For women, it's better to be average-looking than exceptionally beautiful

Hello Zaradi. Thank you for accepting the debate! I would like to propose two mechanisms whereby life becomes worse for women as a direct result of being exceptionally beautiful. The sleaze-magnet mechanism 1.1 casual When I was studying in France, I briefly became friends with an exceptionally beautiful Japanese woman. After class, we would try to go somewhere in the town to talk but it was impossible because men would approach her all the time. I mean, all the time, and their conversation was very tedious. They would ask her “what your name?” “where you from?” etc., and she would just giggle and look down because she didn’t want to talk to them and then they would ask me to ask her the questions and so on. After a couple of days, I started to make excuses not to go anywhere with her and we only saw each other in class. Poor, poor woman. To think that she missed out on my company and conversation as a direct result of being beautiful! It’s really sad. You’re probably thinking, “But wasn’t all the attention from handsome French men some small consolation to her?” No, it wasn’t. Here’s why. If two women are in a café in sexy outfits and are making eye contact and have open body language, then of course it’s fine for men to approach them. However if they are covered from neck to ankle, as my friend and I were, not looking around and busy talking to each other, then they probably don’t want to be interrupted. Sensitive, intelligent, men know this and keep their distance. If one of the women is so exceptionally beautiful that they simply have to talk to her, then they will wait carefully for the right moment. Men who ignore this courtesy rule are without exception stupid, insensitive or desperate. Therefore, exceptionally beautiful women are always being plagued by men who are neither hot nor relationship material. This is annoying in itself, but it also prevents beautiful women from having fun with people who are not trying to have sex with them, you know, like friends. 1.2 serious There is a very small minority of men who are sociopaths. I’m sure there are women sociopaths too, but they need not concern us here. I studied at university with such a man. He was very good looking, very intelligent, and on the national lacrosse team. Let’s call him Dick. Dick had a very strong sense of hierarchy. He judged me as being so low on the hierarchy that he wouldn’t even acknowledge me. If I happened to be standing in a group he would look right through me as if I wasn’t there. If I said something to him, he wouldn’t respond at all. I loathed him of course. Well, it so happened that one of my best friends, who is head-turningly, exceptionally beautiful and who went to a different university, happened to meet him and they started dating. One night they came around to my house for dinner and Dick was a completely different person. Because I was friends with his girlfriend, he bothered to be charming. He was very, very charming. He laughed at my jokes, I laughed at his jokes… I had to keep pinching myself to remember to hate him. My friend, who had never seen his bad side, was head over heels, of course. They moved in together and two years later everybody, including her parents, was just begging her to leave him. But by then her self-esteem was wrecked. She blamed everything on herself. He was cruel, manipulative, and controlling. It was disaster and it took her years to recover. If she had been average-looking, Dick would never have even given her the time of day. All the really, really beautiful women I know have problems with relationships. There is a sort of man who just wants a trophy girlfriend. These men don’t see or don’t care about a woman’s spirit; they just want to control her. Because they’re not slowed down by sincerity or having to be polite to people who can’t help them, and because they can be extremely charming, sociopaths are often very good at getting their target. Being average-looking is a perfect defense against such men. They have no interest in you. This is why average-looking women end up with the best men and the best relationships. 2. The self-esteem mechanism Adolescence is usually characterized by a lack of power and influence. Even after graduating college, young people are almost always at the bottom of the career ladder and poor. Older people patronize them or ignore them. To get ahead, young people have to work hard and survive lots of bad days to educate themselves in the adult world. Gradually, their skills develop and they figure out how to succeed. For beautiful women, life is nothing like this. They get heaps of attention from an early age. People like having them around so it’s easy for them to get jobs. Successful men will take the time to help them get ahead in whatever career they want. Instead of feeling powerless, they feel powerful, but in a limited way. Quite soon, beautiful women start to think that their attractiveness is the most valuable thing about them. Why bother to work hard and learn stuff when you can just slip on a cute dress and get what you want straight away? There are several problems with this approach. The main one is that attractiveness to men, although heavily dependent on looks, is not entirely dependent on them. Men tend not to like it when women – beautiful or not – take away their power or resources. Therefore, if a woman bases her power too much on her attractiveness to men, she may find herself in a position where she must always be submitting to them. Average-looking women, instead, are building up their skills and their careers so they can get what they want whether men give it to them or not. This is a much less risky approach to life, and far more successful in the longer term. There are many beautiful women in the public eye, of course, but they always seem to be constrained. Whenever an average-looking woman is successful or famous, she is much more likely to be speaking acting freely because she has gotten there on her own terms. Women whose self-esteem is based on their attractiveness to men also spend an extraordinary amount of time and money on their appearance. Average-looking women who let themselves go a bit can spend that time on money on their own future and their own pleasure.