We Could Care Less

Helen of Troy

This post is inspired by Australian Julia, who described her bout of anxiety over her looks after mentioning another girl's beauty to three guys. Going nuts with fear that we have lost the genetic lottery in the eyes of all the men around is something I am sure all we modern girls can understand. My solution is that we care less about what men think. After all, they don't care as much about what they think as we too often seem to do. In fact, sometimes they don't even think.

 Female thought process

I'm serious. One of the big differences between men and women is that men are capable of switching off thought. When you ask a man what he's thinking, and he says "Nothing," he's actually telling the truth. When you say "What do you think of Sharon?" and he says, "I don't," he 's not being bitchy. He just doesn't think of Sharon. And the fact that you think about your looks all the time doesn't mean that men think about your looks all the time. Male thought looks like this: A-->B-->C-->D-->E. Plod, plod. Female thought looks like this (see photo):

Besides all the other signs that Bruce Jenner is a man, his fond belief that womanhood can be achieved with a lipstick, knife and silicon (A-->B-->C) is pretty obvious. But it is not nice to make fun of the mentally ill, so I shall return to the only people over whom we have real control, and that is ourselves. 

Our inner selves, I mean. We could have whole new faces carved on into our own, risking scars and horrible misshapen silicon shifting under the skin, and even if they looked great (doubtful), our inner selves could still be wailing away: oh, but what do men think?  A better question is, DO men think? That is, DO men think about me? And the answer to that is, Why should they? I know a gazillion men, and I think of very few of them, and even then of most of them only occasionally. 

"I owe it to the public to look my best," said some celebrity or another. "They have to look at me." And I think this is the right point of view from which to see your grooming habits. It is a duty not to offend against community standards. Therefore, you must wash and tidy your hair before you run for your bus. You must put on clean clothes that proclaim you to be an inoffensive, if interesting, member of society. If you are twelve, you shouldn't grieve the middle-aged ladies on the bus by wearing "sexy" clothing. If you are fifty-two, you shouldn't embarrass the twelve year olds (and everyone else) by wearing the same thing. If you are going to a wedding, you wear a pretty dress--not white--and shoes. If you are going to a Sunday church service, you cover your shoulders and cleavage. If you are going to a Goth bar, you wear black. (Wearing blue jeans to any of these places is just rude. Daily Mass, okay. You pop in between this activity and that. But Sunday Mass? Come on. Even if you just milked the cows, you surely have time to wash your hands and put on a skirt.)

But as far as "beauty" goes--try to forget it. Either any given man is going to be attracted to your face and figure, or he is not. End of. Apparently men are attracted to faces brightened with makeup--duh, lipstick is red, and our eyes are drawn to red--but I have never heard a man who wasn't a homosexual make-up artist say to a woman "I really like your make-up."  (Usually women say it to each other, and then there is a conversation about make-up tutorials on youtube.)* And the British press is full of unkind remarks about features that have obviously gone under the knife or needle: "trout pout" is the one that first comes to mind. 

Actually, I take back the "End of". A man can be attracted to your face and figure without liking you. All unusually pretty (or "common denominator" pretty) girls know this, and by the age of 21 are experts at identifying it. A man can even hate a woman because he is attracted to her face and figure, for he sees his attraction to her as her power over him, which he must resist by punishing her. So on, so ISIS. A man who honks his horn and says, smiling with every tooth, "Hey, looking good, baby" is not lying about being attracted to you, he is lying about LIKING you. Obviously he doesn't like you; he doesn't even know you. 

So either any given man is attracted to your face and figure, or he is not. Start of. If only a few men appear to be attracted to you, then you are more vulnerable to anticipate foolishly and just hope that (rather than discover if) he likes you, too.  But whether a guy likes or dislikes or hates you, on top of being attracted to you, can be known only from social interaction. And by social interaction, I mean around other people in the community. The guy on the Boston street who forced his phone number into my hand saying, "You gotta call me! You just gotta!" probably would not have recognized my voice had I been silly enough to call him. ("Sandra, right? No--Charlene! Oh yeah, of course, baby, just havin you on. Of course I remember you! Heh heh heh!") Actually Facebook most definitely counts. You meet a guy, he befriends you on Facebook, and he has fewer than 200 Facebook friends, or he actually sends you a message... Well, I think that counts as social interaction in the community.

If, however, all the guys you know who seem to like you don't seem to be attracted to you, don't sweat it. Big fat deal. Are you attracted to all of them? No. But you still like them okay? Well, great. You're more than a sexual object, and they're a lot more than sexual subjects. You're a sexual subject, too, by the way, and you'll notice men don't browse the make-up counter, wondering how to make their eyes look bigger. You're just attracted to any given man, or you're not. 

As I have said I zillion times, I am not (nor have I even been) particularly beautiful according to conventional standards. (My hair is by unconventional ones, and I used to have the muscles of a Greek goddess, weep weep.) Nevertheless, I have attracted more than one guy who actually liked me in the last thirty years, not including Paweł the wonder child who fell for me when we were six. I am not sure I attracted one guy a year--and knew about it--but maybe I did. I don't know. I care only for illustrative purposes. As men on the prowl for women like to say, "It's a numbers game." 

The chap who first said that me, a neighbour, used to chase chickens when other work was scarce, so he slapped a "Not My League" label on civil servant me shortly after we met. I rather liked him; he was a good soul, although prone to giving out his phone number to waitresses at the same bar and wondering why they didn't call. As women, we are lucky that we aren't actually expected to hand out our unsolicited phone numbers to men. At most, we have been expected to trail ourselves through crowds of men like fishing lures. I suppose we can still do that, as long as we are trying to catch the fish that are most attracted to "Nice Catholic Girl With Too Much Self-Respect To Say Nothing of Respect for Nice Catholic Men To Dress Like a Hooker." However, I think it best that even then we just dress for success, and then forget all about it. 

Fisherman (and fisherwomen) must get cranky when they stand knee-deep in frozen streams without catching anything, but surely they don't resent the fish. Still less do they freak out that they will never, in their entire lives, catch a fish. Of course, they will catch a fish---unless, of course, they stop going to the stream and take up gardening instead.

*All the same, I think men prefer women wearing an average amount of makeup because most men are by definition conventional, and women conventionally wear some makeup. If men are turned off by female leg hair, it is because women conventionally shave, wax or melt off the hair on our legs. WHY, o WHY did we start doing that?!