I really wish men and women could body swap for a day so we could better empathize with each other. Most men don’t really see that the world tells women “the most important thing you can be is pretty”. Whatever else you might have accomplished in life really pales in comparison to your looks. It’s just the way it is. This holds especially true outside the Bay Area bubble. Many of my wonderful male friends are just astonished at how much time and energy and money that I spend to be beautiful. I don’t think they understand how much society judges me on my looks. How it forces me to constantly compare myself to other women. How awful those moments are when I feel that I don’t have it. How women are acutely aware of and expected to “fix” our physical “shortcomings”: the hair on our face and legs and armpits and bikini lines and backs, our even-slightly-blemished skin (how dare we have pores), our thick ankles, our fleshy arms and stomach, our facial features (everything from thin lips to nose shape can be “fixed”), our hair color and texture, cuticles and unpainted nails on both hands and feet, callused feet, moles, under eye darkness and bags and wrinkles, thigh cellulite, breast shape, flabby arms, creased forehead and cheeks, short or saggy neck, unlifted lashes, low cheekbones, eyebrow shape, jaw and neck definition, etc etc. and especially, any signs of aging. We don’t ever become “silver foxes” or look “distinguished”- aging is the enemy.
In today’s world, the scrutiny of men’s appearance will never even come close to the microscope that women live under. Truly. An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman.
And worse, women are brought up to really care what others think of them, and to make everyone else comfortable at their own expense. So you can’t just “stop caring what people say”. That would really screw you over in this world.
I imagine that beauty is for women what money is for men. It’s our currency and often what makes us valuable to the group of the shallow “others” in this society.
I used to think like you, until my brother committed suicide from loneliness and rejection. I look at his suicide note every so often,and worry about my boys. Most men absolutely care what people think, and want to make other people comfortable. My brother, my father, your wonderful friends, probably do too.
Women and men have very different burdens, and its extremely clear the grass is not greener on the other side. Most people are not the high performing ruthless psychopathic type A personality common in Silicon Valley, New York, Miami, etc.
I'm a Korean woman that grew up in a white Surburbia, the meanest people to me were brown haired "average" white girls. They insulted my hair, my eyes, my nose, and my lack of nasal bridge, literally everything you can think of.
I believe the primate social hierarchy at play, and at our core many of us are trying to "win" that hierarchy. At the same time, I think certain types of people gravitate to cities and certain lifestyles.
> We don’t ever become “silver foxes” or look “distinguished”
While perhaps a little more crude, doesn't "MILF" convey the same intent with respect to women? All of the above speak to an attractiveness found in those who are considered older. There are plenty of women in their later stages of life who are still considered very attractive.
> aging is the enemy.
I posit that becoming "boring" is the ultimate enemy. Indeed, becoming boring is correlated with age. People tend to settle down as they become older, and that is what is considered least attractive. The movers and shakers don't want to associate with someone who thinks watching TV on a Saturday night is a good time.
> An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman.
It does appear to be true, statistically, that it takes men longer to mature. In fact, stereotypically, there is an idea that men will never grow up. The longer you keep at doing "stupid kid things" the greater the chances that you will eventually strike gold.
> The longer you keep at doing "stupid kid things" the greater the chances that you will eventually strike gold.
This is somewhat the key to success as a man, and what they're evolved to do.
Men don't get to live a life staying safe in the cave. Men are the species' tool for throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That's why the bell curve for male success/failure is much flatter than it is for women. More extreme successes and more extreme failures. Men are the element of the human tribe that take on huge risks to discover new and valuable things. When it works, the success can be massive and disproportionate. When it fails, it fails hard, often in death. And usually, there's no (or little) safety net for men. There's a reason why 75% of the homeless are men.
This does seem like a necessary outcome of the harsh reality of supply and demand of sexual reproduction, that eggs and wombs are scarce and valuable while sperm is abundant and cheap.
Angela Merkel pretty solidly disproves this. Granted there aren't a lot of women like her, but even a single counterexample is sufficient to disprove broad assertions.
Women communicate in a variety of ways. One of the prime ways they communicate, even with other women, is through looks. So enhancing looks is the first step of communication. And so there is also competition. I have noticed in a large group of women, if there is someone who comes to work highly focused in looks, the other women begin to do the same. And in similar style too.
Men don’t really study that much into looks. They are less sharp about it. But ugly men get less attention too. If they don’t dress well, they get less noticed. In such cases, the surviving men who don’t look great have something else that sets them apart: high level of intellect.
What sets women apart, if not looks, is discipline and reliability.
I look a little white, I look a little Middle Eastern. When I was young, I absolutely hated how I looked. I was bullied. Taunted. Tormented. I wanted a nose job. I wanted different hair. I wanted a different build. But as I got into my late 20s, I started to get a lot more attention, and I realized that a lot of people found me attractive. For reference, I look a lot more like Yehuda Amar (an Israeli chef) than Michael Aloni (Akiva on Schtisel).
It's true that being conventionally attractive made my life 1000x easier - it's almost like the trees lowered their branches to make the fruit easier to pick. I'm pretty sure it made it easier to get a mortgage and a job and definitely a partner. But I still think about what my life would be like if I had a different nose, different hair, different build.
Even in my late 40s, I still get a lot of attention from much younger women. A few weeks ago, a woman, maybe 25, openly flirted with me while she made my cappuccino. This has happened many times before, but I never make a move.
All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw me naked. Or how fast she would disappear if she saw my crooked upper teeth. Or all my gray chest hair. Or my hairy back. Even if I played ball and gave her my number, even if she thinks I'm handsome, older-and-wiser, I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her.
Maybe it won't come as consolation but a lot of very beautiful people suffer from the same. Like how people who are already skinny can very well be hit by anorexia.
Used to being beautiful all their lives, one day there's a chink in the armor: a wrinkle, a white hair, a stretchmark, that same feeling you have starts to sink in. The emotional impact might be worse than for people who had a lifetime to be at peace with how they look like.
This seems to be the author of the article [0]. Your first reaction is probably that the real picture doesn't match at all the picture you built in your mind while reading the article. I hope that helps you realize you are not alone in feeling that everyone else must be thinking of you what you think of yourself. They're probably not.
Definitely recommend any “nude” cultural stuff you may find. It empowers you with self acceptance and body(ies) awareness.
Germans calls it FKK [0] and it’s a think our civilization would highly benefit to incorporate. Also if anyone visit Belgium/ Netherlands, highly recommend an afternoon in a nude sauna garden. (For those wondering, no sex involved neither allowed). Naturist beaches in other places are great too but a bit harder to get when you’re a “beginner” : they tends to be public space that are also frequented by clothed-people and you may find yourself weird to undress among them, the first times at least.
We have a similar path from how we were growing up vs getting better as we got older. One benefit I saw from being an overweight, out of shape, nerdy kid growing up is that I learned not to worry about what other people think or say.
"Let it pass like water off a duck's back." became a little bit of a mantra until I truly wasn't worried about it, even as I age.
Accepting that, if people wanted to be with me they would. If they didn't, I didn't want to waste my time with them. Trying to get somebody who didn't like me to like me, ceased being anything I was concerned about. Prior to hitting this point, I'd had multi-year crushes in high school on a couple of girls who were nice and friendly but just weren't interested in me.
After having this realization, it made it a lot easier to date because you can ask people out without fear of rejection. If somebody said no, great! That saved a lot of time. Don't take it personally.
The other thing that young men definitely have to learn is the gossip pipeline. Don't participate in it, but realize it is out there. Word got around in college that I "wasn't looking for a serious relationship" and it made it a lot easier for me to date. Turned out that a lot of young women worry about overly clingy men if they go out one time and then decide not to pursue it further. There's a lot of pressure on women there. People even tried to set me up on blind dates.
Eventually, I met my wife of 20 years so far.
The act of simply going on a lot of first dates is fairly validating in and of itself. Learning all of this stuff added to my own confidence too. But the absolute first step is simply self acceptance. Control what you can control, don't worry about what you can't.
And to be clear, control what you can control means that you can control improving yourself (diet, exercise, grooming, mindset, humility, faith, education, courtesy, reliability, family relationships, etc). A lot of self acceptance advice suggests that you shouldn't be trying to get better. I'm not suggesting that at all. We can all improve and we can all be better for the people we care about. That's a big piece of showing we care.
From my experience I found most ‘perfect’ looking people when getting to know them better a bit boring, bland. Perhaps it’s this lack of struggle or soul searching that made then slow down their growth in other dimensions. Many of these folks suffer most when getting older and their looks fade.
I prefer the company of "ordinary" people. I have always avoided beautiful women, even if they fancied me; I wouldn't want to become jealous. Also, I've found some (not all) of the beautiful women I've known to be be rather shallow, as if "beauty is enough".
To be clear, the women I've loved weren't really ordinary; they were intelligent, eloquent, kind, and beautiful in their own way.
One of my former coworkers is objectively very, very handsome. He looks like a blond 6’4” model. On top of that he’s young, very smart and a genuinely nice guy too.
Whenever we went for lunch together, it was like I entered another world and it was fascinating to me. Girls would walk up to him and say “hi”, stand around and make awkward conversation and then leave. This happened ALL THE TIME. I can say that this has never happened to me not even once in my life. I’m the type of guy where a girl will ask me where I work, and I’ve been working with her for a year. It doesn’t bother me one bit but I’m also in my 50s.
I’m not particularly handsome so sitting with him felt like I was gaining a secret pass to the lifestyles of the beautiful. When we were in line, I would look around and see girls just staring at him without him noticing.
The complete contrast between his life and mine in terms of how women treat him was really fascinating to me, especially since he’s a good guy and a rising star because he’s smart and hard working.
Rumi talks a lot about the pain of unattainable beauty, in both men (as desire) and women (as envy or desire to be desired). That brand of Sufism really breaks down, both philosophically and psychologically, the "meaning" of painful beauty. For Rumi, the beauty that drives people insane is an infinitesimal ray of God's beatific manifestation. Witnessing unattainable beauty is supposed be painful, and the pain is there for a reason, to draw one to what is Higher, and eventually drawing one to the Source of beauty to find that within oneself.
> Since tresses and cheeks show a sign of that drop, kings keep licking the ground.
> Delicate earth has received a drop of Beauty, so you kiss it night and day with a hundred hearts.
> Though mixed with earth, a single drop can drive you mad—what then will that wine do to you when pure?
(Rumi M V 372-375)
Note "earth" here is a reference to human beings, as Muslims believe humans were created from earthly clay.
This reminds me of a very cynical old quip about the difference between patriarchy and feminism:
Patriarchy is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for men"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is possible in patriarchy, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from above.
Feminism is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for women"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is impossible in feminism, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from below.
Very true.
It seems men just don't care as much about social norms, which I just chalked up to autism when I was younger. Now I realize after getting married to a wonderful husband, and having kids, that's it's a survival mechanism. They don't get nearly as much societal help as women, and so social norms are far less relevant to them.
Women care a great deal about social norms/"brutal" hierarchy, but we can also get a lot more from it. So it tends to be enabled at every rung of the hierarchy.
When I was a young girl, the worse bullying came from "average" looking girls rather then the very beautiful ones.
Can you explain the second half of that quote any further? It's not obvious to me how feminism fits that description in the way that patriarchy does. The intended irony of the statement is clear, but I fail to recognize how the second half of the statement bears any resemblance to feminism in theory or practice.
The hierarchy of physical looks seems inexorably tied to the human social order. It seems that there is a separate world that opens up when you meet a certain threshold of physical attractiveness.
I get the impression that complaining about ones physical appearance is more accepted in women than men. I can imagine a man writing the OP piece would be labeled a few topical terms for his entitlement and toxic envy.
It's become impossible for me to ignore how often social hierarchies order themselves to a significant degree on the basis of physical appearance. I would implore anyone to consider physical fitness, fashion, skin, hair care and even cosmetic surgery if they inexplicably fail in social or romantic endeavors while bearing no other obvious faults. It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance.
>It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance.
When stuff like this comes up I always have to think of two people, Machiavelli and our last chancellor, Angela Merkel. She was by no means attractive, a woman, an East-German physicist and yet managed to become arguably our most significant post-war leader and governed over 16 years.
Machiavelli tells us why. In social hierarchies it's not looks, wealth or even intellect that matter, it's Virtù, that is martial spirit, or ambition. All other traits are just up to luck. People who accept the notion that their role in hierarchies comes down to how they look or how others perceive them have already given in to passivity. People who climb hierarchies literally do ignore why they're not supposed to be there.
Separate world: definitely. I remember a random real estate agent inviting my friend to a party and saying "bring your good looking friends" while giving me the stink eye from a distance. I have an older neighbor who is tall and handsome, and his wife was saying how, when they were younger, women would walk past him then turn around and make some excuse to talk to him.
I can't believe how much I deluded myself when I was younger about the nature of social hierarchies. There was some research (can't find it now) about childhood aggression showing how, if a kid is better looking, then aggression actually improves their social standing, while if the kid was not good looking, the opposite happens.
Forgive your younger self, we all had our own coping strategies.
My coping mechanism was that, if I only I lived in South Korea I'd fit in and be popular and happy. I learned as adult the social hierarchy is just as cruel there as it is in America.
Whatever you do, just make sure you don't allow your kids to repeat the same mistakes.
As I have grown older(early 40s), I too have observed this effect. Not that it is absolute, but there is certainly a correlation between looks/attractiveness and whatever they want, money, attention, partners and so on.
The most depressing part was when I in my early 20s realized there are people in this world and seeming quite many of them who have it 'easy'. They live their life's without struggling with the small stuff, everything just comes. The big stuff takes time of course. Not that they don't have their own subjective experience of struggle, its just on another level both personal and materialistic.
As you say physical fitness it maybe the only thing one can do in order improve ones standing unless one has some innate talent which can be exploited.
One thing is dating. The other is that people treat others differently depending on their attractiveness in any other aspect of life. Not only how kids relate to each other in school but even how parents (often subconsciously) favor the more attractive kids.
My reading of Neapolitan quartet is completely different. It is not Lila’s external looks that make her irresistible, but it’s her spirit - a force of nature that she has. I think the Lenu considers herself better looking than Lila, so it was not so much about a beautiful face and body. Remember it’s “My Brilliant Friend” not “My Beautiful Friend”.
Would highly recommend the books to anyone who is still wondering - the torrent of raw humanness coming out from those books is, for a better word, brilliant.
The elegance of this authors words makes me fathom how she could possible feel so inadequate. The entry certainly explains it, so I make no attempt to reduce or abstract. But as another commenter has mentioned, there is beauty found in more than just appearances.
I'm afraid I didn't find the writing "elegant"; I found it overly flowery. But then she let on that she's a poet. I don't enjoy poetry much, but some people do, so I decided to let it pass. Until I saw your comment...
Readit News
In today’s world, the scrutiny of men’s appearance will never even come close to the microscope that women live under. Truly. An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman.
And worse, women are brought up to really care what others think of them, and to make everyone else comfortable at their own expense. So you can’t just “stop caring what people say”. That would really screw you over in this world.
I imagine that beauty is for women what money is for men. It’s our currency and often what makes us valuable to the group of the shallow “others” in this society.
Women and men have very different burdens, and its extremely clear the grass is not greener on the other side. Most people are not the high performing ruthless psychopathic type A personality common in Silicon Valley, New York, Miami, etc.
I'm a Korean woman that grew up in a white Surburbia, the meanest people to me were brown haired "average" white girls. They insulted my hair, my eyes, my nose, and my lack of nasal bridge, literally everything you can think of.
I believe the primate social hierarchy at play, and at our core many of us are trying to "win" that hierarchy. At the same time, I think certain types of people gravitate to cities and certain lifestyles.
Dead Comment
While perhaps a little more crude, doesn't "MILF" convey the same intent with respect to women? All of the above speak to an attractiveness found in those who are considered older. There are plenty of women in their later stages of life who are still considered very attractive.
> aging is the enemy.
I posit that becoming "boring" is the ultimate enemy. Indeed, becoming boring is correlated with age. People tend to settle down as they become older, and that is what is considered least attractive. The movers and shakers don't want to associate with someone who thinks watching TV on a Saturday night is a good time.
> An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman.
It does appear to be true, statistically, that it takes men longer to mature. In fact, stereotypically, there is an idea that men will never grow up. The longer you keep at doing "stupid kid things" the greater the chances that you will eventually strike gold.
This is somewhat the key to success as a man, and what they're evolved to do.
Men don't get to live a life staying safe in the cave. Men are the species' tool for throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That's why the bell curve for male success/failure is much flatter than it is for women. More extreme successes and more extreme failures. Men are the element of the human tribe that take on huge risks to discover new and valuable things. When it works, the success can be massive and disproportionate. When it fails, it fails hard, often in death. And usually, there's no (or little) safety net for men. There's a reason why 75% of the homeless are men.
This does seem like a necessary outcome of the harsh reality of supply and demand of sexual reproduction, that eggs and wombs are scarce and valuable while sperm is abundant and cheap.
Men don’t really study that much into looks. They are less sharp about it. But ugly men get less attention too. If they don’t dress well, they get less noticed. In such cases, the surviving men who don’t look great have something else that sets them apart: high level of intellect.
What sets women apart, if not looks, is discipline and reliability.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
It's true that being conventionally attractive made my life 1000x easier - it's almost like the trees lowered their branches to make the fruit easier to pick. I'm pretty sure it made it easier to get a mortgage and a job and definitely a partner. But I still think about what my life would be like if I had a different nose, different hair, different build.
Even in my late 40s, I still get a lot of attention from much younger women. A few weeks ago, a woman, maybe 25, openly flirted with me while she made my cappuccino. This has happened many times before, but I never make a move.
All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw me naked. Or how fast she would disappear if she saw my crooked upper teeth. Or all my gray chest hair. Or my hairy back. Even if I played ball and gave her my number, even if she thinks I'm handsome, older-and-wiser, I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her.
Used to being beautiful all their lives, one day there's a chink in the armor: a wrinkle, a white hair, a stretchmark, that same feeling you have starts to sink in. The emotional impact might be worse than for people who had a lifetime to be at peace with how they look like.
This seems to be the author of the article [0]. Your first reaction is probably that the real picture doesn't match at all the picture you built in your mind while reading the article. I hope that helps you realize you are not alone in feeling that everyone else must be thinking of you what you think of yourself. They're probably not.
[0] https://muckrack.com/grazie-sophia-christie
Germans calls it FKK [0] and it’s a think our civilization would highly benefit to incorporate. Also if anyone visit Belgium/ Netherlands, highly recommend an afternoon in a nude sauna garden. (For those wondering, no sex involved neither allowed). Naturist beaches in other places are great too but a bit harder to get when you’re a “beginner” : they tends to be public space that are also frequented by clothed-people and you may find yourself weird to undress among them, the first times at least.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikörperkultur
"Let it pass like water off a duck's back." became a little bit of a mantra until I truly wasn't worried about it, even as I age.
Accepting that, if people wanted to be with me they would. If they didn't, I didn't want to waste my time with them. Trying to get somebody who didn't like me to like me, ceased being anything I was concerned about. Prior to hitting this point, I'd had multi-year crushes in high school on a couple of girls who were nice and friendly but just weren't interested in me.
After having this realization, it made it a lot easier to date because you can ask people out without fear of rejection. If somebody said no, great! That saved a lot of time. Don't take it personally.
The other thing that young men definitely have to learn is the gossip pipeline. Don't participate in it, but realize it is out there. Word got around in college that I "wasn't looking for a serious relationship" and it made it a lot easier for me to date. Turned out that a lot of young women worry about overly clingy men if they go out one time and then decide not to pursue it further. There's a lot of pressure on women there. People even tried to set me up on blind dates.
Eventually, I met my wife of 20 years so far.
The act of simply going on a lot of first dates is fairly validating in and of itself. Learning all of this stuff added to my own confidence too. But the absolute first step is simply self acceptance. Control what you can control, don't worry about what you can't.
And to be clear, control what you can control means that you can control improving yourself (diet, exercise, grooming, mindset, humility, faith, education, courtesy, reliability, family relationships, etc). A lot of self acceptance advice suggests that you shouldn't be trying to get better. I'm not suggesting that at all. We can all improve and we can all be better for the people we care about. That's a big piece of showing we care.
To be clear, the women I've loved weren't really ordinary; they were intelligent, eloquent, kind, and beautiful in their own way.
Dead Comment
Whenever we went for lunch together, it was like I entered another world and it was fascinating to me. Girls would walk up to him and say “hi”, stand around and make awkward conversation and then leave. This happened ALL THE TIME. I can say that this has never happened to me not even once in my life. I’m the type of guy where a girl will ask me where I work, and I’ve been working with her for a year. It doesn’t bother me one bit but I’m also in my 50s.
I’m not particularly handsome so sitting with him felt like I was gaining a secret pass to the lifestyles of the beautiful. When we were in line, I would look around and see girls just staring at him without him noticing.
The complete contrast between his life and mine in terms of how women treat him was really fascinating to me, especially since he’s a good guy and a rising star because he’s smart and hard working.
Dead Comment
> Since tresses and cheeks show a sign of that drop, kings keep licking the ground.
> Delicate earth has received a drop of Beauty, so you kiss it night and day with a hundred hearts.
> Though mixed with earth, a single drop can drive you mad—what then will that wine do to you when pure?
(Rumi M V 372-375)
Note "earth" here is a reference to human beings, as Muslims believe humans were created from earthly clay.
Patriarchy is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for men"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is possible in patriarchy, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from above.
Feminism is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for women"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is impossible in feminism, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from below.
Women care a great deal about social norms/"brutal" hierarchy, but we can also get a lot more from it. So it tends to be enabled at every rung of the hierarchy. When I was a young girl, the worse bullying came from "average" looking girls rather then the very beautiful ones.
I get the impression that complaining about ones physical appearance is more accepted in women than men. I can imagine a man writing the OP piece would be labeled a few topical terms for his entitlement and toxic envy.
It's become impossible for me to ignore how often social hierarchies order themselves to a significant degree on the basis of physical appearance. I would implore anyone to consider physical fitness, fashion, skin, hair care and even cosmetic surgery if they inexplicably fail in social or romantic endeavors while bearing no other obvious faults. It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance.
When stuff like this comes up I always have to think of two people, Machiavelli and our last chancellor, Angela Merkel. She was by no means attractive, a woman, an East-German physicist and yet managed to become arguably our most significant post-war leader and governed over 16 years.
Machiavelli tells us why. In social hierarchies it's not looks, wealth or even intellect that matter, it's Virtù, that is martial spirit, or ambition. All other traits are just up to luck. People who accept the notion that their role in hierarchies comes down to how they look or how others perceive them have already given in to passivity. People who climb hierarchies literally do ignore why they're not supposed to be there.
- On the political chessboard, she could usually see 2-4 moves further ahead than any other German politician.
- She attracted and retained an extremely capable, loyal, and tight-lipped inner circle.
I can't believe how much I deluded myself when I was younger about the nature of social hierarchies. There was some research (can't find it now) about childhood aggression showing how, if a kid is better looking, then aggression actually improves their social standing, while if the kid was not good looking, the opposite happens.
Whatever you do, just make sure you don't allow your kids to repeat the same mistakes.
The most depressing part was when I in my early 20s realized there are people in this world and seeming quite many of them who have it 'easy'. They live their life's without struggling with the small stuff, everything just comes. The big stuff takes time of course. Not that they don't have their own subjective experience of struggle, its just on another level both personal and materialistic.
As you say physical fitness it maybe the only thing one can do in order improve ones standing unless one has some innate talent which can be exploited.
There is a story by Ted Chiang on a device that makes you blind to the physical attractiveness of other people, "Liking What You See: A Documentary" (https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-...).
Would highly recommend the books to anyone who is still wondering - the torrent of raw humanness coming out from those books is, for a better word, brilliant.