I enjoyed this article by the excellent Tell the Bees a few weeks ago. The article starts with a review of the film The Substance, and moves into a broader exploration of male and female beauty standards and the stories we tell about them. The title of the original post refers to the idea that attraction is fundamentally a quantitively idea of inputs and outputs. You can calculate your a like attractiveness like you can calculate your taxes. And its this idea that gets skewered in the post:

We hear stories of men getting leg extending surgery (to be a short man is a fate worse than death, they proclaim) and looksmaxxing, spending hours in the gym to become men they deem worthy of love. No offense, but I’ve seen the boyfriends of a lot of my straight girlfriends: you do not need to be a six foot tall muscle god to get a girlfriend! It feels urgent that they understand this, but they won’t.

I particularly enjoyed the top comment by Ariel Meadow Stallings reflecting on her experience of covering ren faire weddings:

Let me explain: many of the folks having ren faire weddings were not what some would call conventionally attractive, but it was clear they were having so much sex. The weddings were all bi/pan/poly with the bride having 2 girlfriends and the 5’4″ groom having an elf on the side and the wedding receptions having sex tents and ok fine I’m exaggerating a bit for effect but only just barely! My editors used to joke that based on the ren faire weddings we saw, the folks that some people dismissed as “ugly nerds” were having wayyyy more fun and a LOT more sex than the rest of us — by many magnitudes.

I like these quotes so much because they encourage vivid counter narratives to the simple, rigid and reductive stories we can hold about our worth. It might be true that on average its slightly better to be more like this than that, but actually so many outcomes are available to you.

The input/output view is popular. I imagine this is down to:

• An input/output model with some inputs you can affect gives you some measure of hope of controlling the outcome. Though I expect, holding all things equal, how much you bench-press doesn’t have much of an impact on your dating success.
• A deterministic view of your value (even if a very negative one) may offer some relief in terms of “knowing” your place in the world, it validates in some ways the troubles you may be experiencing.
• In my experience, both of my own life and of working with clients, the more mental distress, the more attractive black and white thinking can be.
• It doesn’t require you to do the more painful, vulnerable work looking at what’s happening internally when you relate people, when you approach them, when you make contact, when you initiate. It keeps all the work happening in a safer space, of gyms and calories.

In CBT they sometimes encourage people to look for counter evidence. Is there anything that would refute the way you are feeling right now? Can you think of examples when that hasn’t been the case? And sometimes that can be helpful, though it’s harder to do when in the middle of some really big feelings.

There can be a balancing act between what we understand of the sociological forces at play in our lives which affect how we are seen and critically engage with them, and the space that we leave for agency, for randomness, for surprise connection.