"I can't be both stupid and ugly"
The beauty of the female mind.
A while back, I was walking a girl back to her dorm after a night out. At some point on our walk, she shared with me that she had a personal philosophy about her aesthetic, and I thought I’d write something about it.
Aesthetic as ego insurance
What she told me is that she explicitly puts extra effort into her aesthetic when taking an exam. This is quite peculiar, since almost all exams are written nowadays rather than oral, so nobody is really looking. Her reasoning was that if an exam were to go sideways, she could still leave the room having something to be confident about. In her words:
“I can’t be both stupid and ugly”.
As should be obvious, I’m the type of guy who has lots of thoughts about lots of things, all the time. Yet, I’m very sure that my aesthetic has never featured in any of my philosophy sessions. Granted, I do pay attention to dressing well, but I compose my outfits on-the-spot rather than planning them out in advance up to the level of accessories (which for me are always the same anyway).
What she described strikes me as one of the many charming differences between the male and female mind: women really think about how to turn their outward appearance into a temporary artwork. I wholeheartedly love this about them (at least the naturally feminine ones). It’s not a given at all that you would decide to create more beauty in the world; you could dress in a baggy T-shirt if you wanted.1
Intelligence as ego insurance
Recently, I reminisced about that legendary quote of hers, and I realised that it’s actually not too far off from how I see myself positioned in the dating market.
I was thinking about how the women I aspire to date prioritise the intelligence of their man over his looks, and how this actually gives me a better advantage than if my target audience were average women. If that had been the case, then I would have been competing much more at the level of looks, and I would lose. The rate of infidelity across the entire population is much higher than it should be, and you could imagine – to give black-pillers some credit – that a woman who is mainly enamoured with her man’s looks is more likely to cheat when she encounters a man who is much more handsome than her man. In other words: I would hate to be as average-looking as I am (on a good day) and be a bumbling idiot. In even other words: to find a compatible woman, I can’t be stupid and ugly, and the reason I don’t despair about finding her is that I’m quite certain I’m not stupid.
Unbeknownst to me, I was already living out her quote. She was right.
In fact, as I’ve seen many women point out online, they receive more attention from guys when they are less done up, so any objections pertaining to elusive “beauty standards” are dismissable like so many other conspiracy theories. It’s women themselves who innately want to look good, rather than social pressure forcing them to do so, and that actually makes women way more virtuous than men in that regard. Imagine thinking it’s somehow a bad thing to be born wanting to put more beauty into the world. ↩︎
