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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#26: "I'm Not Attractive To Others."
I mean, when you are constantly being shown pictures of very attractive people, especially those kinds of people who have the benefit of entire departments of hair, makeup, and wardrobe, and who then have the further resources of digital and film retouching, editing, and otherwise ensuring that a person's blemishes are smoothed away, their imperfections are blended, and only their very best selves are presented in the images that the rest of us get to see, what other conclusion can you draw? There's a reason that the trope of Hollywood Homely exists, after all.
Yes, we're also supposedly taught from an early age that the people we see on the screens and in the glossy magazine pages are not real, that so many people who appear on camera do so because they are specifically chosen to be pretty (by some arbitrary standard) and then they are given a lot of help to make sure that they stay pretty when the camera is on them, when they're being lit by a whole bunch of additional sources, and when they appear in public. That the pictures of them we see are generally assumed to be altered so that they look their most glamorous. Actually, that's a perfectly good word to use, glamour, which has the associations of being the kind of magic that is used to witch the eye into seeing something in the way the caster wants it to be seen. And is also strongly associated with the Fair Folk and their tendency to appear supernaturally beautiful and to try and ensnare the enchanted humans into playing unwise games or being trapped in the lands of unreality, unable to get home. Also an apt metaphor, to be lured in by the ability of someone, either in makeup, wardrobe, machine, or otherwise, to turn a person into a trompe l'oeil. (We haven't even touched the departments of comics, animation, rigging, modeling, and other such things where things that never were real to start with still ping for us about their beauty. We're pattern-matching creatures, so we'll anthropomorphize.)
Even with the supposed warning that we get about not being fooled by what we see in the magazines and on the screens (and the occasional piece that gets run, book that gets published or even entire shows and videos dedicated to what someone looks like before they get in the makeup chair, and how they're transformed), there's still far more of the imagery being put on our screens and in our eyeballs without any kind of "memetic hazard" warning or other such thing. We're just supposed to remember our training and not ascribe any value at all to the fact that our imagery, while it has expanded to include a mess more of body types and colors than it had in the past, is still essentially limited to a few archetypes and a limited set of their variations. And that still applies even in the industries that are trying to make their money by finding and targeting the people who are turned on by specific niches of body types and colors. (At least until you get out to a certain point away from the spotlight and the center of where the resources come from, anyway.)
I'm trying to not ascribe this to any one gender presentation over another, because there's just as much work going on to generate beefcake as there is cheesecake, and pin-up art and poster boys are in the same general space as each other, along with what constitutes an idol, in looks, in voice, in very clear demands that they not be seen dating anyone so that they appear available to any and all of their fans. And the dark side of that imagery hits all gender presentations without discrimination. Disordered eating, disordered exercise, the belief that someone is entitled to the affections or sex from whomever they want, or that people who look a certain way are obviously more interested in sex. That some people are allowed to be choosy about who they want, based on the perceived attractiveness of themselves, and others should be grateful if anyone shows any interest in them at all, because their relative attractiveness is so low that by rights, only the desperate would seek them. The people who believe they rate high and should be rewarded accordingly, and are willing to seek whatever advantage they can over the ones they have deemed unworthy of the attention of who they feel entitled to. The ones who believe they would be able to get the attention of the one they seek, were the ones they seek not perpetually chasing the shallow and attractive with good lines and no substance instead of seeing the nice guy present in the one being overlooked. It is a funhouse mirror at best. That we still ascribe some amount of social standing and, erm, point value toward a success score to how attractive the people around us find us (and our partner) says something about us and where we place our judgment and trust. And that there's literally entire industries there to help someone raise their potential attractiveness, or to give them "infallible" advice about how to attract and retain the class of person they feel entitled to says a lot more about what we consider important when it comes to attractiveness.
So, no, I was never at the top of the attractiveness table, and as best as I could tell, I wasn't necessarily anywhere in contention. (It turns out that I'm also bad at picking up subtle flirts, so understand that my self-perception is wholly and completely subjective.) And if we go back all the way to the very earliest, remember that I'm also in the middle of believing that being a nerdy person, a gaming person, means that my attractiveness score has plummeted sufficiently that I wouldn't be in the running for anybody anyway, so I'm not really looking for the signs that someone is interested in me. Other people have their relationships, and I have people that I would be interested in. But there's also a certain amount of me thinking about myself and not being sure that I've got the requisite maturity to engage in a relationship, as well as listening to the sounds of things around and deciding, probably correctly, that the people I was interested in may not have been interested in a relationship with anybody at that point. So I would believe that I had a atypical growing-up experience, with regard to not having an entry in the Register of Middle School Crushes, or the idea of having a high school sweetheart who I might have to choose between university and her.
University didn't do much to change that for me, but again, that's from a fair amount of not being actively interested in pursuing such things or noticing the signals. It always takes some obvious expressed interest in me for me to notice. Which there at least was some of that going on in university. And at least one disaster of an attempt that ruined a friendship, and that in of itself made me even more shy and skittish about things, because I'd tried (bad timing, bad situation), and it had gone effectively terribly for me. And on I went into graduate school, where I actually did manage the bit with someone expressing explicit interest in me. So, there you have it, the whole premise is completely blown out of the water just like that! People have found me attractive, and explicitly so, and therefore all of my issues about that have been completely and incontrovertibly resolved!
Yeah, no. Because the terrible relationship that I'm still paying off was the first relationship after grad school, when I was supposed to be a reasonable adult who had gone through some false starts, some less good relationships, and was fully equipped to handle figuring out whether or not the relationship being offered me was going to be good and fulfilling or whether I should have passed on it or backed out of it quickly. But because I didn't know what to look for, and she didn't care to break it off at any point (because it would have meant not having me to support her), any of the progress I might have made about believing myself attractive to others was knocked down and suppressed for years. So I was even more not looking for the subtle signs and it took a fairly blatant sign of interest from someone else to come back to the possibility that other people might find me attractive. (Even then, I was more willing to believe that it was someone else in the party of people who had the same name that was the object of interest and affection than I was, because that bad relationship had completely trashed my ability to see myself in any kind of worthy or attractive way.) Which, yes, I managed to climb my way out of the wreckage of that relationship, but I definitely am still carrying a lot of the wounds, weasels, and trauma from having been in it. And I'm still no better at noticing subtle flirtation than I was before, so that's a skill I still don't have. (Why would I need it? Well, because some people are taught that flirting too directly is unbecoming of someone of their gender presentation. And others because they like the idea of the chase and the catch, and telling someone they're interested in them is too direct for their own desires.)
Which makes it somewhat remarkable that I've had as much success as I have in people telling me that they find me attractive. It seems to be, based on things so far, that people who get to know me through my writing make that decision for themselves along the way and then eventually there is a situation where it comes up and there are statements made. Or people who get to know me in other contexts first get to know who I am and then, similarly, when the context appears, there are statements made. It's certainly not a quick way of finding this out, but at the same time, by the time something like this appears, there's been enough figuring it out so that when someone declares their interest, it's based on having gotten to see inside my head for a while, or at least, to make some good guesses about it, and then, from there, going on and deciding whether what I look like is appealing enough to match what's already been seen coming out of my head. There are certainly worse ways of trying to figure out a relationship, as I have figured out and experienced.
It's not something I've completely discarded. I think the trauma of the bad relationship, and some of the other things that I am coming to know about myself and how I relate, are still telling me that my default is that nobody finds me attractive and it is a very rare few who find me otherwise, and fewer still who say so. This is something where I can work my way into believing quality over quantity, but sometimes I do wonder what it would be like if I were one of the people that others were like "this one's good, we want to make them better with all the tools at our disposal," and what I would look like with all of those things applied to me. What my most glamorous self would look like. (With, hopefully, an appreciation of all the work that it takes to make that happen.)
#26: "I'm Not Attractive To Others."
I mean, when you are constantly being shown pictures of very attractive people, especially those kinds of people who have the benefit of entire departments of hair, makeup, and wardrobe, and who then have the further resources of digital and film retouching, editing, and otherwise ensuring that a person's blemishes are smoothed away, their imperfections are blended, and only their very best selves are presented in the images that the rest of us get to see, what other conclusion can you draw? There's a reason that the trope of Hollywood Homely exists, after all.
Yes, we're also supposedly taught from an early age that the people we see on the screens and in the glossy magazine pages are not real, that so many people who appear on camera do so because they are specifically chosen to be pretty (by some arbitrary standard) and then they are given a lot of help to make sure that they stay pretty when the camera is on them, when they're being lit by a whole bunch of additional sources, and when they appear in public. That the pictures of them we see are generally assumed to be altered so that they look their most glamorous. Actually, that's a perfectly good word to use, glamour, which has the associations of being the kind of magic that is used to witch the eye into seeing something in the way the caster wants it to be seen. And is also strongly associated with the Fair Folk and their tendency to appear supernaturally beautiful and to try and ensnare the enchanted humans into playing unwise games or being trapped in the lands of unreality, unable to get home. Also an apt metaphor, to be lured in by the ability of someone, either in makeup, wardrobe, machine, or otherwise, to turn a person into a trompe l'oeil. (We haven't even touched the departments of comics, animation, rigging, modeling, and other such things where things that never were real to start with still ping for us about their beauty. We're pattern-matching creatures, so we'll anthropomorphize.)
Even with the supposed warning that we get about not being fooled by what we see in the magazines and on the screens (and the occasional piece that gets run, book that gets published or even entire shows and videos dedicated to what someone looks like before they get in the makeup chair, and how they're transformed), there's still far more of the imagery being put on our screens and in our eyeballs without any kind of "memetic hazard" warning or other such thing. We're just supposed to remember our training and not ascribe any value at all to the fact that our imagery, while it has expanded to include a mess more of body types and colors than it had in the past, is still essentially limited to a few archetypes and a limited set of their variations. And that still applies even in the industries that are trying to make their money by finding and targeting the people who are turned on by specific niches of body types and colors. (At least until you get out to a certain point away from the spotlight and the center of where the resources come from, anyway.)
I'm trying to not ascribe this to any one gender presentation over another, because there's just as much work going on to generate beefcake as there is cheesecake, and pin-up art and poster boys are in the same general space as each other, along with what constitutes an idol, in looks, in voice, in very clear demands that they not be seen dating anyone so that they appear available to any and all of their fans. And the dark side of that imagery hits all gender presentations without discrimination. Disordered eating, disordered exercise, the belief that someone is entitled to the affections or sex from whomever they want, or that people who look a certain way are obviously more interested in sex. That some people are allowed to be choosy about who they want, based on the perceived attractiveness of themselves, and others should be grateful if anyone shows any interest in them at all, because their relative attractiveness is so low that by rights, only the desperate would seek them. The people who believe they rate high and should be rewarded accordingly, and are willing to seek whatever advantage they can over the ones they have deemed unworthy of the attention of who they feel entitled to. The ones who believe they would be able to get the attention of the one they seek, were the ones they seek not perpetually chasing the shallow and attractive with good lines and no substance instead of seeing the nice guy present in the one being overlooked. It is a funhouse mirror at best. That we still ascribe some amount of social standing and, erm, point value toward a success score to how attractive the people around us find us (and our partner) says something about us and where we place our judgment and trust. And that there's literally entire industries there to help someone raise their potential attractiveness, or to give them "infallible" advice about how to attract and retain the class of person they feel entitled to says a lot more about what we consider important when it comes to attractiveness.
So, no, I was never at the top of the attractiveness table, and as best as I could tell, I wasn't necessarily anywhere in contention. (It turns out that I'm also bad at picking up subtle flirts, so understand that my self-perception is wholly and completely subjective.) And if we go back all the way to the very earliest, remember that I'm also in the middle of believing that being a nerdy person, a gaming person, means that my attractiveness score has plummeted sufficiently that I wouldn't be in the running for anybody anyway, so I'm not really looking for the signs that someone is interested in me. Other people have their relationships, and I have people that I would be interested in. But there's also a certain amount of me thinking about myself and not being sure that I've got the requisite maturity to engage in a relationship, as well as listening to the sounds of things around and deciding, probably correctly, that the people I was interested in may not have been interested in a relationship with anybody at that point. So I would believe that I had a atypical growing-up experience, with regard to not having an entry in the Register of Middle School Crushes, or the idea of having a high school sweetheart who I might have to choose between university and her.
University didn't do much to change that for me, but again, that's from a fair amount of not being actively interested in pursuing such things or noticing the signals. It always takes some obvious expressed interest in me for me to notice. Which there at least was some of that going on in university. And at least one disaster of an attempt that ruined a friendship, and that in of itself made me even more shy and skittish about things, because I'd tried (bad timing, bad situation), and it had gone effectively terribly for me. And on I went into graduate school, where I actually did manage the bit with someone expressing explicit interest in me. So, there you have it, the whole premise is completely blown out of the water just like that! People have found me attractive, and explicitly so, and therefore all of my issues about that have been completely and incontrovertibly resolved!
Yeah, no. Because the terrible relationship that I'm still paying off was the first relationship after grad school, when I was supposed to be a reasonable adult who had gone through some false starts, some less good relationships, and was fully equipped to handle figuring out whether or not the relationship being offered me was going to be good and fulfilling or whether I should have passed on it or backed out of it quickly. But because I didn't know what to look for, and she didn't care to break it off at any point (because it would have meant not having me to support her), any of the progress I might have made about believing myself attractive to others was knocked down and suppressed for years. So I was even more not looking for the subtle signs and it took a fairly blatant sign of interest from someone else to come back to the possibility that other people might find me attractive. (Even then, I was more willing to believe that it was someone else in the party of people who had the same name that was the object of interest and affection than I was, because that bad relationship had completely trashed my ability to see myself in any kind of worthy or attractive way.) Which, yes, I managed to climb my way out of the wreckage of that relationship, but I definitely am still carrying a lot of the wounds, weasels, and trauma from having been in it. And I'm still no better at noticing subtle flirtation than I was before, so that's a skill I still don't have. (Why would I need it? Well, because some people are taught that flirting too directly is unbecoming of someone of their gender presentation. And others because they like the idea of the chase and the catch, and telling someone they're interested in them is too direct for their own desires.)
Which makes it somewhat remarkable that I've had as much success as I have in people telling me that they find me attractive. It seems to be, based on things so far, that people who get to know me through my writing make that decision for themselves along the way and then eventually there is a situation where it comes up and there are statements made. Or people who get to know me in other contexts first get to know who I am and then, similarly, when the context appears, there are statements made. It's certainly not a quick way of finding this out, but at the same time, by the time something like this appears, there's been enough figuring it out so that when someone declares their interest, it's based on having gotten to see inside my head for a while, or at least, to make some good guesses about it, and then, from there, going on and deciding whether what I look like is appealing enough to match what's already been seen coming out of my head. There are certainly worse ways of trying to figure out a relationship, as I have figured out and experienced.
It's not something I've completely discarded. I think the trauma of the bad relationship, and some of the other things that I am coming to know about myself and how I relate, are still telling me that my default is that nobody finds me attractive and it is a very rare few who find me otherwise, and fewer still who say so. This is something where I can work my way into believing quality over quantity, but sometimes I do wonder what it would be like if I were one of the people that others were like "this one's good, we want to make them better with all the tools at our disposal," and what I would look like with all of those things applied to me. What my most glamorous self would look like. (With, hopefully, an appreciation of all the work that it takes to make that happen.)
no subject
Date: 2023-12-27 07:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-27 08:49 am (UTC)Relationships in a Quack House
Date: 2023-12-29 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-27 10:43 am (UTC)'If you do this thing no one will love you'
Wrong!
no subject
Date: 2023-12-27 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-29 05:04 pm (UTC)