Is Physical Appearance Completely Irrelavant?

Yeah. Dlowan, I'm surprised you haven't encountered this type more -- I find that she (always a she) is disproportionately present in the "helping" professions.

I'd like to quickly say, though, given the genesis of this discussion, that I don't think that's what Butrflynet was doing. What I gather from her posts is that her main concern was for those being left out of the "hot mama" fest.

Soz - dunno.

I came very late in life to the whole make-up thing. Never used it past about say fifteen - except for the odd brief bout - disapproved of it as a young woman - though I suspect this is something that people blessed with good skin and big eyes and such are far more likely to have been hard line about!

Discovered the joys of lippy and such about 12 years ago, oddly enough as a reaction to being monstered by a group of my friends because I refused to stand for a position in my trade union that I was expected to stand for to be a "good comrade", as it were.

So, I figured if they were gonna to see me as bad and politically uncommitted and such for looking after myself, I would play that role to the hilt! Went out and bought some fire engine red lippy, nail polish, mascara and eye-liner (wanted to buy false eyelashes, wear several pairs and flutter the smeggers, but they scared me) mildly bimboish clothes, and appeared at a big "do" thus attired. I don't think anyone really noticed, cept for the lippy, which folk liked, and I didn't look back - well, I wear lippy when I feel like it - and I do love me eye-liner.

I personally think, Soz me dear, that you oughta do what feels good.

I think certain camouflage stands us in good stead in some places, so why not wear YOUR version of it if it works?

I like to be a total dag at home - bloody cats necessitate that anyway, damned furballs! - sometimes dress up to the nines and look as smashing as I can, and I do have some very theatrical glad rags, but they are pretty eccentric - and be happy and feel good about what I am wearing the rest of the time.

Sometimes I will dress to achieve an effect, like having salespeople be nice and stuff - other times I will glory in looking incredibly and scruffy and compelling good treatment anyway - something about how you use your eyes, I think, that one - I got the fiercest look, I am told - blue ice!

I think you should play wiv it all, if you want me real advice - life's but a stage.....

Heavens, Soz, WHAT type is prevalent in the helping profesions?

I been blessed all my professional working life with the BEST colleagues.

I could count on the fingers of one hand the nasty ones - four on 'em - two boys and two goils...

The type that Mrs. Cav has to deal with... those who do horrible evil "Cat's Eye"-ish things. I've seen a lot of them.

Really?

What are "cats-eyeish" things?

Book by Margaret Atwood. Women being evil in a particularly womanish way. (Oh geez, I'm totally playing into Craven's hands, aren't I?)

I'll give you an example. E.G. has a departmental secretary, who has worked there forever. She has no real power, but goes about trying to get power in whatever way she can. Her main source of power is information. She talks to everyone, and then parcels out information in the most scandalous, soap opera-ish way possible. (I'm going overboard on the -ish suffixes today, but that's a chronic affliction.) It took a while for E.G. to figure this out, and he took what she had to say at face value. I was suspicious early on, since I know the type, and helped him figure it out fairly early. Scott didn't like how E.G. was handling a problem, but Scott didn't say anything to E.G. about it, so E.G. felt all horrible and wondering if he should bring it up and guilty. But he didn't bring it up, because it was priveleged information that happened to have been given to him by... the secretary.

He now avoids speaking to her, and takes everything she says with a grain of salt. The department has fairly poor channels of communication to start with -- lots of insular physicists holed up in their offices and gallivanting around the world going to conferences. But she has started innumerable fights, given birth to innumerable rumors, etc., etc. Several people feel they can only get the "real" story from her.

That type.

You know, this is interesting, because I have been discussing the sorts of issues being raised here in discussion with a friend, and he has been talking about women being worse in relation to lots of this stuff - putting pressure on women about appearance, making them feel bad etc - and this has so much not been generally a factor in my life, past, as I said, adolescence, that I have been sort of gob-smacked. Hmmmmmmmm.

goddamn scientists. goddamn university women. they can all rot.

Great smile, Cav and great bride/wife AND great cigar..........I'm really enjoying this discussion guys, it's making me organize my thoughts in a way that pleases me.

I think we're talking about.....well so many things, but the two that interest me most are about aging and sexuality. I want to use a psychoanalytic term here, so I'll take a couple of sentences to define it first. Fantasy, in the psychoanalytic sense refers not in any way to truth or falsehood. It refers to an organizing structure or story, often unconscious which has it's origins in our earliest experiences and is influenced by temperament.

Let's leave aside for a minute those people who are so narcissistically vulnerable they depend almost solely on the surface, including physical appearance. I think we all are in agreement, these people have a problem.

I think however, there is no getting around the fact that physical appearance carries some communicative weight and is of necessity a component of everyone's fantasy about themselves and their objects. For some it bears more weight than others, depending on the fantasy. But appearance counts, along with all the other things we've all defined so clearly (intelligence, the ability to be caring, etc.). I think how we look, the kind of trouble or not we take to achieve a certain look is all about organizing ourselves. And this becomes more true as we age because maintaining a certain look can often require more work as we get older.

For me, I want to look pretty, or as pretty as I can reasonably manage. I'll spare you the details about my fantasies, but just to say that this is one component. It's important enough to me that I will and have gone to some effort (exercise, maintaining my optimum weight, a minorly invasive cosmetic surgery, good haircut, good hair color, flattering glasses, make-up, staying current with fashion [letting go of the old and embracing the new], attention to clothing, -- choosing clothes which emphasize my good points and play down my bad ones, etc.) But it's seems clear to me that how a person puts him/herself together is dependent in part on a highly idiosyncratic mental mechanism. So I think we should be careful, as always not to over generalize.

All this being said, I would like to also say that I think this is about competition. Some of us are more competitive than others and we all handle our competitive strivings in various ways. Some of us, many of us try to manage our competitive wishes by denying them, avoiding awareness of them, but hopefully and ideally, a person will find a way to sublimate them. This involves achieving gratification of the wish while doing so in a form that enhances human relationships rather than destroying or causing injury. But both gratification and care are necessary in any adaptive method of managing competitive desires.

So, competition is a real part of life, I believe. The question is how we manage it, not if it exists (this is contemporary Freud speaking.) So we have varying levels of competitive drives and varying methods of managing these drives. Some work better than others. For this reason, I don't apologize for my ambitions. I just try to play fair and expect others to do the same.

I have had several unexpected but magnificent consequences of my cosmetic surgery (and I must say here that this is a chicken and the egg phenomenon that I'm not entirely sure I understand). First, I have had an increased (and highly pleasurable) sense of my sexuality. This has been a very good thing for me and my loved ones. While it's created some painful upheavals, they have been, over all, highly profitable for all concerned in the long run. The level of attention I've received from men my age has been greatly increased and this surprised me, but I'm enjoying it just the same. I hadn't really thought it would make such a change, but it has and I like it. But the mixed bag and the one so full of conflict for me is the expression of envy from some women, both young and older. This expression of envy has been greater and is unpleasant. But this phenomenon brings moments (sometimes days) of self examination which I find to be conducive to my own emotional understanding and growth. And this is the way I've so far resolved my conflicting feelings about these sometimes intensely competitive experiences........I've decided that I'll just do the best I can and I'll expect others to do the best they can. This seems fair to me. And if others are envious of what I have or are jealous of my relationships with my loved ones, I must expect them to try as hard as they can to get what they want for themselves. It is not up to me to deny my own appetites (within reason) so that others will be comfortable with their own compromises. None of us can make everyone happy and take care of our own needs at the same time.

That doesn't take the "male gaze" (to grab a phrase that's probably long out of style) out of the equation. Why shouldn't women be ruthless toward each other if they are in fact in direct competition for (wealthy and virile) male attention?

Or, alternatively -- if women are accorded little real power or status in a male-dominated world (which they are in many or most places), and if human's are innately competitive and driven toward social stratification, there will be competition in arena's that women have some control over -- who's got the best hair, who keeps the best house, who bears the most children, who has the most cruelly effective eating disorder...


(trying to make a real contribution)

Well...let me clarify...Mrs. cav works for a TV/movie production company...

Here is the advice she gives other women on job interviews, from her own empirical observations: If possible, get a man to interview you. It is your choice whether or not to present yourself as flirty and cute, or professional and competent. A man will go for either, but will also check the facts first. When interviewing with a woman, a common tactic is that they will try to make 'friends' with you, and divert the interview into a conversation about your favourite restaurants, shopping places, etc. Do not get sucked into this, they will stab you in the back. Be straight up, tell them why and how you are perfect for the job. Be a 'man', in essence, because they are jealous of you, and will always think you are after their job, because THEY are insecure. They will fold, however, in the face of cold, hard facts. Never make friends with your female boss, it will just end up bad for you later.

She just came home and left again for a company function....when I heard the key, I started washing dishes. She took one look and said "You're just doing that for show, aren't you?" I had to say "Why don't I just say you are right about everything and leave it at that." Seemed to be the high road there We had a laugh...and on some level, I think I made her feel good, which is always a good thing. :wink:

er, yeah, looks like lola beat me to the "submit" button...

Aha! Now - that is a familiar sociology.

I have a friend who is now a sociology professor, who started her working life as the private secretary of a company director (I mean, she prolly STARTED in the typing pool, but you know what I mean) and she was always fascinated by the power dynamics in such situations.

Her feeling was, and my experience leads me to agree, that those sorts of people have immense COVERT power - and, my feeling about covert power is that it often leads to evil - my pet theory on this is sort of two pronged.

One - that such power is often held by people who have little access to roles with much legitimate power, and hence they resent many around them, and greatly enjoy their reflected glory.

Second - that power without responsibility is often dangerous, because we are never actually made accountable for how we use it.

A lot of these sorts of positions have been held by women - because of employment gender roles, or frank exclusion from power in the past.

Mind you, that power is sometimes used for good, as it were, but it is still illegitimate.

You are right, of course, Patio - I sort of discussed this a bit in my previous post.

In one university at which i worked, we had such a woman--what appalled me most was the credence people lent her, even when the facts obviously denied her story. One day, she spread the rumor that i had come to the office the night before, drunk, and had slept there to avoid being late for work--that she knew this because she had seen me in the rest room shaving (it was a small building with a single wash room) that morning. When someone told me later in the day, i laughed, and that individual admonished me that lots of people might believe her, and what could i say to lay it to rest. I told him to look at me, and he said, well, so? I pointed out that i had not shaven that day, and the evidence of his eyes ought to give the lie to her story. He paused, looked surprised, and grudgingly admitted that i was right. I was much saddened to realize that people had more interest in a "juicy story" than in knowing the truth, even if they should have been able to see it with their own eyes. Such people exist, and weild their sick power over others through their games, because they have judged their audience aright, which audience are credulous and eager to be titilated.

I get really squirmy when the "they're just jealous" card is played. I think that is dismissive and often not the point.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend when we were pregnant. Several high-profile celebrities had just had babies -- Cindy Crawford, Madonna -- and were going on covers of magazines etc. showing off their amazing, toned bods. We were lamenting that we women don't even get any slack any more immediately after the birth of a baby. "Cindy did it!" "Madonna did it!" Yes, they did, with a ton of money, nannies, personal trainers, personal cooks... they did it, but WHY? And why should we?

Gosh, long posts coming fast and furious.

Yes, very much agreed about power, access thereof, and usage thereof.

cav, Seems you have perfected the art of mate-bating. I'm no good at that kind of stuff; my way is more direct. I buy my wife jewelry. c.i.

Patio,

Are you trying to say that I'm better at the submit button than you are?