As shallow as all my talk about fancying this or that person was in the Age, Diversity + More post, I still have a problem with running into reviews that only ever bring up a woman's beauty if something more is to be said of them.
I understand that whatever you prefer, you prefer, but while reading through someone's reviews of an older series with several different actors in each episode, I was forced to take notice of their only ever bringing up the women's looks. Whoever was beautiful and what other woman gorgeous, stunning or some other thing. Actresses are often reduced to their looks, and I'm not sure I'm any less guilty of it if looked at over a longer period of time. After all, women are apparently only to be looked at and need to be desirable to men, and that's their worth and value all too often.
As said, we are geared toward beauty by nature. I remain a hypocrite in having criticized the super-skinny and the incomprehensible fad of the silicone plumped lips, as well as having taken note of men's physical features or attributes, and liking whatever it is that I do like. I just find it limited and limiting to always to keep going on and on about the beauty or (relative) ugliness of whatever actress or any other female figure.
Female politicians are either lookers or frumpy nobodies that are probably battle-axes and difficult, right? You have one doing a stately visit and their clothes and hairstyle will be the things talked about. Sportswomen these days are criticized if they don't appear in makeup and try to conform to beauty standards. However ill-advised it might have been on all fronts to go the route East Germany did with their women athletes as well (or so they say), I'm also sure it wasn't any better to make fun of their looks back in the day either.
Likewise, I found it very jarring to see a comment on that rather well-known video clip site along the lines of "God, what happened to him? I used to have such a crush on him" about a person who'd simply hit their 50s and looked... normal. Or quite lovely, if you were to ask me, but no longer how they did in their thirties.
Age happened. The world happened. Shallow happened in your case, and given that you'd apparently fancied the actor when he was younger, you should possibly have matured some by now as well. Possibly. One can never tell.
I knew someone in the UK who said that while growing up with the Carry On movies, they were more inclined to want to be the Hattie Jacques and woshername wifely or matronly figures than the giggling Barbara Windsor bimbettes. She was also aware of the fact that she was quite likely in the small minority with her opinion.
What she said was that the others seemed to get to do better things, which is also true. There can be some independent power in being the battle-axe, whether you get ridiculed for it or not. You are a threat to supposed ways of How Things Are Supposed to Go and thus to be put down any chance there is, but you may accomplish more in any case. There is the saying about well-behaved women rarely making history.
However, given that when I broke my arm at the age of six, my laconic and resigned commentary on it was that I would thus never be able to take part in Miss World type contests, something is wrong in what is sold to girls and women. If a six-year-old already some thirty years ago was acutely aware that any flaws in beauty would cut you out of the "competition" and make you a lesser thing, the world might need an unladylike punch or two.
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