I feel that I can tell when I'm reading Alana Newhouse, Ari Goes Down, Chandler Bong, Teresa Strasser, Candice Bushnell, my ex-girlfriend Tiffany Stone (I became attracted to her through her writing, I found it alluring) and Lisa On The Face that I am reading the words of a beautiful woman. There's a certain confidence in them. Meanwhile, I read another blogger who seems bitterly homely. Can you sense beauty on the basis of a person's words?
I sometimes fear that my perceptions are so keen that I can tell a woman's womanly shape by her prose. Cathy Seipp, for instance, writes like a woman who has everything a woman should have (a natural C-cup plus rather than some boyish A-cup). I could be more specific about the depth of my insights in this matter but the Torah does not permit me to do so.
Post-Jewish advice columnist Amy Alkon wouldn't be Amy Alkon without her outrageous curves.
A beautiful woman such as Alana Newhouse is more likely to support a free market in dating, sex roles, romance, and marriage. Give women freedom.
Beauty conveys a confidence that you will have a high demand in the marketplace of dating.
More homely women tend to be more supportive of traditional mores, that a community should uphold traditional sex roles and distinctions between men and women, that it should look after women paternalistically so they do not fall prey to the naturally predatory male, and that the community should do everything it can to minimize the value of looks and to avoid a free market in dating but instead push people to pair up early (soon after 18) and have kids so that the concerns of young people will be for practical matters such as child-rearing rather than the glamorous but dangerous world of free dating.
Homely women frequently fear that beautiful women will steal the best men. They frequently resent the unfairness of life and they often want more communal regulation.
A single attractive woman is a threat to the peace of a traditional community. For rational reasons, women with BFs and husbands fear that their men lust for her. It is disturbing to the equilibrium.
If a man can possibly view a woman as a sexual object, he will (unless he is a particularly elevated sort like me). That will be his primary way of viewing her. A beautiful woman writing on sex will usually be viewed as a dumb slut unless her work is of soaring beauty or importance, such as a Mary McCarthy (wife of Edmund Wilson) etc...
But it is better to be a beautiful female writer, where beauty adds to the allure, than a handsome male writer where his beauty causes people to take his work less seriously?
Beauty like ugliness like robust health like sickliness like wealth like poverty shapes who we are.
Homely poor females in particular know that they are not going to be able to coast through life on their looks and money. People like me who dropped out of university know that they are going to have to work extra hard and perhaps take some unconventional routes to success. People like myself who have struggled with chronic illness for many years (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in my case) tend to be much more conservative in our outlook on the world than those who feel robust.
Beauty, particularly combined with smarts and yichus and good education, conveys a certain confidence. Homeliness, particularly in one who has never married, can leave one with a chip on the shoulder, a need to prove to the world that one is still a worthy person even though strangers who encounter one are not initially dazzled by one.
Everything that makes us who we are, including our looks, shapes our writing. In the end, we can not help but write what we are. It is not coincidental that I am obsessed with writing about sin, particularly certain sexual sins, as well as with God, morality and a stern moral code that I frequently flout.
I'm not talking about us fantasizing about a perfect world, in which "beauty (pretty words) stems from beauty (pretty face)?"
I am primarily interested in what is true, rather than what should be. What is true is that we are powerfully attracted to the attractive, much more so than most people want to admit. Handsome charming people can get away with writing and saying outrageous things that an ugly prosaic person could not.
I agree with Tom Wolfe that much of human motivation is about striving for status. It is hard to underestimate the power of jealousy (particularly among writers), and much of jealousy is over looks.
I find many reporters blunt. I just got off the phone with one who wanted my help. If I had been on his side of the phone, I would've tried to be much more charming so I could've elicited a better interview. I don't understand all the people who interview me who are boorish and insensitive during the interview. Afterwards, fine, write what you like. But while you want something from me, why would a journalist, or anybody, not be real nice?
