why being pretty doesn’t make you special

from issue 11: still a twenty-something teenybopper

There’s this scene in the film version of Looking for Alibrandi where the main character, Josie, is lying in bed with her grandmother. They are looking over old photos of Josie’s grandma when she was young, and she reminisces on how beautiful she was and how all the young men in the village wanted to marry her.

The film’s probably more famous for the image of Pia Miranda clutching Kick Gurry on the back of a motorcycle, but that gentle nostalgic scene in the bedroom was the one that stuck with me most. Not because of the gentle nostalgia, though, so much as because of the way it tapped into my desires and insecurities.

The most beautiful girl in the village. Countless admirers trailing after me, begging to cater to my every whim. It was a seductive image—except for the inconvenient fact that, for the most part, boys weren’t trailing after me, begging to cater to my every whim. Actually, for the most part, boys didn’t do much more than make me cry. And I couldn’t help wonder why that was and if, if only I was more beautiful, things would be different.

No doubt about it, beautiful women hold a pretty special place in our society. Their airbrushed images smile down at us from billboards and pout up at us from magazines. Newspaper profiles on successful women almost always linger for a few too many words on how ‘tiny’, ‘elegant’ or ‘luscious’ the interview subject is. The world clicked its collective tongue when Brad left Jennifer for Angelina but secretly understood, because Angelina was ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, after all.

I’ve even read academic journal articles about the supernatural lure of beautiful women. The idea is that if you’re pretty enough the world will fall at your feet. Girls will want to be you (when they don’t want to hurt you), boys will want to be with you, sales assistants will gush and offer you free merchandise, and you’ll just swan through life throwing the occasional bit of fairy dust on the masses.

The problem is that just as the images we see in advertisements, in magazines and on television bear only a passing resemblance to reality, so too do the lives we imagine accompanying them. It’s true that people are more likely to be romantically interested in those they find physically attractive, and there’s also evidence to suggest that attractive people get a better deal when it comes to jobs, cash and even social opportunities. But the idea that beautiful women hold the rest of the population under some kind of stupor and get everything their own way? Pure fantasy.

For a start, beautiful people—and, especially, beautiful women (you might say we’re lucky that way)—are a dime a dozen. They’re everywhere. Take a look around you next time you walk down the street and you’ll find tall ones, short ones, blondes, brunettes, redheads, light skin, dark skin, tanned skin, skinny, curvy, chubby, whatever. And I don’t just mean beautiful in that Dove/pseudo-self-acceptance/‘everyone is beautiful’ way either. Good-looking people really are everywhere you look.

Being pretty doesn’t actually make you all that different from most other girls out there. And it’s certainly not going to make you ‘special’.

That doesn’t mean you should go knotting up your knickers because you’ll probably never be ‘the most beautiful girl in the village’—although it does mean that ‘the most beautiful girl in the village/school/party’ is more a matter of individual preference than of fact. But more importantly than that, it means that if you really want to stand out, there are much easier and more effective ways of differentiating yourself than through the way you look.

It’s true that, unless you’re a twin, there probably isn’t anyone out there who looks quite like you—but there isn’t anyone out there who thinks or laughs or lights up a room the way you do either. Do you have a knack for solving maths problems? For writing kick-arse essays or stories? For hitting a ball really, really hard? Do you give heaps back to your community, or have a gift for making people laugh or feel at ease with themselves? Chances are, those are the things your friends, family, crushes and significant others love about you and rave on about given half the chance—not how shiny your hair is or how tight your arse is. And if they are hung up on the latter, I’d say you’ve got more serious problems to think about than how you look.

So why, then, do we find it so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our lives would be so much easier if only we were the most beautiful girl in the village, instead of accepting the truth that she doesn’t exist? Why do we keep falling for the myth? And why do people keep trying to sell it to us? Maybe because the fact that she doesn’t exist means that so long as we strive to be her, we’ll never be happy with ourselves, so we’ll keep on buying that shampoo, that diet product or that magazine. We’ll keep on beating ourselves up over things we don’t actually have any control over.

It can be tempting to do that sometimes. But next time you wish you were ‘that girl’—the girl who seems to have everything falling at her feet, consider for a moment why things seem to come so easily to her. Chances are she’s not the most beautiful girl in the village after all—she’s just one of many beautiful girls who also happens to have a whole lot of confidence and a beautiful personality. And chances are there are moments she wishes she were you.

Rachel Hills, 23, is an editor for Vibewire.net and a writer on gender and media issues.