She was not a beautiful woman, but men found her very attractive, because of her beautiful face and also her body.
“She was not a beautiful woman, but she was well-dressed, quite pretty and, as I quickly realized, very intelligent. She was a good listener, but did not say much herself. After dinner I managed to spend a lot of time talking to her.”
“She was not a beautiful woman but she would just hold you in in so that your attention was directly on her.”
“She was not a beautiful woman, but at thirty-one she possessed a mature comeliness. There was strength in her high-cheekboned face, a keen intelligence in eyes the color of dark blue velvet. Her seal-black hair, layered high and fastened with one of the jeweled combs she favored, glistened with bluish highlights in the pale sunlight slanting in at her back. Many men found her attractive, to be sure.”
She was not a beautiful woman. Her lips were too full, in that way that everyone hates. And her eyes were too big and too green, which is a bad thing for eyes to be. Her eyelashes were too long, too. Her breasts might even have been too big. Her waist was too small and her skin was smooth and unblemished. God, she was disgusting. Made you want to throw up.
“She was not a beautiful woman but something about her was. There were no straight lines about her. The features of her face were crooked. Her eyes were large, one slightly larger than the other, and she would fix them on the man’s, quietly, whenever they happened to meet.”
“She was not a beautiful woman, but there was an indescribable something about her entire face and figure that was strangely attractive.”
She was not beautiful, but her hair and eyes and smile and face were beautiful. Also her body. That was beautiful, too. Just not her, somehow.
“Scarlet O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin — that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.”
“Said I she was not beautiful? Her eyes upon your sight
Broke with the lambent purity of planetary light,
And an intellectual beauty, like a light within a vase,
Touched every line with glory of her animated face.”
“She was not a beautiful woman, but very attractive.”
She was not a beautiful woman in the conventional sense, but no one who met her could take their eyes off of her appearance, in that unconventional way you can’t stop staring at the non-beautiful.
“She was not a beautiful woman, but strangely attractive. No chalk whitened her face, as did most women of her class, for her natural skin was pale enough. Though her lips were too full, she did not paint them with red ochre. Nor did she use antimony or ashes to darken her eyelids. Her breasts were almost too large for her size, and though she had borne three children, her waist had not thickened as most women’s did. Like all the women of our land, her hair — a bright, shining mass — flowed down her shoulders and touched her hips.”
She was not a beautiful woman, but she was sultry. Sultry and attractive and strangely compelling. And hot. Sexy and hot and put together in the way men like. But not beautiful. Definitely not beautiful. Gorgeous, maybe.
“She was not a beautiful woman but was pleasing to the eye.”
“She was not beautiful — she was common, and could not be like Estella — but she was pleasant and wholesome and sweet-tempered. She had not been with us more than a year (I remember her being newly out of mourning at the time it struck me), when I observed to myself one evening that she had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.”
She even smelled good. All the time. Like cinnamon, or something. And her voice was like the sound of distant flutes. Christ, she was so ugly, this non-beautiful woman.
“She was not astonishingly beautiful. All her features, considered individually, were extremely pretty, but the entirety of her face gave the impression that it had been put together hurriedly from stock without reference to any plan. Probably the most suitable word is “attractive,” although people who knew what it meant and could spell it might add “vivacious,” although there is something very Fifties about “vivacious,” so perhaps they wouldn’t.”
Literally everything about her was beautiful, but she wasn’t beautiful. God, it was like someone dipped their fists in a tub of beauty and smeared it all over her face until she glistened like a thousand dancing suns, but she definitely wasn’t beautiful, not even a little bit, nope, not her. She was Interesting, instead.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
Tags: beautiful not beautiful, beauty, pretty but not hot pretty, protagonists, when a man describes a woman as having a good personality she’s either attractive with a good personality or unattractive with a good personality
Dear Toast: every day I love you more.
this post is very othering to those of us who aren’t very well read (ok I recognized GWTW obviously, and I guess Estella – Great Expectations, but that’s it).
I definitely still recognized this trope though. Men think they’re so clever to be attracted to someone who doesn’t look like Megan Fox.
they think they’re even cleverer to NOT be attracted ti Megan Fox. “I dunno man. She’s just not hot to me.” NO ONE IS IMPRESSED WITH YOUR INTENSELY REFINED TASTE IN HOT WOMEN.
SERIOUSLY. “GTFO of here, Megan Fox. Don’t you know I own a Miles Davis album and my library smells of rich mahogany?”
“Don’t you know I own a Miles Davis album” is so clever that I’m MAD.
SO TRUE.
I feel like this is evidence of the intensely critical media bombardment we’re subject to every day – women like MF are held up as the epitome of ‘hotness’ and blasted on the front of men’s mags, so when guys admit they don’t find her attractive they’re almost… bewildered? Except for the ones who are sneeringly proud of it, they’re just juiceboxes.
to be fair I do understand the one about the eyes, bc my first boyfriend was not that cute except he had lovely sea green eyes with ridiculously thick long black lashes. and then once you get to know someone and like them they do seem more attractive.
One of the girls I crushed on for a long while really wasn’t that good looking, but there really just was *something*. I think it was the way she carried herself, and the way she smiled.
Me too. The only one I recognized that wasn’t obvious was the, “her lips were too full, in that way that everyone hates,” passage, but I don’t remember what it’s from.
Does anyone remember that study about women who were considered attractive by everyone versus those about whom opinions differed wildly? I found it really interesting (my apologies in advance for reducing the following women to “hot or not” judgements, but it’s for the sake of illustration).
To use a real-world example using actresses: Sandra Bullock is classically beautiful. She has all nice features that fit together in an aesthetically-pleasing way. But there’s nothing remarkable about her. Even though probably everyone would agree that she’s pretty, you don’t often hear OMG SANDRA BULLOCK GET IN MY BED.
On the other hand, look at Penelope Cruz. Some people find her features oddly-proportioned and don’t think she’s pretty. But other people (myself included) think she’s gorgeous. People’s opinions on whether she’s hot tend to be more vehement one way or the other. It’s either HELL NO or HELL YES.
So basically, what I’m saying is that even though she is considered universally beautiful, admirers of SB might rate her hotness an 8, while admirers of PC are more likely to give her a 10. We’re less actually less attracted to “perfection,” which I find pretty encouraging. Because that means that if you have features that you think are too something, that something probably makes you more attractive to some people.
And again, I’m sorry if anything I said here made anyone feel icky. I just didn’t know how else to explain it, and I don’t remember where I heard about that study. I just thought it was interesting.
I was with you until you used the 1 to 10 scale. I will objectify people in many ways, but not with letter grades or one of 10 numbers.
I don’t use the 1 to 10 scale myself, and hate when people use it. I deliberated on whether or not to include that part, even hypothetically. Ultimately I put it in there because I was unsure as to whether I’d clearly made my point. I’m sorry for offending.
With such diplomacy, I can’t imagine anyone being offended. Have you considered running for public office?
I’m honestly not sure if that’s a dig or if you’re being sarcastic.
Not a dig at all and not sarcastic in a cruel way. I mean my former sentence, and then I’m just poking fun a little because successful politicians are good at making strong/unpopular points in a nice/agreeable way, right?
Ha, that’s a relief. You’re right, though. I think I get that “talent” from my dad, who would have made a great foreign ambassador if he weren’t so picky about food (7 years of PoliSci education only to open up a lawn care franchise whatchagonnado).
I could never become a politician because there is definitely dirt on me (and possibly naked pics, thanks ex husband) on the internet. Plus I cry when people yell at me, so there’s that.
Here’s the study I think you are thinking of: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics…
That’s the one! Yeah, I found it really interesting.
I remember this! I think it was with OK Cupid data. Super interesting.
I’m concerned that there are people who don’t find Penelope Cruz attractive.
I’m theoretically well read (lit phd holla) and I only recognized the quotes from those two books, as well.
I am secretly not secretly hoping someone will post a key so I don’t have to google all of them to satisfy my curiousity.
Aren’t they? I mean, we do talk a lot about appreciating nonconventional beauty, but when men try to articulate different tastes in beauty (like here), we mock them for it?
“She wasn’t beautiful, until she took off her glasses and straightened her hair – then, my God, she was the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen. Look how easy it is, ladies!”
Now she’s All That.
Or she’s an undercover CIA Agent Sandra Bullock. Or Anne Hathaway as a surprise princess. Or or or… (there are too many of these!)
Don’t forget about when she took her hair out of the ponytail.
How come these women never have uncomfortable bump lines where their ponytails used to be?
Their hair is just so sleek and thick and voluminous and shiny (but not beautiful) that the bump lines just undo themselves.
Or glasses marks on their noses?
Too real.
Or blink too much because they just put in contacts for the first time and their eye nerves haven’t deadened yet?
And the braces.
The magic of removing one’s glasses: http://9gag.com/gag/3783489
She was not beautiful. I mean, she was beautiful, but I want to be seen as intelligent and deep, so she wasn’t really beautiful. Look! I can be attracted to non-beautiful! As long as she’s beautiful.
I mean, we wouldn;t want her to be UGLY or UNATTRACTIVE. Everyone knows that only beautiful women are interesting and worthy of novels. But she wasn’t beautiful. YOU GUYS DIDN’T I SAY SHE WASN’T BEAUTIFUL.
(I’m pretty sure I’ve accidentally done this in some things I’ve written. BRB, editing it out. I promise, any heroine of mine who ‘isn’t beautiful’ will just not be beautiful.)
Yea verily, I deserve recognition for looking past the delicate crook in her nose and the untamed wave in her flowing locks, for I am an open-minded and compassionate soul who sees beyond the shallow epidermis to the like-minded soul within.
Let it be known that she was not, however, an unsuitable aesthetic prize for me.
And she does not wear noticeable makeup, for she is not a slattern nor a classless lipsmackers connoisseur; she also respectfully maintains a natural look, so that my ocular organs are not dismayed by acne scars nor eyelashes less luscious than a bambi. Her girl next door perfection is not marred by marked effort, for she is as at home in jeans as she is in a ballgown, both of which are required dramatic scenes in this fanfiction.
She also maintains a slim and honed gym physique yet never exercises hard enough to sweat or eats the salad in a restaurant
In fact, I think she eats steaks and potatoes on the regular, that’s how much she’s not into her own body. She’s just naturally like that.
(I eat steak and potatoes on the regular, along with dessert, which is why I look a little bit like a melted ice-cream)
BRB, changing my username to Classless Lipsmackers Connoisseur.
(Dr Pepper 4 lyfe, though Thin Mint is pretty terrific. Hi, I’m 12.)
Dr. Pepper is hands down the greatest lipsmacker of all time.
Dr Pepper is the best everything.
VIVACIOUS. Curse you, Good Omens, and your terrible quotability.
Terry Pratchett does seem really found of the beautiful-not-beautiful trope. “She’s not beautiful, but maybe she’d be attractive in a way that people don’t find beautiful today. Oh and she has HUGE BOOBS.” Maybe I’ve just been re-reading The Truth and the Moist von Lipwig books too much.
On the flip side, he does have characters that are actually described as beautiful (Angua) and genuinely plain (Magrat) and someone with eyes like vodka drinks/gimlets (Granny Weatherwax).
Yes, like Sacharissa, who would be beautiful if viewed over several centuries, and who has a good selection of features approved of in all.
Yeah, he pretty much uses similar descriptions for Sacharissa and Adora Belle, except one is blonde and the other isn’t.
Also, they never wear fashionable or revealing clothes, but their bodies are so hot (BOOBS) that you can just tell that they have nice figures under their clothes. Because they are naked under their clothes.
[I really do love his books, but that is one thing that grates..]
He clearly has a type, and when deliberately writing an attractive woman, she fits neatly into it. I suspect that pictures of a young Mrs Pratchett would show a woman much like that in looks.
That aside, he writes some of the best and most complex female characters of any male writer I’ve read, so he gets a little slack from me.
Totally agreed. I just feel like it’s been cropping up in the newer books more often than not.. but then again I haven’t read his last two DW books.
Brag/interesting comment maybe:
I once got into it with Farah Mendelsohn at WisCon over whether or not Pratchett was feminist, and she said: “He isn’t. I know him, and he really isn’t. But he likes women, he really, truly likes women.” And I thought, well, that’s actually a good start, isn’t it, at the same time as thinking oh god I wish that were enough and isn’t it terrible that it’s so rare and now I’m crawling back to the woodwork.
I’ve always loved Granny and Nanny, and Sybil Ramekin, who has the most sympathetic portrayal of being tough but raised in girl’s school.
Did Farah mean he’s not a feminist in that he doesn’t like the label, or..? That’s just really interesting, I can’t help but think about his books and his characters overall and think that he is.
I honestly love all of his characters, even the beautiful-not-beautiful ones, because let’s face it, that’s how I was hoping I would be seen from ages 14-possibly now.
Yes. It seems odd to me that someone who consistently writes women who have their own power and agency, and who are valuable for things beyond their physical appearance, and who are so astonishingly varied in character and behaviour, might not be a feminist.
But I’ve been wrong before.
Yeah, ditto about being wrong; I mean, I don’t know him personally. Nevertheless, part of me is having trouble putting aside Equal Rites. I mean, he specifically wrote a book around how women were conspicuously absent from high fantasy, or that the kinds of magic they used was downplayed in some way.
Anyways! On this tangent I should add that my hold on Unseen Academicals came through and I’ll be picking it up from my neighborhood library. 😀
Equal Rites was my first Pratchett Book. Special place in my heart, and all that.
Mine was Lords and Ladies. Lancre witches FTW.
Same here. I don’t even think it’s his “best”, but it’s my favourite anyway.
I mean, yeah, but he also spends a lot of time on how women “naturally” are or whatever. Like, all dwarven women secretly want to wear dresses and makeup. No woman could possibly be happier without baubles! And the repeated references to young girls loving pink, etc. They really, really started to grate on me.
Oh. I was under the impression that not all of the dwarves who want to wear dresses and makeup were female.
And there was the incisive little comment in there about how the female dwarves can ‘do anything the men do as long as they ONLY do what the men do’.
I mean, there are plenty of reasons not to be a feminist, some of them quite good, but I have a feeling they probably don’t apply in Mr. P’s case.
Tansy Rayner Roberts has a great series of blog posts looking at Pratchett’s depiction of women, both good and bad:
http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/tag/pratchetts-women/
WisCon is at the sun-hot heart of a very particular type of academic, faintly classist, capital-F FEMINISM, so it is hard to say what she meant, exactly; I strongly suspect I don’t qualify either, most of the time. But I really like women, too, and Terry Pratchett once got given an honourary membership in Brownies (thanks, Tiffany Aching), so that’s lower-case feminist enough for me.
Ooh, WisCon, Farah Mendelsohn: unexpected crossover to the other section of the internet I follow!
Well, he’s not very well at all, now. I believe he writes using a speech-to-text software program. I’ve started to notice him repeating descriptions and the like. It’s possible that as the alzheimers sets in he’s becoming more reliant on his stock phrasing.
I still love his work and will buy all of them until they… stop. It’s just sad.
🙁
I think that accurately expresses it, yes. I remember when he announced his illness and it was awful. It’s amazing how you can be so invested, emotionally, in someone you’ve never met.
(with typical pratchett styling he said something like “People keep asking me what they can do to help. Unless you’re a world-reknowned neuroscientist: not much.”)
I have stopped reading his new ones, because it makes me too sad. They just aren’t as good, and he is a minor god to me.
I decided to stop reading after Snuff. Bulldog licking piss off a nettle? Fuck that, won’t be giving any more of my money to you. I don’t give a damn if Alzheimer or not.
I actually quite like that description of Sacharissa; it made me think shit, yeah, what’s beautiful now hasn’t always been beautiful, and so on and so forth. Hmm.
My long-worked-on novel’s protagonist is very not-beautiful, in a truly not-beautiful way: tall, yes, but not in a willowy way. Tall and tough and big-boned, strong muscles disguised by her roundness, big broad shoulders that she uses to bull her way through crowded subway platforms. She’s ungainly and stand-offish and with eyes that pinch down to suspicious slivers when a stranger approaches.
She scrapes her hair back severely, but not to shake it down in a tumbling cascade later and look alluringly through a curtain of tangled curls; she scrapes it back to keep dust and silverfish out of it. Her hair is not an expression of her passion; it is just hair.
She has big flat feet and broad, capable hands with short nails. Her thin lips pull into a narrow line when she’s having misgivings, which is almost always, and never bloom into lush kissable pillows in unconscious moments.
I had already written the first draft before I noticed I was falling into the male-gaze-y trope of “so beautiful in her not-beautiful way,” and tore it apart to re-write her. It’s surprisingly seductive, the expectation that a female protagonist should be beautiful, and writing a not-beautiful woman feels like an everyday act of small subversion.
My protagonist is unattractive in some of the ways I (who am pretty comfortable both with my beautiful parts and my oh-so-not-beautiful parts) am not-beautiful, but also in other ways. I’m in love with her not-beauty, with her roughness and her stubbornness, with her suspicious gaze and her refusal to speak gently, with her unblinking unwillingness to cede space in public.
Deliberately unbeautiful protagonists hoy! One of the reasons I almost hope I never get a movie. They’d cast some pouty-lipped, alabaster-skinned, busty stunner to play my pointy, scarred, broken-nosed, flat-chested, unlovely heroine.
Other subversive unattractive awesome female characters, GO:
-Tris Chandler (Tamora Pierce, Circle series)
Brienne of Tarth (Game of Thrones), although she is described as having surprisingly pretty eyes
Ann Claybourne and Nadia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series.
Marion from The Woman in White, although her role with regard to the male protagonist and the other, more attractive woman in the story is pretty disturbing. But she’s still awesome!
Octavia Butler is pretty good at this but I can’t remember if I’m thinking of Kindred or Parable of the Sower.
I’m writing a legit ugly woman too! Much more interesting, even though it is always, always tempting to write her a little better looking because I just like her so much and being ugly makes her sad.
My protagonist isn’t ugly, exactly; she just isn’t pretty, either by birth or by design. She’s plain and ordinary-looking and reasonably comfortable with it.
She stays plain and stubborn throughout. She doesn’t let her hair down and remove her glasses; she doesn’t soften and find romance in unlikely places; she doesn’t become yielding and sweet; she doesn’t bloom under the unexpected sun of some dude’s attention. She’s tough and frowning and plain and crabby and I love her.
…is…is it wrong that your character sounds quite attractive, to me? I’m not generally into women, as a rule, but (and I assume it has something to do with the fact that I’m a short woman who’s built like a miniature fertility idol, and probably also that I usually like more feminine-looking men anyway?) I am quite taken with big sturdy no-nonsense-looking ladies. She sounds like my type 🙂
I hope that wasn’t weird. Was it weird? OH GOD SORRY ELSA *hides*
I DON’T THINK IT’S WEIRD. But (predictably,) her physical body resembles my own, though (perhaps less predictably) I chose to write about the ungainliest stages of that body while excluding (what I think are) its most [eta: conventionally] attractive features.
As a younger woman, I had long lush hair with a striking white streak; my protagonist does not. I had frankly great legs; my protagonist does not (or, perhaps she does, under her pants, but no one’s lookin’ at her legs). I think I have pretty eyes; my protagonist does not. But I’ve also come to think that strength and sturdiness and uncompromising capability are far more attractive traits.
It feels great to write a woman so stern and uninterested in prettiness and softness, and indeed I find those qualities attractive. But — at least to me — that’s markedly different from “beautiful”; finding someone attractive is a much less gendered expectation than finding someone beautiful. Beauty is typically passive; attraction is often about action and interaction.
THE TAG. <3
My god, to leave me hanging until the tag, waiting for the requisite When Harry Met Sally reference. Don’t DO that to me, Mallory!
Please, respect this woman. She is not beautiful; she is not the kind that’s just for fucking. That’s a different woman. She’s over there somewhere.
There are beautiful dumb women and ugly smart women, and THERE WILL NEVER BE A THIRD TYPE
Some people regard “motherss” as a hallowed third position. But only a very specific set of mothers, be sure.
And those are definitely never ever for fucking.
No, there’s hot, beautiful, young mothers, and evil mothers.
But specimens of each type will probably be referred to as “not like other girls” at some point.
Oh god, you’re giving me Piers Anthony flashbacks.
There was a third type once, but they were banished to the internet for thinking they were people.
Fortunately, beautiful girls are the ones most likely to put you in the friendzone, which is why I mention it. So you won’t be surprised when she can’t resist me, later.
I have accordingly filed this unbeautiful but vivacious woman, played by Kristen Wiig, in the girlfriendzone.
“She wasn’t beautiful. She was too lithe and willowy, with ugly slim hips and graceful arms and small perky breasts. Not like those beautiful sluts with their big cow tits.” Anne McCaffrey introduced curvy teenage me to this one, Harlequin Romances pounded it home.
I weep at the beauty of this. And also, of course, in despair.
I had to double check that black seals exist, because I was not sure.
Also the woman in the picture is only beautiful because feather skirt.
A well written piece. Certainly enough to make me come back for more. -Rich Woods
thanks rich
-Mallory Ortberg
Now I can’t stop thinking about Amy in Little Women.
When we first meet her: “A regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners.”
Then, when she’s older:
“Amy is with truth considered `the flower of the family’, for at sixteen she has the air and bearing of a full-grown woman, not beautiful, but possessed of that indescribable charm called grace. One saw it in the lines of her figure, the make and motion of her hands, the flow of her dress, the droop of her hair, unconscious yet harmonious, and as attractive to many as beauty itself. Amy’s nose still afflicted her, for it never would grow Grecian, so did her mouth, being too wide, and having a decided chin. These offending features gave character to her whole face, but she never could see it, and consoled herself with her wonderfully fair complexion, keen blue eyes, and curls more golden and abundant than ever.”
She’s not pretty y’all but she’s pretty? SO CONFUSED.
You don’t know you’re beautiful, / That’s what makes you beautiful
I think that is “she is pretty and generally accepted as pretty, but focuses on her flaws and doesn’t think of herself as pretty.” Which is also very common in novels! But it’s like Trope 1B to this Trope 1.
The text does literally call her not beautiful though.
I think it’s more: “she’s not actually as pretty as she thinks she is but, like, she’s still actually pretty (especially in comparison to brunettes or whatever)” because she doesn’t notice the nose, mouth, and chin which RUIN HER WHOLE FACE and focuses instead on being blonde.
OMG this is amazing. I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of bullshit lately, what with the spate of “she wears jeans BUT SHE’S ALSO BEAUTIFUL” and “you don’t know you’re attractive because you’re confused by the fact that you don’t go around wearing a tiara and putting on lipstick all the time, but I’m here to tell you, you are in fact attractive” songs and the “real beauty” campaigns, and ANTM coming back. First, the absurdly, completely ingrained assumption that you have to be beautiful to be worth anything–that’s why we have to be reassured that these characters are, in fact, attractive, or why we have to bend over backwards to claim that everyone is physically beautiful somehow. Because who gives a fuck about someone who’s just flat-out not cute? And then the stupid double-bind of having to be attractive but not on purpose, and not consciously–thus the stupid boy-band songs, or Tyra’s idiotic smugness about finding her “I never thought I was pretty because I’m so skinny and I have HUGE WEIRD EYES” diamonds in the rough.
Tyra’s idiotic smugness is SO ADDICTING THOUGH
That and their use of the non-word “flixel” this time means I’ll be glued to my TV for the entire cycle.
” we have to bend over backwards to claim that everyone is physically beautiful somehow. Because who gives a fuck about someone who’s just flat-out not cute?”
girl yes. not everyone is physically attractive and that’s OK. being physically unattractive doesn’t make you worth less as a human person.
(although the other side of that is you’d have to be pretty fucking hideous for there not to be SOMEONE who finds you attractive, there are a lot of “types” out there!!!).
It is in men’s interest to place themselves where they can dole out the permission to exist to women based on various criteria. Most of the men who do this will place physical beauty as the prize to fight for because they have zero skin in that game. Obviously beauty has become an ideal you subscribe to, no something you ARE. So antagonizing women on their level of attractiveness (either with literary prose but more and more with language that is clearly intended to state how bonerific they are) accomplishes many things. The pursuit f beauty as it is regulated by the industry is incredibly time consuming and expensive. Drowning women in work for acceptance is a way to keep them behind in many ways. Also, groups where men are predominant will become closer by excluding others… i.e. women. At some point their sexism will be called out and they will HAVE TO accept women in their ranks. Then, pitting women against each other is a tactic to deflect attention from competence, intelligence and experience as a means to evaluate colleagues and employees. In the late 90s, a guy coined the term ‘media elevation’ which is the expectation of men that women should always look exactly like the models in magazines. The disconnect is that Heidi Montag had to get 10 plastic surgeries in a day to look like a photoshopped magazine cover of HERSELF! The paragraphs you cite say ‘she was not aftermarket cosmetically beautiful’ but then go on to describe women who embody so many aspects of what beauty truly is about. These paragraphs are nonsensical and makes the narrator seem like someone who has no idea what the fuck he/she is talking about. This is how I feel about everybody who makes value judgement about me or anybody else based solely on physicality. Beauty used to mean something, now it’s just a measuring stick that leaves so much out of the picture… Just like the habit of measuring everything using money.
“By current standards I am not beautiful. Fortunately for me, Emerson’s tastes in this area, as in most others, are highly original. My complexion, which others find sallow and dark, he described (on one memorable occasion) as resembling the honey of Hymettus; my coarse, jet-black hair, which refuses to remain confined in braids, buns, or nets, arouses in him a peculiar variety of tactile enjoyment; and his remarks about my figure, which is unfashionably slender in some areas and overly endowed in others, cannot be reproduced, even here.”
RIP Elizabeth Peters. Years since I read those books but I recognized it immediately. Thanks for this.
Isn’t beautiful just “pretty & tall”?
gorgeous = “pretty with great hair”
OMG… this is perfection.
Uggghh I remember reading a book once as a teenager (I think it was called Undercover Cleo) where the protagonist was this porcelain-skinned thin leggy redhead with gorgeous green eyes, whose mother was a model and who herself could step in to modelling gigs at short notice, but for some reason could not be called beautiful. What. Like, I’m short with quite standard brown eyes and hair that’s been going grey since I was 18 and I often have a spot or two on my chin, and I think I’m pretty damn hot most days, actually.
So I guess I have to assume that Cleo was in fact nine feet tall with skin so flawless and translucent you could see her veins and muscles underneath, and that her eyes were entirely green, not just the irises but the pupils and what would otherwise have been the whites too, and that the modelling gigs were aimed at aliens. Because how the fuck is that not beautiful otherwise.
i feel like the unifying theme to this set of things is not so much about not-beautiful as it is about not-PERFECT, but when have “perfect” and “attractive” ever been synonyms?
it’s as though there’s some weird conspiracy in place where people think they’re supposed to be attracted to perfect people, but actually the things that make people attractive are (i think) the things that make them weird or interesting – not ugly, but deviant from some kind of golden-mean ideal in a way that makes them individuals.
so this may be an unpopular opinion, but actually this trope (beautiful-not-beautiful) has never bothered me because i assumed the gist of it was “she wasn’t perfect-looking, or anything; she looked like a person and people found that attractive.” and i always found that to be an UPLIFTING trope – i might look in the mirror and think my nose is too big, but i have this barrage of literature to fall back on that tells me that actually the things that make me not-perfect are the things that make me ME!
though i grant you that some of these ladiez sound pretty damn perfect-looking.
Aaaaah The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the absolute worst example of this! I don’t have the exact quote but it’s basically like:
“[Some dude character] couldn’t help but be fascinated by Lisbeth even though she wasn’t beautiful at all. She had a face that would look great on a billboard if she was wearing makeup, but she could never be a model because she was too skinny and delicate. He couldn’t understand why he was so attracted to her flawless features and skinny, skinny body, when those characteristics are never celebrated by the media as a beauty ideal or anything.”
Don’t mean to interrupt a good old fashioned pity party, but “hot,” “pretty,” “voluptuous,” “gorgeous,” “beautiful,” all mean different things. They really do. No matter how much anyone complains or “subverts” (usually just inverts) beauty, beauty remains beauty. And it doesn’t have to make sense. It wouldn’t be beautiful if it did.
Beauty is not decided by vote. All of the quotes that this blog cites attest to that. Women don’t decide what is beautiful to men; men do. Men don’t decide what is beautiful to women; women do.
“It was a striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones high yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of candles.”
“All her features, considered individually,”
That one is Terry Pratchett, isn’t it?
I rather expected GWTW and Great Expectations to be there! I would have been disappointed if Scarlett wasn’t.
But the first one isn’t even trying very hard! “She wasn’t beautiful, but men found her attractive because of her beautiful face”.
I think Spider Robinson does a pretty good job of averting this trope in his short story “God Is An Iron” (which is also chapter two of the novel Mindkiller, and the compilations Deathkiller and The Lifehouse Trilogy):
“Emaciation was near total; except for breasts and bloated belly, she was all bone and taut skin. Her pulse steady. At her best she would not have been considered attractive by conventional standards. Passable. Too much waist, not enough neck, upper legs a bit too thick for the rest of her. It’s hard to evaluate a starved and unconscious face, but her jaw was a bit too square, her nose a trifle hooked, her blue eyes just the least little bit too far apart. Animated the face might have been beautiful — any set of features can support beauty — but even a superb makeup job could not have made her pretty. There was an old bruise on her chin, another on her left hip. Her hair was sandy blonde, long and thin; it had dried in snarls that would take an hour to comb out. Her breasts were magnificent, and that saddened me. In this world, a woman whose breasts are her best feature is in for a rough time.”
Too real.
lol