Unpacking My Superficiality I: Preramble
Superficial: 1. Of or pertaining to the surface. 3. Shallow or lacking depth. 4. At face value. Antonyms - In-depth, thorough.
I'm about to embark on a sporadic run of posts where I (perhaps paradoxically) take an in-depth look at my superficiality.
It's something I've been privately unpacking for a while, quite a while, because I find it interesting. The menu is probably going to go: body images, faces, looks, age and no doubt a misc section that would probably wash out from writing up those other three.
I find it interesting because of the conflict between my narrative and my lived experience. Like I possess a belief that I shouldn't be superficial, but my experience and how I generally convey myself is that I am very superficial.
Now most people to be honest, don't engage with me at all, they just ignore me and let me be and I notice and appreciate that. But occasionally someone will engage me, challenge me and I feel a hint of disappointment that they have discovered I am quite superficial, and then they adopt a frame of engagement that appears to assume I've never heard a bad word said against superficiality.
Most interesting to me, is that I feel quite often that I can make a better case against superficiality than most people who tell me it's bad that I'm superficial. However I suspect that that might exacerbate the disappointment I perceive.
Now I suspect that I'm very superficial, but how to frame this? Maybe since where talking about visual perception I should start off with a little webcomic that is almost entirely in Spanish:
This in my opinion is a serviceable if not exhaustive exploration of the 'friend zone' concept. Important takeaways are that women are entitled to have friends and accept gestures of friendship without quid pro quos that make Luis feel entitled to resent Karla's rejection. There's a lot I could unpack because the nice-guy-friend-zone shit is interesting, but relevant to my superficiality is that we could extract a venn diagram for Lois and demonstrate that for him, his 'friend zone' and 'fuck zone' don't overlap.
Speaking to my subjective experience my friend zone is massive. Virtually everyone can be my friend, I'm easy and have a very open border policy. I've unfriended 3 people in my facebook life, 1 because I suspected they had a hystrionic personality disorder, scared me and I assumed when they got fired from my work I'd never see them again and it was thus safe to dump them from being able to see my feed. Another because they publicly demonstrated the poor judgement to, I'll be generous and say 'criticize' Aboriginals for burning an Australian flag 'after all we've done for them.' I'm sure they had their own particular emotional reasons for venerating our crappy flag so, but nevertheless I made the call that they would probably never have anything to say that I would be interested in reading so I ditched them. And the last was probably the least justified, but it was someone I just got sick of talking about me instead of to me, and it wasn't even negative it just tripped me out since they were in my life that they preferred to find out about me via facebook instead of you know conversing with me when I was present, so I cut off their info supply and it resulted not in improved conversation but the end of a friendship, which frankly I hadn't anticipated. It reminds me of Skinner's line 'the judge offered me three options: apologise, go to jail or join the army. Had I known there was a war on at the time I probably would have apologized.'
Anyway my Venn diagram as near as I can determine approximates this:
Imperfect, but let me walk you through it. The large purple circle is my friend zone, and maybe it should be 'potential' friend zone in terms of I will be friends with just about anybody. I'm not fussy, and not depicted here is how truly tiny the white space would be proportional to the purple of people I don't think I can be friends with. The yellow circle represents the portion of the population I find attractive, and it's really small probably honestly too small, but it almost entirely overlaps with my friendzone, it's a subset of the people I will be friends with. A fraction of people I can be friends with, I am interested in being more intimate with. Thus were I in Lois from the above comic's position, were Karla to tell me she preferred to be friends, then we would be friends. If then Karla started to resent that I as her friend no longer made romantic overtures like taking her on dates, or inviting her to the movies with a bunch of my other friends, I feel that resentment is on her.
I've also included a tiny sliver of non-overlapping attraction but not friend material, but I'd have to say it's largely hypothetical. It is within my experience to find attractive people whose personality I find distasteful and perhaps even repulsive. What might constitute in crude speech the people we would 'hate-fuck' however, I'm skeptical even of this. I suspect the conflict of feeling simultaneously aroused and repulsed by a person probably arises from a desire to except something distasteful about ourselves - hence we don't hate them we actually hate a part of ourselves we wish we could instead accept. Basically, I suspect it would always turn out like Pride & Prejudice.
Now who makes it into my attraction zone? Well I suspect that they way it's supposed to work is something like this:
And I say 'something', because even I know I could build a better model than this, where instead of an average score I'd use a weighted average score, where I might say kindness and intelligence are more important criteria than career and superficial attractiveness etc.
This wouldn't be superficial but a holistic evaluation process of determining the value of prospective partners. It's true of me to say that kindness is more important to me than attractiveness. A woman getting a haircut I don't like as much as what she had is not a deal-breaker for me, in fact it appears to be an inevitability of entering a relationship, but being rude to the help is a dealbreaker to me. That get's you friend zoned right away. (In my own case, probably for psychologically unhealthy reasons, but perhaps useful reasons, I care far less about how a person treats me than how they treat strangers.)
So in the above made-up score card, this person for superficial attractiveness is below average. Were I superficial I would be losing out on someone who is actually quite desirable as a partner, you could measure my error as -3 between superficial attractiveness and actual attractiveness.
This system I feel would work well, even be desirable if I lived in a small rural village with a population of around 250 people and an average age of 50. The local secondary school has 1 class of 10 students covering a curriculum from year 7 to 12. Where I as an eligible bachelor am faced with two prospective sweethearts Cheryl and Jenny. Cheryl is a beautiful farmers daughter who is also cruel, stupid, boring, petulant and lazy. Jenny is homely, intelligent, kind, interesting and disciplined. In which case, the scorecard would be a perfect remedy to being superficial... except a bachelor could quickly determine who to be with through a fairly simple and short process of trial and error. In small communities there's ample opportunity to get to know the people in the singles scene.
What though if you live in a city of 5 million or so? What if you have 200 people in your workplace, 30 people in your department at work, share classes at school with 150 people, know 100 or so people through the music scene, work with 120 actors per year, volunteer in a kitchen with 20 others, and swipe through 100 tinder profiles a day?
Speaking only for myself, how I work is something like this:
And I feel compelled to apologize, not for who I am, which is superficial, but for my flowcharting skills, go figure. This like the scorecard system is a gross oversimplification of how my attention is allotted. But the basic thing is, that the superficiality works as a gatekeeper, are you attractive? I want to know more, if not we can be friends, I'm confident.
Two things, the first is that what constitutes whether someone is superficially attractive to me is what I will unpack in future posts because it's more complicated than this flowchart lets on. The second is that it's still true that 'kindness' is more important to me than physical attractiveness, so why would I rule out of potential intimate exclusive relationships anyone I don't find attractive on the outside?
Returning to our score-card system we have a list of criteria of important things in evaluating a potential partner and could even weight it to reflect which qualities are more important. But there's another nuance we can potentially miss, are these criteria correlated, negatively correlated or independent. If you aren't fluent in statistical speak, correlated would mean that beautiful people tend to be kinder and more intelligent. Negatively correlated would mean that beautiful people tend to be crueler and stupider. Independent would mean that whether or not you are beautiful has no impact on whether you are kind or intelligent.
If your really wanted to find out the answers, it would get really complicated even with this abridged list of shit we might find desirable (eg. being beautiful correlates with being kind UNLESS they are emotionally immature etc.) and I've looked into this stuff a bit.
My general presumption is that these criteria are independent, erring on the side of being weakly positively correlated. That last concession is factoring in 'the halo effect' coupled with the Matthew effect. Which is to say this is a huge problem I would concede is caused by superficiality. Teachers tend to view the more attractive students as smarter, call on them more in class and give them more attention (the halo effect), the result of which is that over time the imagined positive correlation starts to become real positive correlations (the Matthew effect), which is cruel and unjust and I'm writing this while listening to Malcolm Gladwell and David Epstein discuss this very error in the domain of sports.
The implication of which, is that in an environment where there are a 1000 women compatible with my sexual orientation, do I have time and energy to get to know them all? To make small talk, go out for coffee, get to know them? No. I don't. 1000 is too much. How to cut it down to something manageable? Well I could take my most important criteria kindness and get rid of all the women who aren't kind. But how? well we could make small talk, go out for coffee and see how they treat the waitress, or whether they give coins to that homeless person etc.
Which is to say, determining who and who isn't kind out of the 1000 doesn't cut down the number at all because kindness can be seen, through behavior but not at a glance. Whereas a less important criteria like physical attractiveness can be seen at a glance. Thus, it's possible for me to walk into an auditorium and depending on how superficial I want to get, cut the unmanageable 1000 down to 100 or 30 or 20 at literally the speed of light.
Now if you aren't at least empathizing with me, imagine being on Tinder, and you matched with everyone you liked. If you looked at some 100 profiles a day, and liked 10 of what you saw. If you got 10 new matches what are the odds you will initiate 10 new chats every day? Admittedly there are other solutions, like first-come-first-serve. But even 10 I would argue is unmanageable for getting to know these more important criteria.
Thus the only world in which superficiality isn't beneficial for cutting down the number of potential love interests is one in which attractiveness and whatever you most care about are negatively correlated. Which is to say, you are using a selection criteria that excludes what you are actually interested in. The evidence to say that being beautiful necessitates you being cruel, or stupid, or immature is very weak from what I've seen.
If what I'm driving at is a bit opaque, what I'm saying is, I want to date someone who is kind, out of 1000 women maybe 400 are exemplary examples of kindness. Hooray! But because being beautiful is not to the exclusion of being kind, 30 women in a hundred I may regard as 'beautiful enough' and 12 of them are kind, and of those 12 maybe only one is willing to go out for coffee with me. That's a massive saving of time and energy and I haven't lost what is important to me by excluding 388 of the 400 women who are kind.
This is the second nuance of the scorecard, is that kindness, intelligence, emotional maturity, ambition, quality conversation, tolerance, honesty, creativity, discipline, etc. can be enjoyed in the context of a friendship. Friendships also, don't generally benefit from being exclusive 'I currently have a friend but who knows, in the future I might be available to be a friend...' they might benefit from quality of focus and attention, but my friends don't generally mind if I go to their housewarming on friday night and another friends gig on saturday night. I've been lead to understand though that a partner is less tolerant of me having a second family, and the non-monogomous communities partially aside, less impressed with me having physical intimacy with more than one person.
Here then, is my frustration. Generally when I wind up engaged in a discussion about superficiality, I'm not treated as an individual, and I'm engaged with someone who assumes I'm open about my superficiality because I've never given it a seconds thought and I am not aware of all the problems with it.
I'm happy to pay the price for being out there is superficial, even if people deem it fit, to wear the shoe of chauvinist pig. I'm writing this up, mainly so I have something to point someone at to say 'here, I've actually given this a lot of thought.' so with my introduction to superficiality out of the way I thought I'd end with a list of how I actually frame my internal debate as to my superficiality:
This first frame is that this is about my superficiality. Insofar as my experience of my own superficiality can be generalized I regard it as coincidental. Johari window aside, I regard myself as an authority on my own lived experience. Much of my exploration has been trying to perceive my own unconscious self's contribution, which I use to revise my own conscious narrative and I'm no where near concluding on this.
If you can't imagine what that last part means, for example, from time to time I will look down at my feet and feel which foot is bearing my weight, then I follow the direction of that foot to see what it is pointing at. Sometimes it's an exit, or where the train is likely to arrive on the platform, sometimes it might be a male colleague at a party I've been meaning to go say hello to for an hour, and very often it's pointing at the most attractive woman in my vicinity, even though my conscious mind was bogged down in a book, or dealing with a client at work etc. I regard this unconscious behavior as part of who I am and useful information.
The second frame, was inspired by a friend telling me that I 'almost get it.' which like almost all feedback, is incredibly useful. Though not related specifically to my superficiality inspired me to think of this kind of matrix of possibilities regarding the Dunning-Kruger effect which is hugely problematic in all public discourse. This comes up a lot when I reveal my superficial preferences, where people explain to me as if I've never heard of sexism, chauvinism, eating disorders or the ugly duckling. There's 3 distinct possibilities, the first is that someone else has a piece of information that I lack, something I've never considered and that explains our different positions (I know less). The second is that I have some piece of information that others lack, something that they haven't considered and that explains our different positions (I know more). The third is that we both lack sufficient information to competently form conclusions on this or other subjects. (We don't know enough) We are in other words, the peanut gallery.
The nasty nature of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that I can't tell when I'm in the first scenario, I don't know what I don't know, until my bubble bursts. By writing about my experience of my own superficiality though, I can maybe illuminate for others whether or not it's the second or third scenario if I present information that is novel to someone else's consideration of the subject.
Thirdly, I have a pretty basic attitude towards self-expression and human rights in general. While concepts like 'free speech' I might be unsure on and have more nuanced leanings, since I'm really only talking about 'the superficial' my feelings on how people present themselves are less complicated since people don't tend to take financial or medical advice from t-shirts (I hope).
Basically, I like the expression 'my rights end where yours begin' eg. I have the right to free speech but you don't have to listen to me, I have the right to assemble, but not in your house.
So when it comes to how one expresses themselves through dress and manner, and even less controllable aspects like weight, complexion, tattoos etc. I basically feel nobody deserves to be accosted, assaulted or excluded based on their appearance. (Maybe if someone's wearing a swastika they deserve some pointed questioning, and I feel that person should by now, know the risks.) However just as nobody deserves ridicule, harassment, exclusion based on their appearance, the point at which I feel my rights begin as an individual is that I have no obligation to compliment, affirm, go on a date, marry, have children, host Christmas etc. based on someone's appearance. In other words, I feel people have both a right and a responsibility to be largely indifferent to each other's appearances.
An individual though, I would basically say is not transgressing any moral laws to have and live in respectful accordance with 'this is not my cup of tea, my cup of tea has chamomile in it.'
My feeling is also such that, were I in a position like recruiting for an organization, my superficiality would become problematic if I kept substituting my cup of tea for the organizational cup of tea. In which case though, it is better for my superficiality to be on the table not to say 'non-hotties need not apply' but to ensure adequate countermeasures are in place like if I had to hire musicians for an orchestra I'd use a blind audition process instead of simply saying to Nigel Kennedy that Gal Gadot just plays a better violin.
Fourth frame issssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss when talking about my superficiality I'm talking about attraction (and specifically what attracts my attention) and not attachment which are two distinct things, and it's a distinction I would try to avoid having to make again and again. Attraction appears to be important in the initial stages of any relationship, and it defines who is included and excluded from our attention.
By contrast attachment is the glue that holds relationships together, for good or for ill. It's what allows us to fearlessly neglect our neck hair, and not bother to match bra with undies when we know our partner will see them. It is what allows us to fart with confidence in the company of the person we are attached to. It's also what makes us apologize for a partner's serious shortcomings or waste our precious lives. Thus in many ways, a better way to spend your time and life than reading about how superficial I am and what I make of it, is to thoroughly interrogate one's own attachment style.
Fifth frame for all my superficiality, I do earnestly and sincerely believe that the most practical and healthy definition of beauty is that someone is beautiful if they make us feel beautiful. It is good once in a while whence we have allowed someone to become close to us, to ask ourselves 'how do they make me feel?' I'd almost say how people make us feel applies generally, however with the current state of public discourse and opinion silos/echochambers some level of discomfort I'd say is good for us.
Sixthly along with only talking about my individual superficiality, there's an accompanying narrative of what I think people wish I would think I'm going to struggle to describe the narrative I receive in variations that runs against the grain of my lived experience. Because they are at odds, my interest is generated as to why they would be at odds, however it makes it hard for me to describe a narrative I don't feel personally is very descriptive, particularly avoiding emotive language, but here goes:
My take on the received wisdom is that my conceptions of beauty, hotness, physical attractiveness are learned, perhaps in a process I am not conscious of. From early childhood through to now, I'm consuming messages that inform how I perceive the world and attribute value. My concept of physical attractiveness is predominantly nurtured by my environment, a social construction. This imparts a cost on me and the community/society.
I'm about to embark on a sporadic run of posts where I (perhaps paradoxically) take an in-depth look at my superficiality.
It's something I've been privately unpacking for a while, quite a while, because I find it interesting. The menu is probably going to go: body images, faces, looks, age and no doubt a misc section that would probably wash out from writing up those other three.
I find it interesting because of the conflict between my narrative and my lived experience. Like I possess a belief that I shouldn't be superficial, but my experience and how I generally convey myself is that I am very superficial.
Now most people to be honest, don't engage with me at all, they just ignore me and let me be and I notice and appreciate that. But occasionally someone will engage me, challenge me and I feel a hint of disappointment that they have discovered I am quite superficial, and then they adopt a frame of engagement that appears to assume I've never heard a bad word said against superficiality.
Most interesting to me, is that I feel quite often that I can make a better case against superficiality than most people who tell me it's bad that I'm superficial. However I suspect that that might exacerbate the disappointment I perceive.
Now I suspect that I'm very superficial, but how to frame this? Maybe since where talking about visual perception I should start off with a little webcomic that is almost entirely in Spanish:
Speaking to my subjective experience my friend zone is massive. Virtually everyone can be my friend, I'm easy and have a very open border policy. I've unfriended 3 people in my facebook life, 1 because I suspected they had a hystrionic personality disorder, scared me and I assumed when they got fired from my work I'd never see them again and it was thus safe to dump them from being able to see my feed. Another because they publicly demonstrated the poor judgement to, I'll be generous and say 'criticize' Aboriginals for burning an Australian flag 'after all we've done for them.' I'm sure they had their own particular emotional reasons for venerating our crappy flag so, but nevertheless I made the call that they would probably never have anything to say that I would be interested in reading so I ditched them. And the last was probably the least justified, but it was someone I just got sick of talking about me instead of to me, and it wasn't even negative it just tripped me out since they were in my life that they preferred to find out about me via facebook instead of you know conversing with me when I was present, so I cut off their info supply and it resulted not in improved conversation but the end of a friendship, which frankly I hadn't anticipated. It reminds me of Skinner's line 'the judge offered me three options: apologise, go to jail or join the army. Had I known there was a war on at the time I probably would have apologized.'
Anyway my Venn diagram as near as I can determine approximates this:
Imperfect, but let me walk you through it. The large purple circle is my friend zone, and maybe it should be 'potential' friend zone in terms of I will be friends with just about anybody. I'm not fussy, and not depicted here is how truly tiny the white space would be proportional to the purple of people I don't think I can be friends with. The yellow circle represents the portion of the population I find attractive, and it's really small probably honestly too small, but it almost entirely overlaps with my friendzone, it's a subset of the people I will be friends with. A fraction of people I can be friends with, I am interested in being more intimate with. Thus were I in Lois from the above comic's position, were Karla to tell me she preferred to be friends, then we would be friends. If then Karla started to resent that I as her friend no longer made romantic overtures like taking her on dates, or inviting her to the movies with a bunch of my other friends, I feel that resentment is on her.
I've also included a tiny sliver of non-overlapping attraction but not friend material, but I'd have to say it's largely hypothetical. It is within my experience to find attractive people whose personality I find distasteful and perhaps even repulsive. What might constitute in crude speech the people we would 'hate-fuck' however, I'm skeptical even of this. I suspect the conflict of feeling simultaneously aroused and repulsed by a person probably arises from a desire to except something distasteful about ourselves - hence we don't hate them we actually hate a part of ourselves we wish we could instead accept. Basically, I suspect it would always turn out like Pride & Prejudice.
Now who makes it into my attraction zone? Well I suspect that they way it's supposed to work is something like this:
This wouldn't be superficial but a holistic evaluation process of determining the value of prospective partners. It's true of me to say that kindness is more important to me than attractiveness. A woman getting a haircut I don't like as much as what she had is not a deal-breaker for me, in fact it appears to be an inevitability of entering a relationship, but being rude to the help is a dealbreaker to me. That get's you friend zoned right away. (In my own case, probably for psychologically unhealthy reasons, but perhaps useful reasons, I care far less about how a person treats me than how they treat strangers.)
So in the above made-up score card, this person for superficial attractiveness is below average. Were I superficial I would be losing out on someone who is actually quite desirable as a partner, you could measure my error as -3 between superficial attractiveness and actual attractiveness.
This system I feel would work well, even be desirable if I lived in a small rural village with a population of around 250 people and an average age of 50. The local secondary school has 1 class of 10 students covering a curriculum from year 7 to 12. Where I as an eligible bachelor am faced with two prospective sweethearts Cheryl and Jenny. Cheryl is a beautiful farmers daughter who is also cruel, stupid, boring, petulant and lazy. Jenny is homely, intelligent, kind, interesting and disciplined. In which case, the scorecard would be a perfect remedy to being superficial... except a bachelor could quickly determine who to be with through a fairly simple and short process of trial and error. In small communities there's ample opportunity to get to know the people in the singles scene.
What though if you live in a city of 5 million or so? What if you have 200 people in your workplace, 30 people in your department at work, share classes at school with 150 people, know 100 or so people through the music scene, work with 120 actors per year, volunteer in a kitchen with 20 others, and swipe through 100 tinder profiles a day?
Speaking only for myself, how I work is something like this:
And I feel compelled to apologize, not for who I am, which is superficial, but for my flowcharting skills, go figure. This like the scorecard system is a gross oversimplification of how my attention is allotted. But the basic thing is, that the superficiality works as a gatekeeper, are you attractive? I want to know more, if not we can be friends, I'm confident.
Two things, the first is that what constitutes whether someone is superficially attractive to me is what I will unpack in future posts because it's more complicated than this flowchart lets on. The second is that it's still true that 'kindness' is more important to me than physical attractiveness, so why would I rule out of potential intimate exclusive relationships anyone I don't find attractive on the outside?
Returning to our score-card system we have a list of criteria of important things in evaluating a potential partner and could even weight it to reflect which qualities are more important. But there's another nuance we can potentially miss, are these criteria correlated, negatively correlated or independent. If you aren't fluent in statistical speak, correlated would mean that beautiful people tend to be kinder and more intelligent. Negatively correlated would mean that beautiful people tend to be crueler and stupider. Independent would mean that whether or not you are beautiful has no impact on whether you are kind or intelligent.
If your really wanted to find out the answers, it would get really complicated even with this abridged list of shit we might find desirable (eg. being beautiful correlates with being kind UNLESS they are emotionally immature etc.) and I've looked into this stuff a bit.
My general presumption is that these criteria are independent, erring on the side of being weakly positively correlated. That last concession is factoring in 'the halo effect' coupled with the Matthew effect. Which is to say this is a huge problem I would concede is caused by superficiality. Teachers tend to view the more attractive students as smarter, call on them more in class and give them more attention (the halo effect), the result of which is that over time the imagined positive correlation starts to become real positive correlations (the Matthew effect), which is cruel and unjust and I'm writing this while listening to Malcolm Gladwell and David Epstein discuss this very error in the domain of sports.
The implication of which, is that in an environment where there are a 1000 women compatible with my sexual orientation, do I have time and energy to get to know them all? To make small talk, go out for coffee, get to know them? No. I don't. 1000 is too much. How to cut it down to something manageable? Well I could take my most important criteria kindness and get rid of all the women who aren't kind. But how? well we could make small talk, go out for coffee and see how they treat the waitress, or whether they give coins to that homeless person etc.
Which is to say, determining who and who isn't kind out of the 1000 doesn't cut down the number at all because kindness can be seen, through behavior but not at a glance. Whereas a less important criteria like physical attractiveness can be seen at a glance. Thus, it's possible for me to walk into an auditorium and depending on how superficial I want to get, cut the unmanageable 1000 down to 100 or 30 or 20 at literally the speed of light.
Now if you aren't at least empathizing with me, imagine being on Tinder, and you matched with everyone you liked. If you looked at some 100 profiles a day, and liked 10 of what you saw. If you got 10 new matches what are the odds you will initiate 10 new chats every day? Admittedly there are other solutions, like first-come-first-serve. But even 10 I would argue is unmanageable for getting to know these more important criteria.
Thus the only world in which superficiality isn't beneficial for cutting down the number of potential love interests is one in which attractiveness and whatever you most care about are negatively correlated. Which is to say, you are using a selection criteria that excludes what you are actually interested in. The evidence to say that being beautiful necessitates you being cruel, or stupid, or immature is very weak from what I've seen.
If what I'm driving at is a bit opaque, what I'm saying is, I want to date someone who is kind, out of 1000 women maybe 400 are exemplary examples of kindness. Hooray! But because being beautiful is not to the exclusion of being kind, 30 women in a hundred I may regard as 'beautiful enough' and 12 of them are kind, and of those 12 maybe only one is willing to go out for coffee with me. That's a massive saving of time and energy and I haven't lost what is important to me by excluding 388 of the 400 women who are kind.
This is the second nuance of the scorecard, is that kindness, intelligence, emotional maturity, ambition, quality conversation, tolerance, honesty, creativity, discipline, etc. can be enjoyed in the context of a friendship. Friendships also, don't generally benefit from being exclusive 'I currently have a friend but who knows, in the future I might be available to be a friend...' they might benefit from quality of focus and attention, but my friends don't generally mind if I go to their housewarming on friday night and another friends gig on saturday night. I've been lead to understand though that a partner is less tolerant of me having a second family, and the non-monogomous communities partially aside, less impressed with me having physical intimacy with more than one person.
Here then, is my frustration. Generally when I wind up engaged in a discussion about superficiality, I'm not treated as an individual, and I'm engaged with someone who assumes I'm open about my superficiality because I've never given it a seconds thought and I am not aware of all the problems with it.
I'm happy to pay the price for being out there is superficial, even if people deem it fit, to wear the shoe of chauvinist pig. I'm writing this up, mainly so I have something to point someone at to say 'here, I've actually given this a lot of thought.' so with my introduction to superficiality out of the way I thought I'd end with a list of how I actually frame my internal debate as to my superficiality:
This first frame is that this is about my superficiality. Insofar as my experience of my own superficiality can be generalized I regard it as coincidental. Johari window aside, I regard myself as an authority on my own lived experience. Much of my exploration has been trying to perceive my own unconscious self's contribution, which I use to revise my own conscious narrative and I'm no where near concluding on this.
If you can't imagine what that last part means, for example, from time to time I will look down at my feet and feel which foot is bearing my weight, then I follow the direction of that foot to see what it is pointing at. Sometimes it's an exit, or where the train is likely to arrive on the platform, sometimes it might be a male colleague at a party I've been meaning to go say hello to for an hour, and very often it's pointing at the most attractive woman in my vicinity, even though my conscious mind was bogged down in a book, or dealing with a client at work etc. I regard this unconscious behavior as part of who I am and useful information.
The second frame, was inspired by a friend telling me that I 'almost get it.' which like almost all feedback, is incredibly useful. Though not related specifically to my superficiality inspired me to think of this kind of matrix of possibilities regarding the Dunning-Kruger effect which is hugely problematic in all public discourse. This comes up a lot when I reveal my superficial preferences, where people explain to me as if I've never heard of sexism, chauvinism, eating disorders or the ugly duckling. There's 3 distinct possibilities, the first is that someone else has a piece of information that I lack, something I've never considered and that explains our different positions (I know less). The second is that I have some piece of information that others lack, something that they haven't considered and that explains our different positions (I know more). The third is that we both lack sufficient information to competently form conclusions on this or other subjects. (We don't know enough) We are in other words, the peanut gallery.
The nasty nature of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that I can't tell when I'm in the first scenario, I don't know what I don't know, until my bubble bursts. By writing about my experience of my own superficiality though, I can maybe illuminate for others whether or not it's the second or third scenario if I present information that is novel to someone else's consideration of the subject.
Thirdly, I have a pretty basic attitude towards self-expression and human rights in general. While concepts like 'free speech' I might be unsure on and have more nuanced leanings, since I'm really only talking about 'the superficial' my feelings on how people present themselves are less complicated since people don't tend to take financial or medical advice from t-shirts (I hope).
Basically, I like the expression 'my rights end where yours begin' eg. I have the right to free speech but you don't have to listen to me, I have the right to assemble, but not in your house.
So when it comes to how one expresses themselves through dress and manner, and even less controllable aspects like weight, complexion, tattoos etc. I basically feel nobody deserves to be accosted, assaulted or excluded based on their appearance. (Maybe if someone's wearing a swastika they deserve some pointed questioning, and I feel that person should by now, know the risks.) However just as nobody deserves ridicule, harassment, exclusion based on their appearance, the point at which I feel my rights begin as an individual is that I have no obligation to compliment, affirm, go on a date, marry, have children, host Christmas etc. based on someone's appearance. In other words, I feel people have both a right and a responsibility to be largely indifferent to each other's appearances.
An individual though, I would basically say is not transgressing any moral laws to have and live in respectful accordance with 'this is not my cup of tea, my cup of tea has chamomile in it.'
My feeling is also such that, were I in a position like recruiting for an organization, my superficiality would become problematic if I kept substituting my cup of tea for the organizational cup of tea. In which case though, it is better for my superficiality to be on the table not to say 'non-hotties need not apply' but to ensure adequate countermeasures are in place like if I had to hire musicians for an orchestra I'd use a blind audition process instead of simply saying to Nigel Kennedy that Gal Gadot just plays a better violin.
Fourth frame issssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss when talking about my superficiality I'm talking about attraction (and specifically what attracts my attention) and not attachment which are two distinct things, and it's a distinction I would try to avoid having to make again and again. Attraction appears to be important in the initial stages of any relationship, and it defines who is included and excluded from our attention.
By contrast attachment is the glue that holds relationships together, for good or for ill. It's what allows us to fearlessly neglect our neck hair, and not bother to match bra with undies when we know our partner will see them. It is what allows us to fart with confidence in the company of the person we are attached to. It's also what makes us apologize for a partner's serious shortcomings or waste our precious lives. Thus in many ways, a better way to spend your time and life than reading about how superficial I am and what I make of it, is to thoroughly interrogate one's own attachment style.
Fifth frame for all my superficiality, I do earnestly and sincerely believe that the most practical and healthy definition of beauty is that someone is beautiful if they make us feel beautiful. It is good once in a while whence we have allowed someone to become close to us, to ask ourselves 'how do they make me feel?' I'd almost say how people make us feel applies generally, however with the current state of public discourse and opinion silos/echochambers some level of discomfort I'd say is good for us.
Sixthly along with only talking about my individual superficiality, there's an accompanying narrative of what I think people wish I would think I'm going to struggle to describe the narrative I receive in variations that runs against the grain of my lived experience. Because they are at odds, my interest is generated as to why they would be at odds, however it makes it hard for me to describe a narrative I don't feel personally is very descriptive, particularly avoiding emotive language, but here goes:
My take on the received wisdom is that my conceptions of beauty, hotness, physical attractiveness are learned, perhaps in a process I am not conscious of. From early childhood through to now, I'm consuming messages that inform how I perceive the world and attribute value. My concept of physical attractiveness is predominantly nurtured by my environment, a social construction. This imparts a cost on me and the community/society.
It takes some cognitive strain to word it this way, trying to avoid emotive language such as 'brainwashed' or even 'imposes'. Functionally I see this narrative as a causal assertion - What I think is beautiful, is beautiful because I was told 'this is beautiful' what I think is sexy, is sexy because I was told 'this is sexy' what I think is hot, is hot because I was told 'this is hot'.
Essentially the argument is notions or ideals of beauty are arbitrary.
As for the cost, to my understanding/imagination it's easy to see and understand. If ideals of attractiveness are ratcheted up too high, excluding the majority of the population it increases competition, both to partner with the attractive and to be considered attractive through cosmetic measures - spending time and money pursuing something we don't need because we could decide not to need it.
Furthermore it may lead to errors in partner selection, rejecting prospects on the criteria of physical attractiveness, which is arbitrary and subsequently losing out on non-arbitrary important qualities like intelligence, kindness etc.
I can make a case for this narrative, pull out supporting examples and evidence but I'd just declare that I don't find the narrative compelling. What I would point out is the following: 1) it's an extreme position, and extreme conclusion. 2) it's an intelligent design narrative and 3) it's a comforting/motivated narrative.
By the first, I mean attributing the majority of my ideals of beauty to nurture factors, or even exclusively to nurture factors is very different from arguing that 'nurture' plays a role alongside nature factors. By the second the narrative implies intention and design by agents, and my general experience of intelligent design arguments is that they don't describe or explain or predict the world we actually live in, whereas natural selection arguments do. They are simpler than intelligent design explanations, which decreases the likelihood that intelligent design arguments is true, because there's more that needs to happen and more that needs to be proved. Which segues nicely into the third which is I'm always suspicious of narratives that are comforting, and there's just too many winners to a mainly-nurture explanation of superficiality, including me.
The argument I keep hearing that is interesting and worth entertaining, but not descriptive of the world I live in, is basically that 'we are sold sex', and not that 'sex sells'. I believe many people do attempt to sell us concepts of sex and sexiness, and mostly these efforts are pissing into the wind.
The three likely candidates that might sell me my superficial notions of attractiveness are: my parents, my peers, and 'the media'. In my case, I can count on one hand the times my dad has ever commented on a woman's appearance and if I inherited anything from him it's being a loner workaholic. My mum is fairly preoccupied with appearances however, I feel confident if we were to do a comparison between what my mum values in appearances and what I do, there would be little to no correalation and I'm confident there's little to no causation. Whenever my mum has suggested 'a good match' for me, I've generally been insulted though to her credit she does like most of my ex partners.
As for peers, sure I can recall my fellow preppy private school boys making comments like 'she has tits like a Swedish moo-cow' or 'she has an acne goatee' but the vast majority of discussing girls was from the perspective of a relationship, namely 'who do you like?' 'I like Ashanti, you?' 'I like Latifah.' and if it progressed to 'why' it was much more likely to be talk about personal qualities like being 'cool' or 'nice' than physical attributes. I suspect my experience was owing to belonging to the 'romantic idiot' majority that were interested in relationships, searching at age 16 instinctively for the partner we wished to spend the rest of our lives with. There was another subset of guys I didn't really have access to, that were more into getting wasted at a party and receiving a blowjob from a girl behind a shrub in a driveway that they would then avoid at school for the rest of the year. But generally and to this day, one of the things I least like discussing with other heterosexual guys, is women I find attractive, because why the fuck do I want to make the case to another man that some woman is attractive? So I can be confident that later that day their read sweaty face will be concentrating on her image as they masturbate? Or that they may wish to compete with me for her attention? I NEVER want to discuss women with other men, unless it's expressing frustration with a relationship or seeking relationship advice.
Leaving the most likely influence, the media. I'm sure advertising and marketing effects me and helps shape my attitude. My old lecturer in marketing Brad used to say there was a debate on whether marketing is a weak or a strong force. He said weak. I was skeptical, but over a decade or so and looking into it, I think I'm coming around. Claims that a marketer 'couldn't sell you a shit sandwich' I found dubious because I grew up in the 90s where the super sour warhead candies were a fad. If kids can be duped into eating an unpleasant candy, then surely they could be talked into eating shit. However, Daniel Kahneman would explain that how an experience ends is more important than the absolute suffering it inflicts, which explains how warheads were viable.
And 'the media' has attempted to sell me a tonne of shit sandwiches that I haven't bought, including but not limited to: skinny jeans, tattoo sleeves, Oakley sunglasses, a car and a mortgage, the Independence Day movie, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Beats by Dr Dre, Uber, Snapchat, Twitter, Boat Shoes... etc. I'm basically that psychographic that advertisers and marketers have no interest in - someone who is neither susceptible to trends nor sets them. Perhaps more simply described as someone who doesn't spend money.
Thus while I have no doubt that the media plays some role in shaping what I find attractive, and I'll unpack that with the more specific less general posts, I'm skeptical that it would be so domain specifically effective on me when it comes to women's attractiveness and almost random in effect on every other domain.
So that I feel should do for covering the general base and premises of my superficiality. Thanks for reading and if you are eager for more there will be forthcoming posts focused on my superficiality regarding body image, facial features, attire, age and whatever else might come up.
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