This conversation is paywalled. It’s also old—really old—which you’ll probably be able to clock by how immature I sound.
Consider that a content warning! Some of the things I say (usually about myself) are, charitably, "kind of out there." It's a frank conversation about attractiveness, and why this mysterious young man and I both think ugliness is more of a vibe than a physical state of being:
We end up landing on this idea that you can will yourself into ugliness without changing anything about your appearance. I still think that's true.
(I wanted to write more of a lead-in, but pregnancy brain is unfortunately very real.)
Me around the web:
Some housekeeping:
I’m reviving the advice column—just an encore, though, not a permanent reinstallment. Email me your questions at defaultefriend@gmail.com.
The Chicago book club meeting is on 2/29. Let me know if you’d like to come. We’re reading Negative Space by B.R. Yeager.
And finally, please consider a paid subscription, and sharing and commenting. Alternatively, consider sharing feedback about how this project can be improved. Either way, it helps me out a lot…
The Less Desired....Under this title I explore a theme that gets very little attention in journalism about romantic and sexual pair bonding – the huge difference between the fortunes of what one might term the More and the Less Desired of each sex. Opinion pieces, sometimes serious and sometimes coy, on the subject of unfair sex are to be found in abundance. What always strikes me when I read this kind of journalism is how it is always framed in terms of a generic species called ‘Women’ and a generic species called ‘Men’; as if the perceived ‘unfair’ asymmetries under discussion are entirely ones between the sexes. The huge intra-sexual differences between the experiences of pretty women and ‘plain’ ones; and between confident ‘alpha’ males and ‘betas’ – this never gets considered.
Nature is very unfair in its distribution of physical comeliness. This is something that will always cause disappointment and resentment in the less lucky ones. In the words of this Unherd article by a feminist writer: “we are all still pitted against each other in the great hotness contest, measured by others and ourselves against the fuckability standard”. But what then of the distribution of those ‘attractive’ male personality traits? A study on the dating app Tinder found that men “liked” more than 60 percent of the female profiles they viewed, while women “liked” only 4.5 percent of male profiles. So Nature it would seem is also unfair in its distribution of this rare 4.5% of male animal magnetism. There is, in other words, ‘unfairness’ in the mating experience for both sexes. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired