; but I don’t usually feel ashamed or embarrassed about how I look. I never attached my self-esteem to the belief that I’m beautiful. But it feels like if I were to describe myself (neutrally) as unattractive, people would pity me, or want to reassure me, or feel uncomfortable, or something.

I always found it interesting how in the Platonic dialogues, people talk about Socrates’ ugliness completely neutrally (or at most with affectionate mocking). It’s clear that Socrates has so much rizz that he doesn’t need to be beautiful. When people reassure me about my appearance, it can sometimes sound like ‘I must tell you you’re attractive, because you need to be attractive; it would be terrible if you weren’t’. But that’s not how I feel! I think I have lots of positive qualities; it’s fine if beauty is not among them.

In this, I feel like my views diverge slightly from a big chunk of progressives and lefties. Progressives often approach critique societal beauty standards, and in doing so they sort of deny the existence of “objective” beauty; they’ll point out that beauty is a social construct that varies across time and space, and that people can be beautiful even when they don’t fit the standard, media-approved mould.

Now, this is both true and helpful. People’s aesthetic and sexual preferences vary a LOT. Whatever you look like, someone out there will be super into you physically. And lots of people are capable of being attracted to or charmed by non-physical features, like kindness or charisma or humour or intelligence. Most people are beautiful to someone (their dear friends, their romantic partners, their parents, their kids).

That said, though: something can be both a social construct and also real and significant, and I feel this way about conventional attractiveness. A person who is beautiful to their adoring husband, but ugly to everyone else, has a very different life experience to a person who's beautiful to almost everyone.

Note that the universally-beautiful person doesn’t necessarily always have better experiences than the unattractive-to-most person. For example, I think hot women get more unwanted sexual attention and pestering than average-looking or ugly women, and that’s a definite downside to being hot. But the experiences are different, systematically, and we should be able to talk about them without feeling embarrassed and awkward.

I feel about beauty the same way I feel about gender and sexuality. It shouldn’t really matter that much, and inasmuch as it does matter, it shouldn’t make people treat you really differently, or cause you to have a wildly different experience in life. It certainly doesn’t have any moral valence: it’s not better or worse to be male, female, non-binary, gay, straight, bi, trans, cis.

But unfortunately, it does matter. Women do, on average, have different experiences from non-women; people’s sexuality does affect their experience in life. And it makes sense to acknowledge that. But that’s not the same as feeling bad about being a woman and/or trans and/or queer. Similarly, I think we might be a healthier society if we could talk more directly about the advantages and disadvantages of beauty and, in particular, who has them and who doesn’t.

1. In my culture, anyway. I’m interested in whether other cultures and subcultures are different.