I was in the store the other day, and I noticed the women on the covers of the magazines. I couldn’t help but laugh at the supposed beauty staring back at me from the covers. As a general rule, I can’t find them attractive. Or more accurately, I can’t find them to be the uber hot women that we are lead to believe. I’ve known (and currently know) people that could easily take the place of most of the models on those magazines.
It’s only a matter of lighting, digital effects, and expensive clothes, really. I mean honestly. When I made a pseudo living as a photographer way back in the day, I saw some of those ‘models’ when they first got up in the morning, and by God, some were pretty hideous.
Without the three pounds of makeup, expensive clothes, special lighting, and digital changes, it’s really hard to see what exactly some of these people are really thinking. I just don’t get how they can be seen as beautiful.
As I write this, it occurs to me that in my lifetime, I’ve never wanted to break up with a woman because she wasn’t pretty enough. This becomes important given that studies suggest (and certainly our culture perpetuates) that men pay more attention to their partner’s appearance than women do. I’m willing to accept that may be true in terms of initial attraction; the first few moments, days, weeks, where you are deciding that you really do like someone and that you want to spend more time, as much as possible, with them. But I don’t know many people who dated someone for years and then decided that they didn’t look good enough for them.
This applies even in cases where their partner gained weight or became dramatically less good-looking. It just doesn’t seem to me that it happens often, that a man leaves a woman because she isn’t pretty enough. Do a study of married men and ask how many would be happier if their wife was prettier, and how much happier they would be. I wonder what they would say? It may be that they would say they would be happier, and then if they suddenly had a prettier wife, not much would change.
Realistically, I’m sure there are girls I would simply never devote enough time to, never make it through those first few weeks, because they weren’t pretty enough. Sometimes the attraction simply isn’t there, and you learn to move on and allow yourself to find someone different. Attraction is, at the very least, and important aspect of loving and living with someone.
On the flipside, I love to look for attractive women in movies, because there are so many of them, and it reveals the trick, the strangeness of beauty. Traditional and magazine cover beauty is boring; show me a person with a real face and dark eyes. I ignore actresses whose names I know; I pick out extras, people in the background, no name pseudo-love interests that flirt around a college class in the movie about the guy and the thing in the place.
There are huge amounts of these women just wandering around movie sets, because they are makeup folks and hairdresser folks and people paid to make others look beautiful. The very fact that so many women can honestly entertain dreams of becoming models is because models are really a dime a dozen. They get big names that we remember through a marketing machine (and digital photo folks), but the rudiments of their beauty are present in a thousand people. It is an acknowledged truth that with a nice digital camera, some good clothes, the right lighting, and enough hours in front of my computer screen, and I can get a damn nice looking headshot of most anyone.
Certainly bodies are a little hard, in that you could modify them digitally but no matter what light trick you use, some bodies don’t conform to our social images of beauty. Who is to say that our societal impressions of beauty are correct, though? For one culture, one standard will not fit another. A thousand years ago, the idea of beauty was far different from today. There are men that love women that are large, and others that love women that are incredibly skinny and borderline anorexic. Who’s to say what love and what beauty is?
But like I said, I’ve seen some models first thing in the morning, and they look horrible; the right makeup, the right hair, the right way of going about it, and almost anyone could be them.
So what would be the point of breaking up with someone because they aren’t pretty enough? They could make themselves pretty, they just don’t…and therein lies the rub.
If my girlfriend or wife or what have you never wore makeup when I was around, it wouldn’t be that I might feel slighted because of that, but it could be that I would be hurt that she didn’t care enough to try and look pretty for me every once in a while.