The ugly woman

Many years ago I met a woman who was hired as a contractor by the place I worked at the time.  My first impression of her was that she was extremely physically unattractive; but I thought about it a bit more because anyone who is extreme in any way is interesting, and I came to some realizations that seemed to me to be pretty important.

First of all, I figured out that it wasn't her body that was the problem.  If I could have seen her "naked and petrified" - without her clothing and without the behaviour patterns that her clothing was a manifestation of, and also without the history of my initial reaction - I think I would have said she looked about average in terms of attractiveness.  The problem was mostly her clothes.  I think the best single-word description would be that they were shabby.  Most of what she wore seemed to have been in use far past the time when it should have been thrown out, to the point where she'd be wearing extra garments over top to cover the holes in the first ones.  Or sometimes leaving the holes uncovered.  Not just the "I do all my shopping at the thrift store" level, because that's unfair to the thrift store - it was the "I do all my shopping in the dumpster behind the thrift store" level.  The clothing was bad to begin with, it didn't seem to be properly laundered and otherwise cared for, individual pieces were worn wrong, and they were combined in the wrong ways.  Honestly, most of the homeless people I see are able to dress themselves better than she did.

But she wasn't homeless.  She had a technical job.  She was good enough at it that her employers at least sort of tolerated her appearance.  She seemed to have a normal amount of disposable income, based on the other things she had and did that I knew cost money.  It's not plausible that she was living in abject poverty, and *even if she were* it'd be hard to believe that poverty actually forced her to be as unattractive as she was.  There'd have been things she could have done to mitigate it, and she wasn't.  She didn't have a hideous deformity or other health-type problem that could explain it - as I mentioned, it seemed to be her clothing, apparently voluntarily chosen, that was the main issue.  As far as I could tell she wasn't suffering from any major psychiatric disorder that could make her unable to evaluate her own appearance from others' point of view and select appropriate clothing.  The whole thing was baffling.

I thought that maybe she was choosing her clothing to serve some other goal instead of "create a favourable impression on other human beings".  For instance, maybe she thought it was really important to be comfortable.  Or maybe she *just didn't care at all* - which probably would be a psychiatric disorder, but whatever.  But as I thought through the other goals she could conceivably be trying to serve, none of them made sense.  The reasonable thing would be if, okay, she doesn't care *much* about appearance, it's more important to be comfortable or something, then appearance would still be a goal she'd try to serve, just at a lower priority.  Clothing can be very comfortable and still look good.  "Appearance is a low priority overridden by some other rational goal" wouldn't explain the observation.  Even if she were just choosing her clothing at random, or to serve some goal like "must be cheap" exclusively, if "must look good" were not a consideration at all...  just by random chance I'd have expected her to end up doing better on visual appearance than she did.  Hell, it was as if she were deliberately choosing her clothing to be as unattractive as possible.

That's when the penny dropped.  I don't know for sure that I'm right, but I think that that's exactly what was going on:  she was deliberately - maybe not consciously, but deliberately on some rational level of her mind - choosing her clothing to make herself as visually ugly as possible.  Looking at her again with that in mind, I noticed something else, which was that her clothing was such as to minimize any visibly sexual characteristics of her body.  If you asked me "did she have a nice ass?" I wouldn't have been able to answer because I'd never seen her wearing anything that made it possible to judge.  All her horrible-looking pants (skirt?  ha!) just happened to be baggy in the wrong place for it to be possible to recognize the shape of her ass.  Similarly for her breasts.  That didn't seem like it could happen by random chance, not so consistently.

I saw her a couple times in contexts where it was unacceptable for her to dress the way she usually did - and it was evident that she was capable of to some extent "dressing up" when necessary, and to some extent recognizing the situations when it was necessary, and the difference between doing that and the way she usually dressed.  But when she dressed up, she still dressed unattractively.

I'm pretty sure she was heterosexual, because she once mentioned having a boyfriend (it occurred to me to wonder if he was blind); I'd have thought her appearance would turn off men and women equally, but I mention that because I'm aware that some lesbians have very different ideas of what's beautiful from mine, and I'm pretty sure that that's not what was going on.  She wasn't just dressing to be attractive to people with different taste from mine, unless they were batshit insane in a way that went far beyond merely having a minority sexual orientation.

So what was going on?  I think what was going on was that she thought we all should be perfect rational beings who don't care about visual appearances.  This was supported by a couple of strange conversations I had with her that in hindsight I'm pretty sure were her attempts to express such a view.  She wanted to send the message, to anyone looking at her, that she didn't care about her visual appearance, but it went beyond that - she wanted to pre-filter her social group.  Repelling the majority of the human race, especially including men who might otherwise have found her sexually attractive, wasn't just an unfortunate side effect of some other goal.  It was actually the desired goal in itself!  If she could get rid of all those yucky shallow men who would prefer to interact with good-looking women, short of deliberately disfiguring her body, she could at least wear the ugliest clothes possible so as to prevent herself from being a good-looking woman.  Then she could be sure that anyone who remained to express an interest in her would be one of those perfect rational beings she so admired.

The thing is, I used to have a lot of sympathy with the viewpoint I'm ascribing to her.  I never did what she did, not to anything like the extreme she seemed to be carrying it.  I don't think I ever picked out an outfit consciously and specifically to be *un*-attractive.  But there was a period of several years in my life when I think I was semi-consciously choosing not to make an effort in the positive direction.  I didn't spend time trying to present myself in a visually attractive way, because I wanted to meet people who cared about more important things.  I also made an effort to care about more important things myself.  I didn't romantically reject any good-looking women, but I certainly made an effort to get to know women who weren't.  I believed that people ought to be attracted to each other for their *minds*, not their *bodies*, and that attraction to someone's mind was a lot more worthwhile.

I don't feel that way anymore.  I think I always knew on some level that it was wrong - note that by "wrong" I mean "incorrect", not a moral judgement - just because it didn't make me feel good.  I think it was in late 1999 that I started the process of really figuring out, on a conscious level, that it didn't work to believe that mental attraction was all that much better than physical attraction.  Y2K Night was one important milestone near the start of that.  Another one was some serious introspection I did on a rainy day when I was walking between Eskilstuna and Sundbyholm, Sweden, during the summer of 2003.  I figure it was around that time that I started really giving myself permission to want a sex partner who is actually sexy.  But it's still very difficult.  I still find myself sliding back into thinking that there's something wrong with letting that be important, and that I ought to be looking for a perfect rational being with a high IQ and nothing else.  In thirty years of living with my brain I damn well ought to know how much a high IQ is actually worth, but even now I feel like I'm in danger of being fooled again and skipping past the beautiful women I really want just because I feel like being sexually turned on shouldn't be an important thing.  Maybe it should be the *only* important thing!

Since 2003 when I made the conscious decision to stop trying to judge possible partners by their minds, I've had a lot more romantic success than ever before that decision.  My love life still sucks, but it's noticeably improved.  But just because I've made a decision to change my beliefs doesn't mean anyone else has changed theirs.  I complain a lot about being single - I used to do that on Livejournal but now that I've decided to stop posting there, this may become a replacement - and pretty often, my friends try to help me by expressing what I see as the same belief system I've rejected; the same belief system that in its extreme form leads to the bizarre behaviour of the deliberately ugly woman.  My friends tell me all about how physical attraction isn't so important and it's better and more satisfying to look for a beautiful mind, and on and on with all the logical consequences of that.  That's not the only important point in the belief system - others include some solemn responsibilities men ought to accept because of the power our culture unfairly grants to men and denies to women, and there are a few more too - but the "mind over body" thing is a big part of the system.  It makes me irrationally angry when I'm exposed to that because it feels like hands trying to pull me back into the quicksand I only just managed to struggle out of.

I haven't read the book _The Ringbearer's Diary_ yet, but I want to; from the reviews I've read, I think it describes very similar ideas to mine.

I know - though it seems like I've learned it in the most expensive way possible - that it's not true about physical attraction being unimportant.  I used to really believe that physical attraction was unimportant, and that people's minds were much better things to be interested in than women's bodies.  I used to believe that if I did a really good job of not caring about physical attraction, and of carrying out the responsibilities that men have, then I'd be able to achieve something better than physical attraction.  It never worked.  I never got anything of comparable value.  That belief system made me miserable.  And just when I finally manage to figure out - without any help from anyone else - what the problem is, and what is really important to me, just when I'm hoping it's not too late and that I can repair the damage - you come along to tell me that no no, I'm wrong, all my remaining problems will be solved if only I adopt this NEW belief system...  which upon examination turns out to be exactly the one I just managed to escape from.  It's not new at all; I already know it more intimately than you can possibly imagine (because, though it's also one of my solemn responsibilities not to say this, I am much smarter than almost all of you).  And you're supporting that cursed belief system with all the promises that were already made to me and broken repeatedly throughout my life; and by factual claims I've already tested and refuted by many years of painful experience.

So if sometimes I seem less grateful than I could be, that may be part of the reason.