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How attractive am I? this question is one of the most confusing/surreal ones, and I think this generalizes to a lot of other people.
I have evidence I am attractive. I make good money off it and people tell me I'm very hot. This should be the end of it, right?
No.
I have evidence I am attractive. I make good money off it and people tell me I'm very hot. This should be the end of it, right?
No.
What if it's makeup+lighting+angles+filters? This is an actual thing that people make fun of (r/instagramreality). Do I only hear from horny men with low standards? I feel a pressure never to tell other ppl they're unattractive, obvs people would feel the same to me! 2/
And I do get ppl in reddit comments regularly saying I'm unattractive, overrated. I see ppl in forums who don't know I'm watching dissect my appearance and conclude it's very weird I make a lot of money cause i'm "not hot enough".
So how do I make sense of this info?
So how do I make sense of this info?
It's extraordinarily hard. There's personal incentive (i don't want to admit i'm unattractive), there's so many other incentives for outside opinions to be inaccurate, there's my own blindness to my own face, there's a wildly conflicting amount of feedback in general.
Our own attractiveness is most a mystery to ourselves; beyond a general range we are in a state of confusing flux. And no amount of response to *this uncertainty itself* can resolve the uncertainty - any assurance is still subject to the same problems.
I feel a vague pressure to figure out exactly how attractive I am. When I talk about hot privilege - do I have it? How much do I have? How much of my success is due to effort vs. being hot? Will other people snicker behind my back if they hear me referring to myself as hot?
People 'knowing their place' in the attractiveness scale is important, because we collectively make fun of people who've overshot their estimation of themselves - just think of any media portrayal where an unattractive person acts like a very hot person. It's comedy!
So to be safe, we downgrade our own estimations - but downgrade too far and the less attractive will resent you - we all probably have known a super hot friend who commiserates with your insecurity by comparing their flaws to yours and it's annoying.
So we've got pressure to know where we are, and also a giant social conspiracy to prevent us from knowing where we are. We end up bouncing around in a vague hot zone, where the boundaries are clear and our self esteem is left to wander according to daily whims.
