I’ve never really believed in pretty privilege. At least not as anything that has inherent value.
I don’t believe in anything that requires women to participate in made-up social hierarchies. It’s bizarre watching adults defend their attractiveness online to hundreds of people they don’t know.
I spent a majority of my life surrounded by women obsessed with their physical appearance. How they look and what it gets them. There were times I wished I had cared about mine more.
I always felt too ugly or too fat or what have you. I lost weight to have better romantic prospects. I’m not absolved of being a woman. It invades us all.
But I just can’t stomach women peacocking online to let us know that men find them attractive enough to do things for them. Who cares?
Clearly, your beauty doesn’t save you from anything.
Earlier this summer, Emily Ratajkowski wrote an essay for The Cut detailing her life as a post-divorcee, sexy single mom skipping around Manhattan.
Mother F*cker
After becoming a single mom, I began compulsively dating in order to figure out what kind of woman I wanted to be.
The concept of associating your identity as a woman with the amount of attention you receive from men and then turning around and calling yourself a feminist… fascinating stuff! And at the conclusion of the essay, I’m not quite sure she even answered her own thesis.
This aside, I remember reading My Body in 2021 and feeling as if it had changed my life. I was obsessed with the idea of a beautiful woman sharing her perspective on how hard it was to be hot. Take my paraphrasing with a grain of salt; I’m too lazy to reread it.
What I found really interesting was the apparent irritation with Emily’s article in The Cut.
Women do struggle with admitting the truth. Some of us do really hate exceptionally beautiful women, and we are too deep in our arrested development to admit it.
The root of this phenomenon? Men. Male validation. Sexual validation.
Men are the prize. Emily says it. Random, average women online admit it.
Men are the prize, and you cannot convince me otherwise.
The online backlash has been quite interesting—almost as if people are half-listening. Women are getting too wrapped up in the implied “jealousy” from Emily’s married friends to actually hear the point.
It’s not some ridiculous phenomenon that single mothers are serial monogamists. I’m the product of one, and every single man was the worst man you could possibly think of.
I’ve had friends with children that were hyper-fixated on finding “the one.” Women would rather overcomplicate their lives than admit that something is broken and requires fixing.
That’s the aspect of the article worth addressing.
The most beautiful woman you could think of is deeply insecure. Emily Ratajkowski is obsessed with male sexual validation. Large chunks of that essay were really depressing to read. Have we not gotten any farther?
She concludes her thoughts with:
Which is maybe why, mid-thrust, when I felt the sting of a slap, a hard one, harder than any he’d delivered before, with the hiss of his words “I didn’t ask for your feedback, bitch,” I almost started to cry. I was there for power, but I’d forgotten: Animal brain, I thought, waiting for him to come.
At the end of the day, you’re still a woman to a man. Beautiful or ugly, fat or thin. And I know it’s not “woke” to say it out loud, but I see it in everything. Men are not socialized to love who you are, but what service you can provide. Cooking, cleaning, access to sex.
Oftentimes, it’s your body and then your mind.
We live in interesting times. People champion the idea of “decentering men”; the radical act of a woman centering herself. Which, in my personal opinion, is a load of shit.
I watched debates over the last year about “Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” and if the voice note guy is a predator or not.
The fact that we still cycle through these conversations means we can collectively put these conversations to bed. Y’all love men. There is no grand mystery to solve.
Women love men so much that they fight to the death in comment sections defending their right to be garbage human beings.
Voice note guy was video after video of women saying he was being an honest adult who was asking for consent.
I see women on Twitter completely freak out if anyone dares to make the sex lives of women vaguely political. And we can blame men for this, but the issue is women.
Women will keep women under the chain of patriarchy. Women don’t want liberation from the system. They want a slightly nicer cage.
So when the Emily Ratajkowski’s of the world write essays about promiscuity and slap a feminist label on it, I pause. Sex is political. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and millions lost their access to abortion. And everyone just shrugged.
There’s no such thing as choice feminism because you can’t do what’s expected of you. Men expect you to lie on your back, have their kids, and cook their dinner. I know we want the world to be different than what it is. God knows I do. But we can’t blindly walk around acting as if men don’t view sex the way they do. And women should value self-preservation over everything.
I wish Emily’s essay had ended on that note instead of a shrug.