This is a bit of a weird example, but definitely honest. I refuse to wear uncomfortable undies and shoes, especially thongs and high heels/stilettos. They make me resentful. I don't understand why female sexiness requires me to be uncomfortable while male sexiness doesn't. I want to be beautiful, sexy, feminine, modest, and comfortable all at once. I don't compromise. Though I'll admit in my twenties, I thought I had to.
I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be “sexy.” I have always hated the word and all it represents on a visceral level and always felt disconnected from other girls and then other women because I didn’t really understand wanting to be objectified like that. I don’t even really like it when my husband uses that word about me because the connotations have always made it an alien experience to me.
Which doesn’t mean I don’t want to be desired. But I’ve only ever wanted to be desired in the context of an intimate relationship. I’ve hated it when strangers hit on me or catcalled me. I was never really interested in a relationship that didn’t start with friendship and trust first before romance. And my few experiences of experimenting with dating that didn’t start with friendship instead of desire were all disasters.
I like to look put together, neat, tidy, even attractive. But not sexy. And I tend to prioritize comfort over fashion or style. Though I don’t want to look like a slob, I also don’t want my clothing to be a torture.
When I am seen primarily as attractive, it can feel nice in the moment but is fundamentally an awkward feeling of being 'misread'- like at the end of the day, I have to go, "ignore all that, here's who I actually am". Definitely yes to the second question: as someone who is generally hopeless at whatever kind of attractiveness young women are supposed to embody publicly, I have often felt similarly hopeless about relationship- I will say though this feeling is not completely to blame on the secular culture- having (somehow) close to zero practical knowledge on healthy relationships and sexuality coming from a Catholic homeschool upbringing did not help *at all* - so a lack of tools on all sides. I would love to hear how you would approach teaching girls to prepare for relationship in a way that is age-appropriate but also direct and accurate.
This is not an answer to one of your specific questions... but what has always puzzled me is the burden I feel to appear physically attractive- but not sexy/desirable!- to audiences I have no interest in attracting, like coworkers or family. It seems to me that people are constantly assessing and judging each other’s appearance, and attractive people are considered to be more worthy of success and admiration. This has stuck with me since I watched Jordan Peterson’s interview on Vice, where he asserted that women who wear lipstick to work are basically inviting sexual harassment, IIRC? It was clear that he either had no conception of why a woman might, say, wear lipstick to meet her mother for lunch, or was deliberately playing dumb.
I just finished reading Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen and the Art of Saving the World, which includes an overview of his five mindfulness trainings. I was surprised that the third one was all about sex!
An excerpt:
"Knowing that sexual desire is not love, and that sexual activity motivated by craving always harms myself as well as others, I am determined not to engage in sexual relations without mutual consent, true love, and a deep, long-term commitment...Seeing that body and mind are interrelated, I am committed to learn appropriate ways to take care of my sexual energy and to cultivate the four basic elements of true love – loving kindness, compassion, joy, and inclusiveness – for the greater happiness of myself and others."
I've always been uncomfortable with the performance of sexuality - not only because the performance is physically uncomfortable. There's an aspect of the performance that seems to me to say, "look at me! I'm *special*, I'm *desirable*" that felt insecure and inauthentic. That actively served to separate me from community and connection and a grounded authentic selfhood.
I'm still working on figuring out what my 'style' is - what it means to dress well but authentically. I really like the way my sister (who works in fashion) dresses - it's always *her*. She dresses as her authentic self, and there's an awesome and beautiful confidence to every outfit she puts together.
On the first question, I think the most obvious example in my own life is that now that I’m married, my conception of attractiveness is primarily shaped by what my husband likes. If we’re dressing up to go out for a date night, my choices about what to wear are shaped by the desire to appeal to one specific person - my spouse - not men generally. I think it’s normal and natural in a committed relationship.
Becoming a mother radically changed my perspective on sexiness as a primary path to intimacy. While the transition from maiden to mother is a cultural shock in many ways, the most glaring example to me was breastfeeding. Having my breasts go from primarily form to primarily function. Pre-motherhood the primary function of my breasts seemed to be to sit proportionally to my body to increase attractiveness and used to dial my sexiness up and down while revealing more and less of them, respectively. I enjoyed dressing my body well for my husband, as a way of being outwardly desirable and continuing sexual intimacy. I now find much greater intimacy in using my body to nourish our son. As I’m laid out on the recliner in hour two of cluster feeding, breasts free for easy access, smearing lanolin on chapped nipples, I find in my husband’s gaze an intimacy I’ve never achieved with display alone. Sustained breastfeeding is anything but easy in modern culture, and it is in the sacrifice of my body, not the display, that I find the greatest intimacy with my partner.
This one is a work in progress for me. I often experience the tension of wanting to feel *desirable* (good), doing something I think will make me feel that way, then ending up feeling *objectified* (bad) as a result of maybe insecurity or evangelical purity culture baggage or something. Thinking about it now, I probably need to do some internal work around this, as well as work in my marriage. (I’m open to book/? recommendations if this sounds familiar to anyone...)
I remember an overnight trip where my roommate ran out of time to put on makeup, and she was distraught because her boyfriend (also on the trip) had never seen her without makeup. There were definitely some differences of cultural and personal priorities between us (I don’t normally wear makeup but of course she was free to!) but I remember reflecting that, if anything, at a certain point in the relationship, the person you’re dating should get *more* opportunities than most people to see your literal or metaphorical warts. Otherwise you’re both in for a rude awakening someday.
Sort of in answer to 1 and 3, I think the healthiest thing I have done is to embrace my appearance and embodiment more broadly as it pertains to sex and romance.
I grew up in a conservative Protestant tradition, and in young adulthood felt like the options for a young woman in the 2000’s/early 2010’s were Scylla and Charybdis: the disembodied, oddly sexless, performatively virginal and young-marrying femininity of church world, or the performative sexuality of either raunch culture or *~sex-positivity~*. Neither was a fit, and I think I buried real engagement with questions of sexuality and coming into womanhood by, in part, refusing makeup, or not spending the money for a good haircut, or dressing in funky vintage clothes but always keeping my body hidden in some fundamental way. You can’t make me wrestle with questions of the flesh if I deny that I HAVE flesh, ahahahaha!! (I was very dumb, lol, and way too cute to style myself so shabbily.)
At a certain point in my early 20’s that facade cracked, I was out of church for a decade, and had what was essentially a delayed coming of age where I had to wrestle with these matters and learn through (at times awkward, heartbreaking, and sweet) experience.
Having landed on the other side in my 30’s and in a less conservative branch of Christianity, I’ve learned to embrace that I’m an embodied, adult woman with an adult sexuality. Taking ownership of that has made me better able to be a steward of myself — I don’t dress to hide my body or the ways in which it may be attractive, nor do I dress to draw undue attention. I wear makeup that takes 7 minutes to apply that highlights my features, and I pay for a haircut that suits me. I enjoy clothing, and enjoy that ways that it can be used to convey a message to the outside world. I find myself genuinely delighted to dress for a date these days, not because I’m trying to self-objectify, but because I’m happy to send a message of: here I am, doing my best to be lovely, in part to convey how much I like you.
Something I noticed a long time ago is that love (in every form) is just so specific that I don't actually understand what a conventional approach to "attractive" is. My husband has insisted again and again (and after five years I do, finally, believe him!) that what he finds most attractive in me is when I'm being my *whole* self. So I keep my hair short, dye it red, sometimes turn it outrageous colours, wear only skirts because I don't actually like pants, go off on long passionate tangents, and all those things are really authentically me! And he likes that best! I've found myself more and more comfortable indulging in the oversharing-of-opinions that so many people elsewhere have told me makes me "A Lot" because my husband genuinely wants to hear what I have to say. (... this is commonly adjusted for time constraints, whether or not there's other people around who may not care, and age-appropriateness if any kiddos are around. But I don't hold myself back for fear of his contempt; instead, any holding back is out of consideration of external relevant factors. It's a nice feeling.) But the same strategy that I used previously to weed out and scare off men who were looking at me funny -- Be Big, Be Bold, Be Loud, Turn It Up to Eleven* -- is the one that made the man who became my husband convinced he wanted to be my friend.
* Many a man I've encountered has been intimidated by or afraid of a larger-than-life young lady with strong opinions and an argumentative streak. I considered this an excellent weeding method at the time and have no regrets.
Are there approaches to “being attractive” you ultimately discarded because they were alienating in the actual experience of a relationship?”
As a man (and an ‘older man’ at that), I am very interested in this and the other 2 questions asked. This aspect of female self perception is for me certainly an unknown aspect of human experience. And it is interesting to me as one who has in my life been a target of the ‘being attractive’ effort.
My male experience of the female attractiveness efforts is often a wish to be free of the too frequent presence of ‘eye candy’. Lust is a difficult emotion to manage when one is constantly exposed to ‘things’ that look so sweet. I do not want to perceive women as objects but eye candy makes that difficult...!
Perhaps someone can let me know more about how things could be different?
I remember the first time I went to Europe with my parents, and we were being served at an ice cream shop or some such. My mother made a negative comment about the server - an attractive young woman who had untouched underarm hair - something about being “disgusting.” My dad said something about it not being a big deal and I realized that he still found the woman attractive (as did I). It occurred to me that the act of shaving hair was performative - by women and partly FOR women, in ways that ultimately shape what men find attractive as well. My mom wasn’t shaving under her arms for my dad but for herself…
Nowhere does this get weirder than shaving one’s pubic hair. I have been banned from one online groups for suggesting that if a man is unattracted to a woman with pubic hair, that implies something is wrong with him and his desires rather than with a woman who is in her natural state. Specifically, to find hairlessness there attractive implies an attraction to prepubescent children - yet it’s normalized online in pornography in ways that are incredibly demanding (not to mention painful!) for actual adult women.
My husband has described lingerie as being a frame for a great work of art, which I think captures the essence of a performative action that captures or enhances the original vs that attacks and offends the original. In other word, one suggests the original body is beautiful regardless of whether the action is taken and the other suggests the body is disgusting unless the action is taken.
I had to drop the whole sexy “coy and mysterious” facade (where they can’t tell what you’re thinking because you’re purposefully withholding communication to make them wonder) in the context of a relationship because it made things too confusing. Not to mention that when you have kids nobody has time for that! Since then, clear and direct communication has become much sexier.
Like Melanie Bettinelli, “l don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be ‘sexy.’ I have always hated the word and all it represents on a visceral level”.
That said, I’ve wanted fewer hassles in life, and, while passing for conventionally attractive can be a hassle in itself, it may result in less social hassle overall.
I started discovering this the summer I turned 14, when I began dieting in earnest to fit in better socially — while I was thinner than many teens with great social lives, I was also awkward and sickly enough that my exceeding conventional weight standards of the time seemed to cost me more. This discovery was confirmed after a sleepover in high school when I had to borrow a friend’s more fashionable clothes and noticed a dramatic difference in how I was treated in them (the clothes weren’t “sexy”, just well-fitting and trendy).
“What ways (if any) did you consciously make an effort to change and become ‘desireable’ that felt like they were good for the long haul?”
In retrospect, my efforts to stay slim in my teens probably involved brief excursions into atypical anorexia (for which I was complimented, including by teachers, as getting “healthier”). But now that I’m a mom too overwhelmed to stick to rigid diets and who now stress-eats (instead of, say, achieving the alcoholism which tends to run in my family), my weight is now a health problem. My EDS connective tissue is more susceptible to the strain of excess weight than average, the pro-inflammatory aspects of adiposity combine poorly with my underlying inflammation, and my BMI is now high enough I can expect to get that spiel from medicos where any medical problem I might be having could be blamed on my overweight. Whatever was disordered about my previous relative thinness, my current state may be worse, and it seems likely that my health benefited, physically and perhaps even more socially, for quite some time from the lower weight.
Additionally, seeing a dermatologist in my 20s and getting acne properly treated rather than just concealed seems to have been beneficial. The skin is an organ, too, and inflammation in it is bodily inflammation. Skin isn’t just skin-deep, as I had once assumed.
There are plenty of problems with using attractiveness as a proxy for health and health as a proxy for human well-being and hence the worth of life. Untruth just isn’t true, and truth is just the truth. Half-truths about human well-being create so much mischief because they are partly true.
There’s a small plot line in The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel about the main character and her mother, and how they do their hair and makeup while their husbands are still asleep. The unraveling of that plot is quite beautiful.
This is related to other commenters' point about wanting to be attractive to one's spouse, but more specifically I value that my husband is attracted to me, personally and individually, not just to a type of woman I happen to belong to, so I generally want to avoid fashions or modes of desirability that don't feel authentic to me. To be honest I don't have any good definition of what it means for an outfit or whatever to be "authentic" to a person so I really do go by feel. It's partly a question of personal style but also of, I guess, values. Like, I know that high heels are generally considered sexy and my husband would think I look good in them, but for a variety of reasons it's really important to me not to wear them, so doing it to look sexy feels fake to me. It would be hot but it would also be a barrier to real intimacy.
This is a bit of a weird example, but definitely honest. I refuse to wear uncomfortable undies and shoes, especially thongs and high heels/stilettos. They make me resentful. I don't understand why female sexiness requires me to be uncomfortable while male sexiness doesn't. I want to be beautiful, sexy, feminine, modest, and comfortable all at once. I don't compromise. Though I'll admit in my twenties, I thought I had to.
I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be “sexy.” I have always hated the word and all it represents on a visceral level and always felt disconnected from other girls and then other women because I didn’t really understand wanting to be objectified like that. I don’t even really like it when my husband uses that word about me because the connotations have always made it an alien experience to me.
Which doesn’t mean I don’t want to be desired. But I’ve only ever wanted to be desired in the context of an intimate relationship. I’ve hated it when strangers hit on me or catcalled me. I was never really interested in a relationship that didn’t start with friendship and trust first before romance. And my few experiences of experimenting with dating that didn’t start with friendship instead of desire were all disasters.
I like to look put together, neat, tidy, even attractive. But not sexy. And I tend to prioritize comfort over fashion or style. Though I don’t want to look like a slob, I also don’t want my clothing to be a torture.
When I am seen primarily as attractive, it can feel nice in the moment but is fundamentally an awkward feeling of being 'misread'- like at the end of the day, I have to go, "ignore all that, here's who I actually am". Definitely yes to the second question: as someone who is generally hopeless at whatever kind of attractiveness young women are supposed to embody publicly, I have often felt similarly hopeless about relationship- I will say though this feeling is not completely to blame on the secular culture- having (somehow) close to zero practical knowledge on healthy relationships and sexuality coming from a Catholic homeschool upbringing did not help *at all* - so a lack of tools on all sides. I would love to hear how you would approach teaching girls to prepare for relationship in a way that is age-appropriate but also direct and accurate.
This is not an answer to one of your specific questions... but what has always puzzled me is the burden I feel to appear physically attractive- but not sexy/desirable!- to audiences I have no interest in attracting, like coworkers or family. It seems to me that people are constantly assessing and judging each other’s appearance, and attractive people are considered to be more worthy of success and admiration. This has stuck with me since I watched Jordan Peterson’s interview on Vice, where he asserted that women who wear lipstick to work are basically inviting sexual harassment, IIRC? It was clear that he either had no conception of why a woman might, say, wear lipstick to meet her mother for lunch, or was deliberately playing dumb.
I just finished reading Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen and the Art of Saving the World, which includes an overview of his five mindfulness trainings. I was surprised that the third one was all about sex!
An excerpt:
"Knowing that sexual desire is not love, and that sexual activity motivated by craving always harms myself as well as others, I am determined not to engage in sexual relations without mutual consent, true love, and a deep, long-term commitment...Seeing that body and mind are interrelated, I am committed to learn appropriate ways to take care of my sexual energy and to cultivate the four basic elements of true love – loving kindness, compassion, joy, and inclusiveness – for the greater happiness of myself and others."
I've always been uncomfortable with the performance of sexuality - not only because the performance is physically uncomfortable. There's an aspect of the performance that seems to me to say, "look at me! I'm *special*, I'm *desirable*" that felt insecure and inauthentic. That actively served to separate me from community and connection and a grounded authentic selfhood.
I'm still working on figuring out what my 'style' is - what it means to dress well but authentically. I really like the way my sister (who works in fashion) dresses - it's always *her*. She dresses as her authentic self, and there's an awesome and beautiful confidence to every outfit she puts together.
On the first question, I think the most obvious example in my own life is that now that I’m married, my conception of attractiveness is primarily shaped by what my husband likes. If we’re dressing up to go out for a date night, my choices about what to wear are shaped by the desire to appeal to one specific person - my spouse - not men generally. I think it’s normal and natural in a committed relationship.
Becoming a mother radically changed my perspective on sexiness as a primary path to intimacy. While the transition from maiden to mother is a cultural shock in many ways, the most glaring example to me was breastfeeding. Having my breasts go from primarily form to primarily function. Pre-motherhood the primary function of my breasts seemed to be to sit proportionally to my body to increase attractiveness and used to dial my sexiness up and down while revealing more and less of them, respectively. I enjoyed dressing my body well for my husband, as a way of being outwardly desirable and continuing sexual intimacy. I now find much greater intimacy in using my body to nourish our son. As I’m laid out on the recliner in hour two of cluster feeding, breasts free for easy access, smearing lanolin on chapped nipples, I find in my husband’s gaze an intimacy I’ve never achieved with display alone. Sustained breastfeeding is anything but easy in modern culture, and it is in the sacrifice of my body, not the display, that I find the greatest intimacy with my partner.
This one is a work in progress for me. I often experience the tension of wanting to feel *desirable* (good), doing something I think will make me feel that way, then ending up feeling *objectified* (bad) as a result of maybe insecurity or evangelical purity culture baggage or something. Thinking about it now, I probably need to do some internal work around this, as well as work in my marriage. (I’m open to book/? recommendations if this sounds familiar to anyone...)
I remember an overnight trip where my roommate ran out of time to put on makeup, and she was distraught because her boyfriend (also on the trip) had never seen her without makeup. There were definitely some differences of cultural and personal priorities between us (I don’t normally wear makeup but of course she was free to!) but I remember reflecting that, if anything, at a certain point in the relationship, the person you’re dating should get *more* opportunities than most people to see your literal or metaphorical warts. Otherwise you’re both in for a rude awakening someday.
Sort of in answer to 1 and 3, I think the healthiest thing I have done is to embrace my appearance and embodiment more broadly as it pertains to sex and romance.
I grew up in a conservative Protestant tradition, and in young adulthood felt like the options for a young woman in the 2000’s/early 2010’s were Scylla and Charybdis: the disembodied, oddly sexless, performatively virginal and young-marrying femininity of church world, or the performative sexuality of either raunch culture or *~sex-positivity~*. Neither was a fit, and I think I buried real engagement with questions of sexuality and coming into womanhood by, in part, refusing makeup, or not spending the money for a good haircut, or dressing in funky vintage clothes but always keeping my body hidden in some fundamental way. You can’t make me wrestle with questions of the flesh if I deny that I HAVE flesh, ahahahaha!! (I was very dumb, lol, and way too cute to style myself so shabbily.)
At a certain point in my early 20’s that facade cracked, I was out of church for a decade, and had what was essentially a delayed coming of age where I had to wrestle with these matters and learn through (at times awkward, heartbreaking, and sweet) experience.
Having landed on the other side in my 30’s and in a less conservative branch of Christianity, I’ve learned to embrace that I’m an embodied, adult woman with an adult sexuality. Taking ownership of that has made me better able to be a steward of myself — I don’t dress to hide my body or the ways in which it may be attractive, nor do I dress to draw undue attention. I wear makeup that takes 7 minutes to apply that highlights my features, and I pay for a haircut that suits me. I enjoy clothing, and enjoy that ways that it can be used to convey a message to the outside world. I find myself genuinely delighted to dress for a date these days, not because I’m trying to self-objectify, but because I’m happy to send a message of: here I am, doing my best to be lovely, in part to convey how much I like you.
Anyway: all things in moderation, I guess?
Something I noticed a long time ago is that love (in every form) is just so specific that I don't actually understand what a conventional approach to "attractive" is. My husband has insisted again and again (and after five years I do, finally, believe him!) that what he finds most attractive in me is when I'm being my *whole* self. So I keep my hair short, dye it red, sometimes turn it outrageous colours, wear only skirts because I don't actually like pants, go off on long passionate tangents, and all those things are really authentically me! And he likes that best! I've found myself more and more comfortable indulging in the oversharing-of-opinions that so many people elsewhere have told me makes me "A Lot" because my husband genuinely wants to hear what I have to say. (... this is commonly adjusted for time constraints, whether or not there's other people around who may not care, and age-appropriateness if any kiddos are around. But I don't hold myself back for fear of his contempt; instead, any holding back is out of consideration of external relevant factors. It's a nice feeling.) But the same strategy that I used previously to weed out and scare off men who were looking at me funny -- Be Big, Be Bold, Be Loud, Turn It Up to Eleven* -- is the one that made the man who became my husband convinced he wanted to be my friend.
* Many a man I've encountered has been intimidated by or afraid of a larger-than-life young lady with strong opinions and an argumentative streak. I considered this an excellent weeding method at the time and have no regrets.
“So, I’m curious:
Are there approaches to “being attractive” you ultimately discarded because they were alienating in the actual experience of a relationship?”
As a man (and an ‘older man’ at that), I am very interested in this and the other 2 questions asked. This aspect of female self perception is for me certainly an unknown aspect of human experience. And it is interesting to me as one who has in my life been a target of the ‘being attractive’ effort.
My male experience of the female attractiveness efforts is often a wish to be free of the too frequent presence of ‘eye candy’. Lust is a difficult emotion to manage when one is constantly exposed to ‘things’ that look so sweet. I do not want to perceive women as objects but eye candy makes that difficult...!
Perhaps someone can let me know more about how things could be different?
I remember the first time I went to Europe with my parents, and we were being served at an ice cream shop or some such. My mother made a negative comment about the server - an attractive young woman who had untouched underarm hair - something about being “disgusting.” My dad said something about it not being a big deal and I realized that he still found the woman attractive (as did I). It occurred to me that the act of shaving hair was performative - by women and partly FOR women, in ways that ultimately shape what men find attractive as well. My mom wasn’t shaving under her arms for my dad but for herself…
Nowhere does this get weirder than shaving one’s pubic hair. I have been banned from one online groups for suggesting that if a man is unattracted to a woman with pubic hair, that implies something is wrong with him and his desires rather than with a woman who is in her natural state. Specifically, to find hairlessness there attractive implies an attraction to prepubescent children - yet it’s normalized online in pornography in ways that are incredibly demanding (not to mention painful!) for actual adult women.
My husband has described lingerie as being a frame for a great work of art, which I think captures the essence of a performative action that captures or enhances the original vs that attacks and offends the original. In other word, one suggests the original body is beautiful regardless of whether the action is taken and the other suggests the body is disgusting unless the action is taken.
I had to drop the whole sexy “coy and mysterious” facade (where they can’t tell what you’re thinking because you’re purposefully withholding communication to make them wonder) in the context of a relationship because it made things too confusing. Not to mention that when you have kids nobody has time for that! Since then, clear and direct communication has become much sexier.
Like Melanie Bettinelli, “l don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be ‘sexy.’ I have always hated the word and all it represents on a visceral level”.
That said, I’ve wanted fewer hassles in life, and, while passing for conventionally attractive can be a hassle in itself, it may result in less social hassle overall.
I started discovering this the summer I turned 14, when I began dieting in earnest to fit in better socially — while I was thinner than many teens with great social lives, I was also awkward and sickly enough that my exceeding conventional weight standards of the time seemed to cost me more. This discovery was confirmed after a sleepover in high school when I had to borrow a friend’s more fashionable clothes and noticed a dramatic difference in how I was treated in them (the clothes weren’t “sexy”, just well-fitting and trendy).
“What ways (if any) did you consciously make an effort to change and become ‘desireable’ that felt like they were good for the long haul?”
In retrospect, my efforts to stay slim in my teens probably involved brief excursions into atypical anorexia (for which I was complimented, including by teachers, as getting “healthier”). But now that I’m a mom too overwhelmed to stick to rigid diets and who now stress-eats (instead of, say, achieving the alcoholism which tends to run in my family), my weight is now a health problem. My EDS connective tissue is more susceptible to the strain of excess weight than average, the pro-inflammatory aspects of adiposity combine poorly with my underlying inflammation, and my BMI is now high enough I can expect to get that spiel from medicos where any medical problem I might be having could be blamed on my overweight. Whatever was disordered about my previous relative thinness, my current state may be worse, and it seems likely that my health benefited, physically and perhaps even more socially, for quite some time from the lower weight.
Additionally, seeing a dermatologist in my 20s and getting acne properly treated rather than just concealed seems to have been beneficial. The skin is an organ, too, and inflammation in it is bodily inflammation. Skin isn’t just skin-deep, as I had once assumed.
There are plenty of problems with using attractiveness as a proxy for health and health as a proxy for human well-being and hence the worth of life. Untruth just isn’t true, and truth is just the truth. Half-truths about human well-being create so much mischief because they are partly true.
There’s a small plot line in The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel about the main character and her mother, and how they do their hair and makeup while their husbands are still asleep. The unraveling of that plot is quite beautiful.
This is related to other commenters' point about wanting to be attractive to one's spouse, but more specifically I value that my husband is attracted to me, personally and individually, not just to a type of woman I happen to belong to, so I generally want to avoid fashions or modes of desirability that don't feel authentic to me. To be honest I don't have any good definition of what it means for an outfit or whatever to be "authentic" to a person so I really do go by feel. It's partly a question of personal style but also of, I guess, values. Like, I know that high heels are generally considered sexy and my husband would think I look good in them, but for a variety of reasons it's really important to me not to wear them, so doing it to look sexy feels fake to me. It would be hot but it would also be a barrier to real intimacy.