Whoa: Jezebel Confesses That Conservative Women are More Attractive Than Their Liberal Counterparts

Kira Davis discusses this surprising admission.

From Jezebel, after confessing the obvious:

So why is this happening? American conservatism is profoundly tied up with the old-fashioned gender paradigm in which husbands are active providers and women are passive nurturers. In that paradigm, a woman's job--the core of her femininity--is to make herself as pretty as possible and then sit back and wait to be picked. That is a deeply conservative idea. You could argue that the conservative path is much friendlier to conventionally attractive women than it is to those with less "mainstream" looks. So is it any surprise that Republican women tend to read "pretty"? It's a much tougher path for the women who don't.

Kira Davis argues that this is because conservative women aren't afraid of their femininity nor to look pleasing to a Penis Monster.

That may be part of it, but I think it's more than behavior and confidence at work here; I think it's about actual looks.

One thing you really can't get away from in politics is that, generally -- and here I speak in broad, broad generalities just like Davis and Jezebel do -- politics can be reduced to a battle of the Inners and the Outers.

The Inners have the inside track to conventional success; they are smart, make good choices and thus good money, and are, as far as women go, generally gifted with the conventional charms of femininity. They're reasonably attractive.

Inners do not rebel against the natural (not conspiratorially imposed, but natural) sort of social sorting that occurs because they generally come out okay by the conventional sort of social sorting.

The Outers, on the other hand, are (or at least feel) frozen out from the conventional pathways to social status-gaining. This could be because they are of a disfavored race, or speak a disfavored language as their first, or have a disfavored sexual orientation, or just aren't very gifted with mental virtues (from intelligence, to discipline, to emotional IQ, to steadiness), and hence don't advance much economically in the normal, natural system of social sorting.

Thus, they oppose the natural system of social sorting, and want to upend it, and make everyone forcibly "equal," and so forth.

Now, physical attractiveness is important to everyone, not just women -- ugly, fat dudes feel the sting of rejection and ostracism as acutely as women (take it from one who knows) -- but I would say that women, being historically limited in their potential to social advancement, feel, rightly, that physical attractiveness is more important to their social advancement than it is to men.

And thus, there is a natural sort of gravitational pull on women who are not physically attractive to the Outers party, the party that wants to throw out standard conventions of physical beauty and make everyone "equal" in this dimension, somehow.

Meanwhile, more attractive women are all saying the same thing: F*** that noise.

Even the hardest-core feminist preaching about the Beauty Myth and how this is all terribly unfair nevertheless actually takes full advantage of her physical attractiveness, if she has it. (Most of the feminists I see getting book deals are actually pretty cute, and as far as I know, none of them has turned down a book deal; none has said, "you are unfairly rewarding me for my lookability on television; give this contract to a far less conventionally attractive feminist.")

So I disagree with Kira Davis about this being all about embracing the feminine and being confident in the feminine. I'm sure there's some of that (people can act pretty, people can dress pretty), but a lot of this is much deeper, and goes to the most elemental, subterranean rivers in the human mind, and goes back, in fact, seared into each person's brain, to his first socializations in kindergarten and first and second grades, and his or her reaction to being sorted by others into the Inner circle or Outer darkness.

(For disclosure's sake, I was always more of an Outer darkness sort of person, though I could occasionally blend into the furthest, least desirable sections on the edge of the Inners.* I kind of have a natural sympathy for other Outers, but my sympathy runs out when they seek a sort of Loser's Vengeance on the rest of the world. You kind of have to get over the bruises and hurts of second grade, and find a path for yourself that doesn't involve coercively disadvantaging all people ahead of you in line with state-imposed artificial penalties.)

* By the way, this is part of the reason I'm brusque with strangers. I actually don't know how to handle compliments gracefully because I'm still sort of baffled to even receive one. I'm still thinking (as I think most people are thinking) with cerebral patterns formed from kindergarten to second grade.

Teachers like me -- the other kids don't.

So when The Other Kids say something nice to me, say "I like your blog," I still don't really know the right, "pretty" way to handle this. I really should read a book on grace and charm or something, because I do not have it naturally.

posted by Ace at 01:45 PM

| Access Comments