putanumonit.com
Primarily relevant to here through the discussion of what people claim to find attractive vs. choose, but also considers various other measures of attractiveness. I dont agree with all these analyses but think its worth posting simply for considering the topic in a lot more detail then Ive previously seen.
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Notes -
I've always disliked the common feminist answer of "I wear makeup for myself, not for men". I find that very reductive and very much a poisoned explanation based on the feminist brain worm that no woman anywhere should ever try to do anything for the sake of men/a man, try to make a man/men happy, or seek any form of approval from a man/men.
I think there's the issue of proximal and distal causes here, or just different levels of abstraction to explain the same phenomenon.
When I say "thank you" at a restaurant after the server gives me my food, I'm not really "doing it for the server" any more. I'm doing it because it's a deeply ingrained habit at this point, shaped by a lifetime of social conditioning. I'm sure at some point I heard the explanation that saying "thank you" was the polite thing to do, and I did it a few times and got positive reactions, and I slowly became conditioned to do it automatically as a result.
In the same way, I can actually believe that a lot of women wear make up "for themselves", in the sense that they have no conscious thoughts along the line of "Gee, I wonder if a cute boy will see this and swoon over my amazing make up." But it's not going to apply to all women, and I do suspect there's a bit of denial going on for some.
Women know men haven't a fucking clue about makeup, they'll think some girl has a 'natural' look when a woman can tell it took three hours to achieve that 'wind-tousled hair and barely-there makeup' look. Or do you really think men care about contouring videos or what shade of red goes with my skin's undertones?
Like Herrick's poem, which seems to think that "a sweet disorder in the dress" is not fine art. If she really threw her clothes on carelessly, Herrick would not be attracted, he would think she was a slattern:
That's why women say "I do it for me", because while men can't tell, other women can, and if you feel that you look good/are following the season's trends, you feel confident and that you are not left out of the loop.
I agree that some subset of "I do it for me" is trying to say a socially acceptable lie, but I have also heard complaints from women that there are social expectations that they must wear make up to look "professional."
I could easily see some women doing a minimalist 30 minute make up routine that looks reasonably good, and just doing it out of habit. It's the same way that I'm sure many women who shave their legs and arm pits aren't doing it "for" other people's delectation, but because it is arbitrarily considered "unhygenic" or "gross" by many people to not do this, and so they keep up with it mostly out of habit.
30 minutes per day on a decent fraction of days is, on a population basis, a lot of time. If the value is mostly just signaling, and make the terrible estimate of (mixing in 'some women don't do makeup much', 'children and old people don't do makeup', etc) (4% of total female population) * (30min/day) ... 1822 entire human lives, per year, spent on makeup. That's quite a bit! It's much less than something like 'commutes', and less than 'showering', sure, but those are (arguably) bad too - many remote workers correctly think back on the daily commute as awful.
And (controversially) I don't think there's any fundamental basis in which losing some amount of time, on a population basis, is that different from an individual never existing, or dying. One can spend one's commute thinking about things, sure, and maybe there's a skill aspect to makeup some find interesting. But is "you will die at 74 instead of 78 because of the carcinogen in your cereal" really that different from "1 extra hour of your day, every day, will be burned for no reason"? Commutes, of course, have reason - unless remote work is an option. Everything is commensurable in this sense, tbh. 'Base' / 'vulgar' things matter, and 'sacred' / 'deontological moral breaches' aren't of a different kind.
That's not to say we should jail executives who don't allow remote work - harsh incentives against things like murder exist because murder is so easy, physically - but the actual impact, and hence responsibility, of a particularly effective advertising exec isn't necessarily better than the impact / responsibility of an auto exec who cuts safety features, leading to a .000001% increase in accident risk, resulting in a hundred deaths over 100 years.
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My condolences. Seriously though, how early do you have to get up for that?
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