"Be more attractive."

Yesterday a friend sent me the link to a recent post on the Boundless blog. The tagline to the post reads: “If no one’s asking you out, here’s the solution: Be more attractive.” Author Josh Loke offers three ways for women to attain this attractiveness: demonstrate respect, look good, and be fun. Specifically, he adds, “If girls are looking for a guy with humor, kindness, stability and initiative, etc., guys are looking for a girl who’s hot.”

Somebody hold my flower.

A blog post like this presupposes that a woman’s one goal in life is to find a date (or enough dates in order to up the numbers and somehow statistically find The One). But let’s bypass that red flag in order to concentrate on what the injunction to “be attractive” actually says to women everywhere. It says that your success as a person and a woman is measured only by externals. It says that you have ‘arrived’ only when men are asking you out. It says that if this isn’t happening, then it’s for no other reason than that you are not enough. It says that your flaws – both the ones you can change as well as the ones you can’t – make you unlovable and unworthy of love. It says that whatever you are already doing, no matter if it’s your best, it isn’t good enough.

The thing is, there’s nothing new about this message. It isn’t some earth-shattering revelation. Culture screams it from every poster on the side of a bus, highway overhang banner, and prime time commercial. It’s something that many women tend to believe about themselves anyway. It’s knitted into our culture and it can often be woven into our psyches. So we don’t need to hear it from people whose stated goal is to encourage and inspire. What’s more, the principle behind the idea isn’t even true.

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who didn’t want to be the best version of their self. Most of us are actively working at this in smaller or greater measure in various ways. For many of us, this ‘best possible version’ includes looking after our bodies and expressing our personalities through the way we present our faces and bodies to the world. I like wearing makeup. I like cute dresses. I like spending a little time on my hair of a morning. It makes me feel ready for life, like the cheeriest, most confident version of myself. A bright lip colour and tamed hair and suddenly I am Joan of Arc. It would be certainly be cool if my personal version of beauty caught someone's eye. But that isn't why I do it.

And in many ways it’s irrelevant anyway because no matter how much effort I put into my personal attractiveness, no matter how much effort you put into yours, there's still going to be an arbitrary line in the critical sand of our culture which has beautiful people on one side, and those who fall short on the other.

I was born with a slight physical disability. It’s only a minor one as far as they go but it means I have some impressive scars and my attempts to learn how to jog keep getting pulled up by injury. I have weird feet and I’ll never be able to wear sexy heels. This is certainly a mark against me in what begins to seem like a high-stakes attractiveness contest. Add to this mark the flaws that I could correct with surgery if I had the money (which I don’t) and I believed I could justify it (which I also don't). Then of course there are all the basics: nose too big, eyes too small, skin too flawed, and twenty-five other things I’d be able to list off because we all get so good at recognising where we fail to come up to snuff.

There is nothing unique about me in this respect. Most of us could rattle off a list of our own remarkable failures to be beautiful. But vague hand-wavy ideas like “be more attractive” imply that with just a little more effort anyone can achieve the nirvana of beauty and finally catch the eye of a passing gentleman. And when people say “be more attractive”, we believe it to be true. If I could pull together all my components and recompose myself into my picture of the ideal externally beautiful woman, I would be tall, slim, elegant, and graceful. I would have narrow shoulders, sleek straight hair, and devastating cheekbones. My skin would be flawless, my hands small and strong. I would be athletic without really trying. But the thing is, I know girls exactly like this. What is more, their inner beauty is just as powerful and profound as their luminous external beauty. Yet they, too, are wondering, “What’s wrong with me? What do I need to do?”

The standard for physical beauty is ridiculously subjective. It is trend-driven and culturally specific. It also has a tendency to be wealth-privileged, ageist, ableist, and exclusionary. Some of us, no matter how much effort we put in, will never be typically beautifully. And that is okay. Every single one of us is far more than our face or our breasts or our waistline. And it’s a little beside the point that I am hoping to make but perhaps it’s worth a reminder: ugly people get married. Awkward people get married. Overweight people get married. Flawed people get married.

One commenter on the post illustrates why telling women to “be more attractive and boys will like you” is an unhelpful mindset:

“I've never ever been asked out over the entire course of my life, and neither have either of my two sisters. We all love Jesus and are very active in our church(es), and we are all perfectly fit (run marathons). We look attractive (well, maybe I'm not, but my sisters are both super cute in my opinion). We are also employed (or studying to be employed) in meaningful ways (medicine, actuarial science, and/or music). We all have hobbies that we are really good at and enjoy. We all would like to be committed, godly wives and mothers someday. We may be a bit reserved in public/around people we don't know well, but in reality, we've got to be the funniest, most hilarious bunch of girls on the planet (in my opinion). We live in a fairly large town near one of the largest cities in our state.

But, I'm trying to remind myself that there's always room for improvement. Maybe what I need is to improve my looks. Or could it be that I don't think of anything to crack a joke over during the 10 minutes of coffee hour after church (this period of time is always truncated for me because I'm either playing a postlude on the organ or teaching Sunday school--sometimes I don't even show up at coffee hour at all!)? Could it be our academic/professional interests that put people off? Could it be that we're Asian?? Could it be that we were homeschooled? Anyway, I'm trying not to think that we all happen to have the gift of singleness...although, of course, it is possible."

This commenter sounds like an awesome, well-rounded, fascinating person. And her first paragraph asserts that. However, she moves from these confident observations -- I am a strong, intelligent, beautiful woman who has a full and creative life -- to the almost apologetic confession that ‘there’s always room for improvement.’ And in one sense she is right: all of us can be better. We can all grow. That’s one of the things that makes life so interesting and the Christian walk so challenging. But the standard imposed upon her by this blog post has it wrong: the assumption is that because no man has asked her out, then there must be room for improvement.

When someone says “What is wrong with me?” to my mind it rarely arises out of personal conviction and a passion for growth. Rather, it’s steeped in despair and shame. People who force us to ask “what is wrong with me?” are not being helpful; they’re being bullies. “How can I be a better person?” is getting closer to the mark. But “How can I be a better person so I attract the attention of a man?” is so far off-base.

Taking care of oneself is good for the soul. It enhances the lives of those we care about because we are happier and healthier as a result. It gives us courage and personal freedom. It sets us loose to more freely care for others. It allows us to be our authentic selves.

So be healthy for you and for the people you already love. Be healthy because your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Be your own form of beautiful because your creativity reflects the splendour of the creator’s hand. Don’t strive to reinvent yourself in order to attract the eye of every possible good guy who passes you by. If your personal brand of beauty is bohemian layers and hippie hair, do that. If it’s farm girl chic with dungarees, boots, and a bare face, do that. If you believe external details are mere periphery in a world where people are hungry and dying, then act on that. Be your own form of beautiful because to do so for any other reason is illusory and transient and it might work -- but it might not work, too.

Be your best you. But be it for you, for the one who made you, and for the people who already love you. If that fails to capture someone's attention, it says less about you than you think. Be great, but be great because life is now, not because it will begin once someone notices how truly lovely you are. The world doesn't magically move out of black and white with true love’s first kiss. Life is already happening and it’s in full colour. Shine bright.

Because I do (Vol. II)

Here, have a collection of incredibly disparate, random things I'm enjoying and appreciating this week. I'm calling it my list of...

Things I do like (today): --

• Sunshine -- I feel a little as if I've been in hibernation, but today the sun is out in full glorious force and I am determined to take myself down to the bay and soak in its warming loveliness.
• Camp Nanowrimo -- July is Camp NaNoWriMo: all the fun of National Novel Writing Month with less word pressure and more marshmallows! For the record, virtual camping is the only kind of camping I really like, and this sort in particular is the best. This is my first year participating in Nano Camp, and I'm mostly here because my infinitely more go-getting friend Laura convinced me to take part. During NaNoWriMo in November, the rules are simple but strict: write a 50,000 word novel (or 50,000 words of a novel). Nano Camp is a lot more flexible; you get to make your own goals. My main intent was to pull out the novel I wrote during Nano a couple of years back and actually finish it. I had reached 50,000 words but not "The End," and there were some plot gaps and sequencing issues I needed to go back and fill in. All breeze and bluster, I cheerfully filled in my Nano Camp goal of 20,000 words, which is what I figure this novel needs to reach completed first draft status. As it happens, we're seven days into Camp Nano and I've written all of 600 words. However, I have been spending time revisiting what I've written, rereading it in full (which I hadn't done since I'd finished), and making notes as I go. The exciting thing is that I still love my characters. Well, there's one I'd like to smack across the face, but he deserves it. And there's another that deserves so much more than what I've given him in this story. There are sentences that I cringe about, but that's par for the course. The cool thing is the story is still there and I don't completely hate it. I'm relishing this chance to spend a little more time making it somewhere closer to better.
• Force 10 International -- I randomly caught a news article last week talking about this Brisbane-based company. What they do is create flat-pack housing that's designed to be built quickly by non-professional labourers and is especially created to withstand nature's worst, in the form of cyclones, tornadoes, flooding, and termites. There is so much good that can be done with a resource like this. I'm super-impressed. Also, any company whose name calls to mind an Alistair MacLean novel has to be at least half-cool.
• Rhett & Link chat to John Green -- this week on Ear Biscuits, Rhett and Link chatted to author, vlogger, and social change inspirer (let's let that be a word, okay?) John Green. People love to rag on this guy, possibly because he's successful and people respect him (always motivation for some internet sledging, I find), but after this interview, I found myself liking and respecting him even more. John Green is neither the antichrist nor the second coming, but he is someone who consistently exhibits a lot of wisdom and grace in his thoughts and actions about life, creativity, and making the world better.
• Hamish & Andy's South America Gap Year -- my favourite real-life broship is back on tv for another season of Gap Year and I'm happy. I'm in the middle of writing a post entirely about Hamish and Andy, and if I can overcome my ultimate fangirl embarrassment, I'll have it up at some point. In the meantime, if you're unfamiliar with Hamish and Andy, just imagine Frodo and Sam with none of the hobbitness or the angst, all of the silliness, and a generous helping of dorky Australian. Then imagine them exploring/doing/eating all the craziest things that South America has to offer. Yes, it is a recipe for joy (and occasional squinty eyes when one of them is eating something gross and you can't look away).
• Beauty basics -- it's winter, which means most of my beauty regime is about not drying out so much that I resemble an old leather boot. At the moment I'm appreciating the Dirty Works hand cream, the Olay Regenerist revitalising hydration cream (a sample size that came in this month's BellaBox and which has totally won me over), and the ever-great Burt's Bees lip balm with acai berry. With the lack of heat and humidity, I'm also loving not having to wash my hair every day, and the VO5 Instant Oomph Powder is my new favourite thing. I actually was inspired to try volumising powder after watching a men's hairstyle tutorial (don't even judge me), and this stuff is so good. Breathes new life into second-day hair, which, for someone with thin hair like me, is super handy.

On that very girly note (I hope I haven't scared away the 18.7 men who read this blog): what are you digging this week? If we had an hour to meet for coffee, what current favourite things would you tell me about?

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Conversations:

• Asea -- "It all comes down to the choices I make. I choose not to have a car or house because I want to be in grad school, and that means a very limited income right now. I choose to embrace the freedom of being single and child-free and use my time to travel. I choose to study a thing I love and do a job I like, rather than go for the super stressful career that eats my soul. Being a grown-up really means making all the choices, and living with their consequences. And, honestly, I really like most of the choices I have made, and I definitely like where they have taken me." This. This is so great.
• Meaghan -- YAY! I'm glad someone got my incredibly vague reference! And you're so right: you cannot unhear her say it once you know her voice! 

Thanks but no thanks?

The focus on individuality in our culture these days means that independence is prized as a virtue and dependency condemned as a vice. For this reason, along with the general life experience that tends to remind us that, mostly, strangers don't care about other strangers (unless they're really beautiful), I sometimes balk when a man offers to carry a bag or open a door for me. Am I supposed to protest that I'm fine, thereby freeing him from this obligation he's imposed on himself? The independence ideal would say 'yes', thereby creating an awkward schismatic moment where I internally waver between accepting or rejecting the offer.

But while I might occasionally feel awkward about random acts of gentlemanliness, I have never been offended by them and I don't feel demeaned by them. In some small way, such offers remind me that there are guys who look out for the interests of women, and the pendulum swings a little further to the side of trustworthy men. I feel cared for and respected, and such encounters usually leave me smiling.

Today, I had an unwieldy handful of groceries in my arm as I joined the checkout queue at the supermarket. There was a handsome older gentleman in front of me whose mammoth haul of groceries took up the whole conveyor belt and spilled over the end, so I leaned my pile on the basket at the end of the checkout and waited.

"Oh, you should go through in front of me," he said.

Without really thinking except to process the fact that there was no room for my groceries anyway and to assume he was merely "being nice", I waved him off. "Oh, I'm fine here. Thank you!"

He smiled but then shook his head and said, "You can't do anything to help anyone these days."

My immediate response was guilt, a feeling of sadness that I had refused an act of kindness. I went to explain or apologise, but he kept on talking. "Things are so different from in my day. Just the other day, I opened a door for a woman and she said to me, 'I could've done that myself, you know!'"

I went to say that I'd never refuse a door opened for me, but he cut me off. "If you wanna blame someone for the way I am, blame my mother. She raised me to be a gentleman!"

I wanted to thank him and let him know he shouldn't stop being a gentleman, but he continued speaking until he was through the checkout. I had not had a chance to explain myself or even thank him, but by the end of the conversation (if it was a conversation), I was not feeling thankful; I was feeling harrassed and oddly unsettled. As I walked out of the store, I looked for the man to at least give him an apologetic smile, but he would not meet my eye again.

 By the time I got to my car, I realised I didn't need to apologise at all. If his goal in allowing me to jump the queue was to serve and respect me and make my life easier, he had completely undermined it by taking offence and being angry at me for refusing his offer. If his goal, however, was to feel good about his own kindness, then it is little wonder he was hurt by my refusal.

But this is the thing with selflessness: it's meant to be, well, selfless.

I don't know if there is a moral to this story -- or perhaps, rather, there are two. The moral for me is that when people make an offer of kindness, they are usually happy to follow through with the act of kindness. The moral for gentlemen is that an act of service is only truly so when it serves the other. Being a gentleman is less about parading your masculinity and more about caring for women.

PS. Here, have a Cary Grant.

Less beautiful:

I have some actually stunning friends. Like, the sort of beauty that makes heads turn on the street to watch it passing by. And sometimes I just want to ask these friends: “What it’s like to be beautiful? What’s it like to know that, in spite of your own perceived flaws (because we all have those), the majority of people who brush shoulders with you in this world will find you lovely?”

I am genuinely intrigued at the thought of this, but I have not found a way to ask the question without it sounding plaintive and pathetic. Even as a little girl, the idea of being the less beautiful one in the crowd was familiar to me. My sister Andrea was tall, blonde, and athletic. My sister Lauren was dark and olive-skinned, with big, soulful eyes and eyelashes a mile long. I was (or at least I thought I was) plump, with a mouth that was an orthodontist’s dream as well as perpetually frizzy hair. At school, my two best friends were adorable. One was tall and blonde with cute freckles. She did dance classes and was the first among us to get a bra. The other was tiny, whip-thin and dark-haired. She excelled in athletics as well as in academics. I was just smart-but-not-amazing-smart, very bookish, and pretty bad at pulling together an outfit.

Some of that stuff shifted as time went by. I got braces. I mostly outgrew my teenage skin. I finally got a handle on controlling my own hair (even though some days I just throw my hands in the air and declare that I am not going to bother), and occasionally I find the perfect outfit that I know is just exactly right for me and my weird body. Other stuff, however, hasn’t changed – like the understanding that I’m not the pretty girl in the room and I never will be. There are things about me that are considered unattractive. I know this because I have a pair of working eyes and because little kids say the things that grown-ups have learnt not to. And since I have worked with little children since I was in my teens, I get to hear their frank appraisals of my appearance on a semi-regular basis. The worst part of this is being reminded about flaws you are frequently trying to forget. The best part is that when they give a compliment, it really is sincere. Man, kids crack me up.

Perhaps the above sounds like a convoluted confession of really poor self-esteem – and I suppose it may be read as that in one sense, if only because the world is kindest to the beautiful people, and not being one of them has messed with my confidence in a number of ways. But besides all that, what I am really trying to say is that the whole idea of beauty and its place in the world is something I have wrestled with and pondered since I was small. I’m still far from discovering concrete answers or a clear resolution, but I feel like this issue must be highlighted, that we must discover what we think about this topic so that we can formulate how to see ourselves and the others around us, how to evaluate what import we should place on beauty. Beauty is no longer a peripheral idea; beauty is currency in this generation, and if we don’t actively work to formulate our beliefs about this topic, societal constructs will formulate them for us.

This was driven home to me anew a few months ago when I stumbled across an article that broke my heart. In it, Ann Bauer details her experiences growing up with the understanding that she was ugly. Hers is no self-pitying self-deception; rather, it is an awareness that grew from the way people in her world saw her and engaged with her. “We’re the same, you and me,” one man told a teenage Ann. “We’re both too ugly for anyone to love.”

When Ms Bauer shared her love story in a national publication, people wrote to her with scathing responses: “You’re a hag who looks like your husband’s mother, and my wife agrees. He will leave you soon.” That was only one of a number of criticisms that essentially said: “You don’t deserve to be with your husband, because you’re not beautiful enough.” Such destructive remarks proved damaging to Ms Bauer’s marriage as she struggled to believe that her husband was the one rare man who could stand to look her in the eyes and not be offended by her apparent ‘ugliness’. Eventually, Ms Bauer came to a sense of peace in her appearance that was highlighted during a night in Budapest:

Evening fell sharply there, which, I discovered, is the reason Hungarian women wear so many layers. The weather cracks at dusk, going rapidly from springtime sun to an ice blue cold, so skirts and shawls and long, winding scarves are essential.

Thus, I was dressed as a native the night we attended the opera: a long black skirt, leather boots, and floor-length cape. It was intermission. John was in the men’s room and I was waiting for him, when I turned and found myself looking into a full-length mirror. And I saw something I’d never seen before: myself, in a sea of women who looked just like me.

Part of it was the clothing. We were nearly all in black with trails of fabric wound around our shoulders and necks. But it was also the face, the form. Everywhere I looked in that lighted glass, there were women with large features, deep-set eyes, rounded cheeks, riotous hair, and delicate-yet-meaty little bodies. We were, in other words, an army of ugly people.

Only, for the first time in my memory, we weren’t. I wasn’t. I was normal, even conventionally attractive. Stylish. Interesting. Sexy. Simply that.

I stood in front of that mirror in the Hungarian State Opera House, watching couples mill. Men holding the arms and hands of dozens of women who could’ve been my sisters, mother, and daughters, tipping their heads back, kissing them lightly, gazing with naked admiration at faces like mine. 

I am happy for the confident conclusion to Ms Bauer’s story, but saddened that such a story even exists. What broke my heart the most was that this woman, in her profile shot, is anything but ugly. Her nose, frequently the object of taunts and criticism, looks fine to me. Ms Bauer is not a supermodel, no. But few of us are. And it made me realise that the reason I’ve been protected from the cruelty of randoms is not because I’m somehow better-looking than this sharp-thinking, intelligent, creative, feminine woman; no, it’s simply because I’m not in the public eye and I’m surrounded by people who think I’m beautiful because they love me, rather than loving me because I meet some required standard of beauty.

In the appearance-driven climate of our ‘now’, we think beauty deserves something. It deserves love, it deserves admiration, it deserves the better job, it deserves notice -- and ugliness does not. None of this is true, of course. Beauty is a collision of genetics, as randomly assigned (at least to our limited perspective) as the extra chromosome that results in down syndrome (as in the case of my brother), or the deformity that is clubbed feet (that's me). Beauty is a gift of grace distributed in the most confusing way, yet somehow we have given it grave import and ranked it far above other similar assignations.

A woman is not a better woman because she is beautiful, nor is an ugly woman less of a woman because she is ugly. Beautiful women do not feel more, nor do ugly women feel less. Beauty is there to be appreciated, yes. Beauty is lovely. And it can be enhanced or ignored, but it should not be worshipped.

Beauty is not a virtue in and of itself; it’s a characteristic. No more, no less.

And of course, this is just the beginning of the conversation. I have more thoughts -- including my problem with the word 'ugly' and the related idea of 'beauty' referring merely to the external -- and there could be a whole discussion about the seemingly innate craving to be desirable, to be perceived as beautiful even if not conventionally pretty. Would love your thoughts on this and a follow-up post to come in the next few days.