Not a pretty girl

I wasn’t sure where to put this, since it’s at least partly a feminist issue and I’ve got a Substack for feminism-related musings now.

Then I realized that it was going to get really personal, and I don’t want the other Substack to get really personal. I am fine with this one being personal. Some of you must be fine with it too, because you’re still here. If not, just skip this one. I won’t tell.

So, I posted this thing a while back in which I complained about the general tendency of men to prioritize Being Pretty over literally any other trait they could ever look for in a woman. My best friend observed that that didn’t really have anything to do with the meme I was sharing at the time, but as I was posting it I was thinking about the last guy who rejected me and how, in one of the last conversations we had, I had asked him if he’d found someone yet and he’d said that being around so many beautiful women at a recent meeting convinced him that he’d be willing to get into a relationship again someday soon but that he wasn’t ready yet. Made a big deal out of that “beautiful women” thing. Not long after that he went radio silent with me. It’s not refusal to spend time on social media. He acknowledges and chats with mutuals.

We had met in person one weekend in late summer last year after some significant amount of time connected on social media, in which we frequently bantered back and forth and he even shared my writing with other people which, if you didn’t know, is a BIG deal in my book. Until we met, it had looked like there was interest there. I already knew I liked him; I dig nerdboys and he is a big ol’ one. He’d seen many of my photos, so there was no mystery in that department. I thought the interest was mutual. My housemate thought the interest was mutual. (I didn’t even ask — she came out with that on her own, unprompted, in a random conversation one day.) And then he and I met in person and everything just sort of… went blah.

The fifties and up are a difficult age range to be in if you’re a lone female and don’t want to be (I mean lone, not female — can’t do anything about the latter). Most often it’s men seeking out significantly younger women and ignoring you. I complained about that, too, in that same Facebook post the other day.

Some male friend piped up and oh God, here we go. If I never hear “men are evolved to be absolutely shitty” again in ANY iteration, it will be too fucking soon. It’s so fucking played. Just stop.

Okay, he didn’t say “absolutely shitty.” What he said, long story short, is that men “naturally” gravitate toward the young and beautiful because youth and beauty mean fertility. It’s evolution, man. You’ve all heard this before. I am just specifying that that’s what he said.

Now I’m going to rip it to shreds.

First off, and most generally, human beings are a cultural species. This means that while we still have some instincts (though it is really difficult to tell what those are — more on that in a minute), most of our operating instructions for life are taught to us by adults when we are children. Adult skills must be taught to us, because we are not born knowing them. But this has the interesting effect that we grow up thinking that the particular adult skills we were taught are the only legitimate adult skills there are, and being told there are other ways to live feels like an existential threat. In other words, if we get told we’re living wrong, it feels like we’re about to DIE.

As I was saying in those parentheses in the previous paragraph, it’s really hard to know what instincts people have left, because the culture we’re taught feels like instinct. And if we were taught it, guess what? We didn’t evolve with it. We couldn’t have, because WE ARE NOT BORN KNOWING IT.

So the question becomes: Do men have an instinct to fuck women thirty years their junior, or were they taught by the culture that they are entitled to fuck women thirty years their junior? Do you know the answer? Can you prove it? Are you sure?

The men offering this argument never stop to think about how a twenty-year-old woman feels about the prospect of fucking a fifty-year-old man. I will tell you this: at the age of twenty-two, I had a fling with a forty-year-old and, as far as age goes, that was at the very upper end of my capability for attraction. He almost didn’t make it. I have, in the years since, messed around with a man literally old enough to be my father, as in he is two years older than Dad, and I will not be repeating that experience with anyone of equivalent age. It was unpleasant. It almost wasn’t, but I am just not chronologically aligned enough with someone that much older to really get anything out of it. I would rather not try. And everything I’ve heard from other women tells me that most of us feel the same way. The only ones saying that a young woman fucking an old man’s a good idea are the young women who know a rich old man. Do you think they’re attracted to those rich old men or do you think they’re attracted to the money? Do you think maybe they’d pick a rich YOUNG man if they could find one of those instead? Oh, I fucking do. Yes, I do. Moving on now.

And most old men are not rich. This idea that young women pick an old man because “he represents resources and stability” seems to be bandied about quite a lot by men on fucking Social Security and no fucking pension. Really? We really gonna go here? It’s like the men who complain about gold-diggers when they got no fucking gold. Sit down.

And let’s look at the other thing they say, about young and beautiful women obviously being fertile and healthy.

First up, let’s get the fertility argument out of the way. The guy who most recently said this to me did not even want to be a father. (He is one, because his ex-wife tricked him, BUT.) MOST men don’t want to be fathers. They may want some other thing that fatherhood brings them, like social status or religious approval or a better relationship with their own mothers, but the kids? No. If they wanted the fucking kids we wouldn’t keep hearing from women that those women are doing ninety percent of the housework and childcare. When we want something, we take good care of it. Compare and contrast how men care for their favorite hobby, or even their fucking car, versus how well they care for the children they sire. (Paying bills doesn’t count, fellas. If you have the money, that’s the easiest “adulting” you ever do.) Except for your exceptional fucking Nigel/Chad who you’re about to want to tell me about in the comments except you can’t ‘cause you’re a free subscriber or a lurker, it’s not even close. Man, don’t be at me about “fertility” when you don’t WANT her to be fertile.

Even if he does want a fertile partner and does want kids, which makes more sense: to go after a woman who’s never been pregnant and for all you know could be sterile, or to go after a woman who’s had at least one healthy baby? You know, in more traditional cultures, the MILF concept is fucking real. Those dudes know the score. Our “civilized” dudes are the only trolltards on the planet who think a nineteen-year-old virgin with endometriosis is desirable as reproductive material.

Oh, right! You’d be very fucking surprised what health conditions are well-hidden by a pretty face or a well-shaped body. Could you identify a woman with no uterus just by looking at her? Even if she’s naked, if she were born without one, no scar. How would you know? She might not know. It happens.

And while we’re on the subject of health, let’s turn this back around again on the guys. Guys, did you know that the older a man is, the more likely he is to father a child who has autism? And fucking hell, y’all already don’t do enough of the parenting work on average. You want to be old and take on a fatherhood role where you will be even slower and less helpful around the house? My daughter’s father was 34 when she was born. As she got bigger, she used to injure him during Daddy Wrestling Hour. You dads out there know what I’m talking about. Could you see a seventy-year-old pulling that off? I fucking can’t. The idea’s ridiculous. Put it away.

To say nothing of the poor kid possibly being a half-orphan by the time they’re eighteen. No.

Put it away, dudes. You’re old. Be old. Leave the young women alone.

The particularly, personally hurtful thing for me is that when men I know say things like this in response to me complaining about the general situation, what they’re telling me is, “Hey, you’re ugly. You don’t deserve a man. Shut up about it and move on with your life.” These are supposed to be my friends. Allegedly. Thanks?

He’s not wrong, though.

Honestly, I went through this phase in my late teens and early twenties when I was almost never without male attention and later, when I looked back and thought about it, I could not figure out why. But based on what a neighbor guy said about me when I was in high school, I’m guessing it was because I looked pretty okay from the neck down.

That’s me crouching on the left:

From the neck up it has been a different matter.

Crooked face, crowded teeth (I had braces twice, starting in second grade — it was that bad), big nose, uneven ears. I’ve seen some repulsive faces in my time and mine’s not that bad, but supermodel material? Nah. Never once.

That one was a bit more flattering. How about this one.

And now with extra added aging.

Oh, I forgot to mention I’ve had hair loss too. Massive. No bald spots, but if you knew me 10-15 years ago you could tell there’s a lot less now. Last time I saw my mom before she died, MOST of her hair was gone. They don’t make ponytail elastics small enough to hold the ponytail she was attempting at the time. Maybe orthodontic elastics might do it. That’s what I’m headed for. Gorgeous, huh? My hair was my best feature and now it’s just a limp joke. (Kind of like something else you find on half the fiftysomething population. The other half. Not mine.)

Look, it’s okay. I’m not fishing for sympathy. (Okay, okay, maybe a little sympathy.) I’ve had to look at this face my whole life. I know what it is. But I have a couple thoughts about this whole situation.

One, I’m really tired of everyone saying it’s what’s inside that counts. No it’s fucking not. You mean you HOPE that what’s inside is what counts. You have seen no evidence to back that up. I haven’t either. Society has done its level best with me to prove otherwise: because my outside ain’t shit, it wrote me off long ago. This whole experience has left me incapable of trusting enough to try again even if someone did come along. He’d probably be after a live-in housekeeper. Fuck off, Hypothetical Dude.

Two, your other rejoinder is going to be “well, if you took care of yourself…” You don’t really mean take care of yourself, you mean change your appearance so you don’t really look like yourself. Get dumber, less-comfortable, more-revealing clothes. (But finish losing the extra weight first.) Get skin surgery. Get a facelift and your eyes did. Get a nose job. Slap on a good wig. Wear makeup, for fuck’s sweet sake. Where I am supposed to get the fucking money to accomplish all of this, no one ever seems to know. Most women who make themselves more pretty are bankrolled by a man. I can’t get a man, ‘cause I’m not pretty. QED.

And so then we get down to the real reason society expects women to do all that beauty bullshit. It’s not so men will think we’re fertile and it’s not so men will love us. But we have the promise of both those things held over our heads and then we’re told that that’s how we know we have value. Literally, if some dude isn’t vouching for us, the rest of society feels free to reject us too.

(Literally, the first thing my old high-school “friends” did in 1999 after I left my wasband and returned to town was hook me up with the one single guy in their group. He wasn’t even good boyfriend material. He was just there. You are not imagining this. I’ve seen it over and over again.)

So the beauty stuff isn’t beauty. It’s surveillance and it’s a standard of measurement for personal worth. The next time some libfem bobblehead tells you she’s “choosing” to be “feminine,” remember that. I’ve been in the Army. I know what a uniform looks like. If these women were choosing this life, they’d all be doing it in their own way rather than striving to be carbon copies of one another.

And this is another reason I’m not sadder about being a troll. The being left out feels really depressing. But I’m starting to realize that actually, it’s OPTING out. Knowing I don’t have to be in the cultural insane asylum anymore is rather awesome.

It’d be nice if dudes would own up to their role in this shit, but we can’t have everything.