Over Thanksgiving weekend, I was talking with my brother, and we were bemoaning something I’ve bemoaned with other men on many occasions: the bloody impossibility of convincing the women we love that they’re beautiful.
Those with a woman that they love know how it is: she’ll get it into her head that her weight or her hair or her skin or something is flawed and unacceptable, and she’ll be down on herself, unhappy and self-hating and trying one regimen or another to fix herself. And meanwhile we just stand there, startled and embarrassed, loving her no less than we did before she seized on this flaw, no less attracted to her, and unable to persuade her of that. You can say that you don’t see a difference, that it wouldn’t matter even if you could, even if she were disfigured, that what you love about her isn’t what’s on the surface anyway, and nothing you say will matter. The Beauty Myth she was programmed with as a girl has its teeth in her, and she’s convinced that if she’s not pretty enough, she’s worthless as a human being.
Right now, a lot of the guys and a certain percentage of the women reading this are nodding their heads ruefully. Y’all know what I’m talking about.
The even more fucked-up part is the converse: the Success Myth that men only have value insofar as we are successful in terms of money and power and competition. And guys, I don’t know about y’all, but that bullshit has its teeth in me DEEP. Over and over the women I love tell me that they don’t really give a damn how much I make, that what matters is who I am as a person, and all my other less tangible qualities. And what do I do? I do the same damn thing: I ignore them, I make up reasons why they’re just being polite or don’t really mean it, and I go on beating myself up for being worthless.
Right now, most of the women who weren’t nodding ruefully two paragraphs ago are nodding ruefully.
Ozy’s Law acknowledges that not all cases of linked misandry and misogyny will be perfectly symmetrical, but damn, in this case misandry and misogyny are doing this shit. (I think Groucho is the Success Myth and Harpo is the Beauty Myth, but read it how you like.)
Now, those who get off on defending the status quo or blaming women for things will leap to point out various examples of women expressing a preference for successful guys, and sure, that’s fine. It is also only useful or interesting if you can prove two other things: 1. There are no equivalent pop-cultural examples of men only being into women fitting a conventional “pretty” model, and finding anyone outside that model disgusting. (Hint: You will lose.) 2. Plain women and poor men don’t find love despite being proverbially unlovable. (Good fucking luck proving that one.)
I think there is another evil factor at work here, though: our old friend the subject/object distinction. Men are supposed to love, not to be objects of love. This is a deeply-encoded assumption, one that’s almost never spoken out loud. It’s just built into every goddamn love story we tell. Stack up how many narratives you’ve heard in your life wherein a man must prove that he really loves a woman vs. how many where a woman must prove that she really loves a man. Coming into focus now, isn’t it?
A woman’s job, we all vaguely assume, is to be loved, to attract and receive love. A man’s job is to do the loving, to be the actor, the one who gives love TO the woman. I think when this myth was being made up, someone misspelled “penis” as “love”, don’t you?
Thing is, once again it just ain’t so. Straight and bi women, by and large, love men. They fall in love and go all goofy and blather to their friends about how great he is, and even after years together and fights and troubles, they look over at him and think Well, damn. At least I got that going for me.
Then, of course, they think If only I wasn’t so fat and gross-looking and we start back at the top.
Confirmation! Did your dad belong to NORML? If so, met him at a NORML conference. (I used to get him mixed up with Stewart Mott) Did he go to the famous one where Hamilton Jordan snorted coke at the party in Georgetown and somebody ratted him out to the Washington Post? That one.
Good times! 🙂
Confirmation! Did your dad belong to NORML?
You know, I have no idea. He never talks about the past much, being a futurist by trade nowadays. Much of what I know about his actions during the 60s and 70s, I’ve gleaned from books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and What The Dormouse Said. But if you’re confusing him with Stewart Mott on the basis of his name, that’s the guy. 🙂
Noah, I think I met your dad! SMALL WORLD! The ongoing Facebook Deadhead joke is that we all know each other under other names, like “Sparrow” and so on. “I didn’t know you were —!”
Some of us used so many aliases, we have forgotten them ourselves. :p One I used was Agnes Waterhouse, and wrote articles and made mix tapes (legendary ones!) under that name.
OirishM, its embarrassing, but usually I am suddenly valued by younger people if I say something that they think is cool or if they find out something about me that is considered cool. Mind you, not *trying* to do that, it just happens naturally, and what is cool to one person will inevitably be regarded as dorky and dumb to another. Example: on my last job, one of the cooks told some young people in the kitchen that I had seen Bob Marley on tour in 1978, and suddenly, it was like I walked on water. Likewise, smoking pot w/Allen… Read more »
@Daisy: Heck, I’m 34, and I experience the opposite effect. I tell old-hippie Baby Boomers that my father founded the Whole Earth Catalog, or if they’re Deadheads I say he set up the Acid Tests at the Fillmore, and their eyes just light up. The convenient thing about using my real name online is I can tell that story and not worry about outing myself. 🙂
@Daisy: “Sure, but in my experience, that isn’t usually how it works. We invariably get cast in that role anyway.” I appreciate that. I just wonder if it’s something that can be resisted and redefined. I’m probably superimposing my recollections of my younger years onto your point somewhat, but I feel that on the whole a lot of people belonging to the previous generation try their best to be relatable and I feel that the younger generation have a tendency to needlessly throw that back at them or resent them for it. I know people need to go through a… Read more »
Daisy: I’m 26. I hang out with a couple other young folk and a roomful of aging hippies once a week. I chat things up with both age groups about equally. Would you like to be my Boomer friend? 😛
OirishM: Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but surely there are other ways to tackle the young-old divide other than establishing more parental roles? Sure, but in my experience, that isn’t usually how it works. We invariably get cast in that role anyway. (i.e. I am introduced as someone’s “surrogate mom” and I had no clue that is what I was to them!) I enjoy young friends, but I think young people prefer to have friends their own age, unless you read their tarot or something (which I do). I certainly wish there were more people (0f all ages) who felt like… Read more »
Stack up how many narratives you’ve heard in your life wherein a man must prove that he really loves a woman vs. how many where a woman must prove that she really loves a man. Coming into focus now, isn’t it? And that romantic-comedy trope of “the man has to apologize at the end”. This was even in 40 days and 40 nights, where the man was raped by another woman and his girlfriend walked in. No equivocation, his ex broke into his apartment, found him handcuffed to the bed and asleep, and rode that pony. Just to win a… Read more »
For the record, f, it has ended with me and my wife. I am a stay at home dad. I measure success in the fulfillment I derive from my parental and household duties. My wife, also has rejected the ‘success myth’. She sees value in me in other ways, not just how much money I bring home, or how much social status I bring. We have both already said, “fuck that shit”. Times are already changing. Most people are accepting with our arrangement. Just saying. And for people who have a problem with this. Fuck them.
It’s also important to note that even successful women themselves, their parents, their friends, still view her success as “deserving” of an equally successful man. Not a very friendly environment for Average Joe to have a loving relationship in. Yes, and this is absolutely horrible, one of the things I most hope will change for my generation. I had two serious boyfriends who worked in technical trades, while I was finishing my Bachelor’s degree in a more “serious” profession and clearly gunning for my Master’s degree as well. Both relationships imploded at least partly to some toxic success myth, “provider… Read more »
Arses, how does one quote things on this site? I’ll try again, mods feel free to delete my previous comment…. _____ @Daisy Deadhead: “And about societal expectations, he is making a feminist point (booyah debaser! come and git me!) about childbearing. I often wish I’d had more babies, not because I wanted the extra work ((screams for emphasis)), but because of the way the world is age-segregated: young people and old people are not often friends, and our relationship to the next generation usually comes through our children or surrogate children. It would be nice to have more of these… Read more »
@Daisy Deadhead: And about societal expectations, he is making a feminist point (booyah debaser! come and git me!) about childbearing. I often wish I’d had more babies, not because I wanted the extra work ((screams for emphasis)), but because of the way the world is age-segregated: young people and old people are not often friends, and our relationship to the next generation usually comes through our children or surrogate children. It would be nice to have more of these now. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but surely there are other ways to tackle the young-old divide other than establishing more parental… Read more »
Here’s an example of the Success Fallacy (aka Myth) from the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a woman talking about her own son, whose wife divorced him after he lost his job in this economy: Now she worries that lower wages—and, more pressingly, the dearth of jobs—has left young men like her son disaffected and depressed. “They’re working minimum-wage jobs and a lot of times, they don’t have benefits, they don’t have a full 40 hours a week. It’s such a struggle they’re kind of like, ‘What for? All I’m doing is surviving,’ ” she says. “They have to move back… Read more »
That is just really, really despicable. My wife is about the size of Pierce’s wife and I think she’s the most beautiful woman in the world … because … you know …
It’s what’s inside that counts.
But, hell, you can count me in with the group that finds Keely Shaye Smith more physically attractive than Katy Perry et. al.
EE: I think it’s implied every time a famous or wealthy man is with an average or below-average-looking woman and people say “Why is he married to her?” Yes, it used to be Tom Jones’ long suffering wife, later it was Pierce Brosnan’s. When I went to look Brosnan’s wife up, I got “Pierce Brosnan wife fat” as the top search term. Without makeup and movie-star magic, he looks middle aged himself, yet the headlines are always about how fat she is. Pierce Brosnan and Keely Shaye Smith: http://www.babble.com/CS/blogs/famecrawler/2008/05/23-End%20of%20Month/pierce-brosnan-wife.jpg Tom Jones and Melinda Jones, married 54 years: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/10/31/article-1082190-03BAEB6D0000044D-85_468x286.jpg I can’t… Read more »
@f, Personally I’ve always felt that this is one half of a double bind; that being clever and accomplished to a certain degree is supposed to entice men, but that being too successful is supposedly too intimidating and emasculating to potential partners. I have often seen this framed as a pure double bind, or in other words, a form of discrimination against women in and of itself, but I don’t believe that it is. An example of a “pure” double bind going in the other direction would the way men are told to be self-sacrificing, gruff providers (“real men”) and… Read more »
debaser: But what I am also saying is that the OP is biased in that it’s from the perspective of a young person. That’s fine it’s just that as the OP gets older and gets more established as a full fledged adult, that his perspective will probably change. Maybe one day family/domestic life will be more important. That the “beauty myth” and “success myth” eventually play less and less of a role. And again, when one is young and trying to form relationships and become (and sustain themselves as) an adult, these ‘myths’ play a huge role. But when you… Read more »
Yeah, this is pretty much me with my fiancée, and was surprised to find how much the success thing affected me personally too. I’m not exactly doing swimmingly well at grad school after having done pretty well all round up until that point, and I can’t quite shake this feeling off of “If I mess this up, she’s going to want to leave me”. I think my fiancée is bloody gorgeous, but she’s bummed out after having put on weight since leaving college. …. Urgh, yeah. I don’t have anything to follow that up with. Shit. Time to find some… Read more »
@Nancy, yeah, they’re pretty much all variations of the story I think Aarne-Thompson calls Search for the Lost Husband. But considering pre-modern gender roles it would be very surprising indeed if there were many stories where a woman actually initiates a relationship and isn’t portrayed as a wicked tramp and seductress; I think that’s a somewhat separate, though of course closely related, issue.
Women who chase men are sad, Men who don’t maintain the active role in a relationship are evil. I’ve seen the odd note of a success standard for women in some stuff, especially anime (girls trying to cook well, or find perfect gifts). However, in those instanes the message seems to be less about proving love as much as making strong impressions (usually of domestic partnerhood.) What I’ve seen from anime culture says that women confess to having feelings, in short, they make the first move, and he accepts or rejects. So the “Women who chase are sad” doesn’t seem… Read more »
Count me as being more affected by feelings of unattractiveness than unsuccessfulness. I mean, I have a decent degree and my job prospects are fair to middling, but I know I’ll never be successful in the same way that my father is successful — and I’m fine with that, because I also know that it never seemed to bring him happiness, just the never-ending pressure to be yet more successful. By similar reasoning, when I was single I consciously decided to not present myself as a potential success object (not that I’d heard the phrase back then) — refusing to… Read more »
@ Jay Generally, I find your theory about pressure on girls to succeed as a kind of twist to the Beauty Myth really interesting. Personally I’ve always felt that this is one half of a double bind; that being clever and accomplished to a certain degree is supposed to entice men, but that being too successful is supposedly too intimidating and emasculating to potential partners. Couldn’t you go with the reverse for men as well, that male beauty is constructed as part of the Success Myth – getting the upper hand over one’s body and appetites and “achieving” an impressive… Read more »
@Jay Generally: I was lectured for a half-hour for getting “only” a 92 on my report card once. Becasue I was a gifted girl, Dad wasn’t quite sure how to classify me in his head, so he basically put pressure on me to be Successful and Ravishing Beauty at the same time. Lots of pressure. To the point that just being away from it is confusing to me because I no longer have an externally-imposed goal to shoot for. I was expected to be The Best at everything, to get some super-lucrative career and marry Rich Handsome White Guy, and… Read more »
f., I’ve noticed it, too, that men and women are getting expected to fulfill both beauty and success ideals. On the female side, there’s _Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters_, which is about eating disorders among ambitious young women. Cupid & Psyche might be a little different– Psyche is supposed to prove her love by obeying his rules. Or should that be respecting his boundaries? Tam Lin is more like a courage and quest story. I don’t know the other stories well enough to comment about them, but I’m noticing that the first two about about regaining relationships rather than achieving enough… Read more »
Yes, I think so.
Oddly, I can think of several narratives that involve a woman proving she loves a man, but they’re all in the realm of very old fairy tales or mythology: Cupid & Psyche, Tam Lin, The Black Bull of Norroway, The Frog Prince, East of the Sun West of the Moon, Beauty & the Beast. And there’s The Snow Queen, sort of, but although it’s more recent it’s deliberately written in the style of an older fairy tale. (There’s also a whole bunch of Faithful Wife Proves Her Innocence folktales, although that’s partly playing into other gender stereotypes, of course.)