TRANSCRIPT
I was clued in recently to a phrase that I’d never heard before called “pretty privilege.” This idea that pretty, attractive, beautiful women have certain privilege in life. I was talking about this with a woman, and she asked my opinion on this subject of pretty privilege. We ended up in a discussion about the downsides of pretty privilege, and she suggested it. I thought it would make a really good video to talk about it.
But how strange! I’m a man talking about a female subject—the subject of pretty privilege, the privilege of being a beautiful woman. Certainly, people talk about it a lot—the advantages of being beautiful. Doors open for you, you can choose your partners, you can get better jobs, etc., etc. Everyone wants to be you. Lots of different ways to make money if you’re beautiful. Blah, blah, blah. Well, this is what I was raised to believe, and I certainly thought about pretty privilege with women, girls that I knew growing up into my 20s and in my 30s.
But the real wake-up for me about this subject of pretty privilege happened when I became a psychotherapist. It really happened most specifically—I remember it when I was in my private practice. It was in my early to mid to late 30s, and I ended up working with quite a few young women in New York City in their 20s, even into their 30s, who were beautiful women—considered high-end, attractive, very beautiful, sexy, beautiful women.
And me being in the role of their psychotherapist—a guy who was older than them, a bit older than them, and a person in a caring, compassionate, parental role with them, almost like a father figure with these young women. And me looking at them and initially just blinking my eyes and thinking, you know, in a slightly different scenario a few years before in my life, before I’d ever been a therapist, these would have been the most desirable women—the women I would have wanted to date. And yet here in this role of psychotherapist, it was like I didn’t feel that. It was like the boundaries of the role, the way it was set up, the way that they came to me, the position that I was in—I didn’t feel any of that stuff.
But I could see that these were the women who, oh, I would have wanted so bad once upon a time. And yet now I was listening to them and hearing life from their perspective. After listening to many of them, I started realizing there were real patterns and that pretty privilege wasn’t always so privileged. The more they spoke, the more I’d bounced their experiences off my experiences of having been someone—a younger guy who had been chasing after or fantasizing about or having crushes on women, girls like them. A new framework came to my mind for thinking about the advantages and the disadvantages of being a pretty woman. And sometimes, actually, I wonder if the disadvantages are even greater.
So I’ve talked a bit about some of the advantages. You know, all the things—you know the women can have power and control, they can choose whoever guy they want, they can snap their fingers and have a boyfriend whenever they want. Blah, blah, blah. Other advantages. But then the disadvantages—and there are so many—that’s what really surprised me, and it really made sense when they talked about it.
First of all, women never knowing if guys like them for who they are or just for their bodies. It’s like their physical beauty is just external; it has nothing to do with who the person is on the inside. So first of all, these women, again and again, telling me they just realized every guy wants to have sex with them. Every guy—every heterosexual guy, that is—is just looking at them as beautiful, someone that they want to be close to. Constantly being approached by men, being harassed even, constantly being asked out on dates. Or the opposite—sometimes the nicest guys of all were too frightened of them, were nervous around them, couldn’t find their words.
I related to that because often I’ve been very insecure about a beautiful woman. Oh, like maybe I wanted to approach her to talk to her, but I didn’t because it was like I just feel so insecure. She’s too beautiful; she has too much status for me. Or maybe she’ll think the wrong thing. Or maybe I really like something about her, like something about her personality, but I get flustered because she’s too beautiful—too much of an ideal of our society’s concept of female beauty. And then you see it all over the place—television, advertisements, and billboards on the street, and acting roles, and in music, and what a sexy woman is. And this is high status. And here suddenly in real life is a real human being who externally fulfills this image, and it’s like it can be scary.
I heard that from women again and again in therapy. They’re like, “Yeah, sometimes there are really nice guys, but they won’t approach me.” And sometimes only the guys that will approach me are these sadistic, nasty, high-status guys who are super confident and arrogant and cocky, and they think they’re like God’s gift to the world. And they’re the only ones who will approach me sometimes, and it’s like really uncomfortable and awkward. I can tell that they don’t like me for me, and so it can be really hard to find a nice guy to date. I heard that again and again.
Also, almost impossible for these women to find male friends—who are heterosexual, that is—because the guys always become attracted to them. It’s like it’s always tainted with sexual interest, and it’s hard to have platonic friendships with men. Even gay guys, some of these women, they said, “Yeah, a lot of my friends, guy friends, are gay because they’re not attracted to me.” But sometimes even they are attracted to me, or they like the status of people thinking that they’re straight, and I am their arm candy. So these guys who are gay, who aren’t even romantically interested in me, get a sort of high-status position by being next to me, and that’s awkward. It’s like, again, they’re not even picking me for me, for my soul, for my personality, for my other strengths on the inside—the strengths of my character. I’m just being picked externally, and no one’s looking below the surface.
It’s hard. Then another thing I heard from a lot of women—they said women often are nasty to me. They don’t want to be friends with me; they’re jealous of me. They’re threatened by me. They think that I’m looking down on them because they’re not attractive enough, and they think I’m better and that I’m snotty toward them. And maybe I don’t feel that way at all, but they’re like, they put me down. They’ll never say anything nice about me. They’ll make fun of me; they’ll make fun of my intelligence, etc., etc., etc. And so it’s hard often to have women as friends. Sometimes it’s only easy to have women friends who are also really beautiful because then we’re not competing with each other. But even then, sometimes we’re competing—so much competition.
It’s like sometimes I wish I just wasn’t attractive. I’ve heard women say this. “I just wish I could try just being a normal, average woman or an unattractive woman so I could feel what it’s like to have people look at me more as a person.” Then I also heard this from some of these women. I’ve heard this from women sometimes, like they said, “You know, at one time in my life, I ended up putting on a lot of weight—put on 40, 50, 60 pounds—and I no longer was considered attractive. And it was kind of a relief in a way. It was like, oh, people are looking at me more as a person.” But then they ignore me, and then they treat me as like I’m something less than, or they say, “I used to be so beautiful. What happened to you? You’ve ruined your life. You gave up on yourself.” But then sometimes it’s like, “Yeah, but no one’s hitting on me. No one’s trying to do x, y, z to me all the time.” And some of these women, also beautiful women, talked about having been raped because they were beautiful. Someone took advantage of them. They got into a vulnerable position; they were young, they trusted somebody that they were with, and someone really hurt them badly because they could get away with it.
It in a moment where the power dynamics shifted, where the guys no longer had to woo them and try to win them. Instead, there was nobody watching, and the guys just jumped in and took advantage of them because they were beautiful. I’ve heard that.
Hmm. Then I think about what happens in the family system. I’ve heard this from when women are very beautiful. Sometimes they say, you know, I never really knew I was even pretty. I never knew anything about being so pretty until suddenly I started going into puberty, and then my mom started telling me, “You’re beautiful,” and she treated me super special or maybe treated me better than one of my sisters or both of my other sisters, who I had. Like, somehow I was better than they were, and my sisters felt hurt and neglected and jealous. And I kind of liked it that I was getting attention. Often, it was like in these families there was a lot of neglect, and suddenly it was like, oh, I’m now getting attention paid to me for my beauty. It felt great. But then it was like, wait, it wasn’t because of who I was. Sometimes it was very confusing for these girls, where it was like, wait, why am I getting treated this way? And they’d look in the mirror, and they didn’t even understand what necessarily beauty was. They just saw themselves as who they were, as normal, and here they are being treated so differently. It was confusing.
And then another thing that they said is in the family, sometimes their fathers started treating them really different. They started getting a sense their fathers were even attracted to them, or worse than attracted, were sort of coming on to them or secretly had a crush on them. And it was like then they got rejected by their fathers. They felt horrible. This was awful. Or they liked it in some way because it made up for the fact that they were neglected emotionally in other ways.
Or another thing is sometimes their fathers felt very guilty about feeling these sexual feelings, romantic feelings toward their pretty daughter who was going into puberty. So the fathers pulled away and started neglecting the daughter. Wouldn’t touch her anymore, wouldn’t give her a hug, wouldn’t let her sit on his lap anymore, wouldn’t give her a kiss on the cheek, wouldn’t want to put her to bed at night. Oh, because he was defending against his sexual feelings. Because, oh God, suddenly his daughter is fulfilling this societal ideal. And what kind of privilege is that?
And then I also think about some of these women who talk about being stalked because they’re beautiful. Guys following them when they go to their job. Guys are showing up at their jobs all the time, and it’s like they lose their sense of privacy. They lose their sense of being anonymous. And gosh, it’s lovely to be anonymous in the world. I think people who have lost their anonymity, who become famous in some way, become very popular in some way. It’s like women who are beautiful. In some ways, it can be awkward. Everybody remembers them. Guys who otherwise would totally ignore them are like coming out of the woodwork to bother them. Sometimes guys who are very unappealing or have real emotional problems or boundary issues. And it’s like they didn’t ask for this. They didn’t ask. The women didn’t ask for this. They didn’t ask to be born beautiful. And it’s like sometimes very hard to set limits with certain people. People can be very nasty when they have limits set against them. I’ve seen this in the world for sure.
And then another thing is when women are beautiful, really beautiful, with this pretty privilege, what I’ve heard is that sometimes life can be very lonely. It can be hard to relate in a real human way to people. And it’s like, who would ever think of this? Who would think that, like, oh, you have this standout valued trait in society, and the end result is that you’re more lonely than you would have been if you didn’t have this superlative thing that supposedly everyone wants?
And then I think about one other thing. I think about a couple of therapists I have known who were blind. And I also think about people who sometimes consulted with me on the telephone over the years when I never got to see them. So, essentially, I was blind when working with certain people. Didn’t know what they looked like. And listening to these blind therapists talk and also realizing for myself, when I was essentially blind because I didn’t have a visual image of the client I was working with, realizing the value sometimes in not knowing what a person looked like. Or I can even think about it now on the internet when people reach out to me all the time, and I have no idea what they look like. I don’t know how old they are. Sometimes I don’t even know if they’re a man or a woman. And so when I interact with them, and I think of this for the blind therapist, told me this also, a little bit less so with the blind therapist, but interacting with a person just as a person, just as a personality, not necessarily as a beautiful woman or an unattractive woman or an older woman, younger woman, and realizing that sometimes there’s a real advantage of having no idea what someone looks like, no idea of what their externals are like. And sometimes it’s very freeing for both parties involved just to go below the surface immediately and not use our eyes and all the judgments that get put into our eyes.
And what I have gathered, because actually after I’ve met some people and talked to them and had no idea what they look like, some people who were women have told me, yeah, I’m considered very beautiful. And I think about it, and it’s like, oh, it didn’t even cross my mind. And suddenly it adds another dimension into my perception of them, and not necessarily one that’s always a good one. And I often have felt like, oh, I’m so glad I got to know this person before I put any societal assessment onto them of their attractiveness or lack thereof.
And then I think of one other thing also that I learned as a therapist working with women who are older, in their 40s, or my age, in their 50s, or in their 60s or 70s. And women who just, like, especially when I’m thinking of older women, 50s, 60s, 70s, where I wasn’t thinking of them in terms of their attractiveness at all. And out of nowhere, they would start telling me about their life when they were younger, and sometimes they would even bring in photographs and show me. And they’d say, you know, I used to be exceptionally beautiful. And I’d look at their pictures and go, wow, and realize, oh my God, they are still, yes, and I could see they were still a beautiful woman, but not in that societal way of being pretty, but instead just a beautiful human being. But looking at those pictures and realizing that, yeah, once upon a time, they were a real sex object. And listening to these women talk, and generally what I heard from them was it wasn’t to their advantage to have been that beautiful. It created a lot of problems, certainly a lot of problems in their romantic relationships, where it was often an impediment to intimacy.
And another thing that I heard from several women who were older was that their beauty, in a way, was a hindrance for them personally to develop other parts of their personality, develop other skills and talents, because their just born given gift of being beautiful was enough to make it in society. And then bang, they hit a certain age, 40s, 30s even, or certainly into their 50s, where society no longer looked at them in quite the same way as sex objects. And suddenly it’s like they lost all their pretty privilege. It was a time-limited pretty privilege. And suddenly it’s like, oh, I’m now just a regular person in the world. And it can be incredibly painful and almost like a betrayal of society that they’re told they’re so great, they’re told that they’re so wonderful, all the doors open, and now suddenly nobody cares about them. I talked to quite a few women who said this sucks, this isn’t fair. And it’s like, no, it really isn’t fair in a way. And then again, life isn’t fair.
So these were all the things that have been coming up for me when I…
Think about this. Whoa, societally advantageous privilege of being pretty foreign.