“It’s not easy being pretty” went the saying, when it came to talking about the problems ‘beautiful women’ faced in terms of the ‘haters’ who cast them aside, projected their own insecurities onto them, and generally made life difficult, from the halls of high-school, right into the workplace.
‘Conventionally attractive’ women (and men) have long lamented on the loneliness they feel for something that they have no control over, due to the severe, almost always unprovoked, criticism they experience in many quarters of their lives.
Science now says that gender has nothing to do with it.
Data supports the fact that your looks can only get you so far, and that’s not far enough. You don’t necessarily land that interview, get that job or get that phone number, if you are an attractive man.
For long, there have been reams of research about how attractiveness has been equated with competence, and erroneously so. Well, now the tables have turned, something that handsome men have known all their lives.
The curse of handsomeness exists, it just might be real folks.
When in competitive positions at work, sales for example, you are more likely to be passed on for promotions if you are ‘conventionally attractive.’
It’s not about sales targets, it’s about symmetry. The more your face has it, the less you may get out of life.
Male managers, with a vertical challenge, balding at the seams, as well as exploding at their trouser seams, in their wanton alpha-desiring behaviour, may be reluctant to place a taller, more physically attractive junior in a senior position.
It is superficial, shallow and spot-on. Your boss is human after all, and when there is a healthy dose of insecurity, there would be no bones made about the fact that you can be fired on whim, or that you are not as financially endowed even if you are in terms of physical attributes.
It’s not all that simple though. No amount of handsomeness hatred can compete with incompetence, narcissism or an unprofessional attitude. That promotion may slip out from your hands because you never finish your projects on time, or that you spend more time in the mirror than on your deliverables, or the fact that you are just a jerk.
There is hope for the people who feel put upon, because God gave them the perfect eyelashes. There is every chance that you didn’t get that promotion, that place on the train, or that phone number because of your jawline, but there is something to be said for delusion as well.
You could use the support of science to explain every traumatic incident in your life as a function of your handsomeness. Take it with a pinch of salt and a pound of bad luck though.
To end where we started, for some reason, more ‘conventionally attractive’ women are supposedly not considered more competent, like their male counterparts.
That is a debate for another day.