The girls who called me ugly did me a favor
Unending status competition forecloses a life of the mind
In elementary school, I had a wart on my face. I’m not sure when my mother finally had a doctor freeze it off, but it was an excruciatingly long time to feel ugly like a troll. I suspect but can’t confirm that she left it there so boys wouldn’t be attracted to me, because she was fucking terrified I would become a teenage mother. I don’t know why she wasn’t more worried about drugs. It always struck me as irrational to keep me under such strict control and not trust that I might judge appropriately to not become a teenage mother.
You may have noticed that my writing is highly concerned with female intrasexual competition. This might seem like a concern with feminism, but that ideology is orthogonal to the analytical object. Feminism is merely a cover for the behavior, thereby prohibiting discussion of the phenomenon altogether. People really have trouble believing that women compete at all, which is why the conflict is carried out like guerrilla warfare — it’s always deniable.
The topic and the fact of my writing at all are related, and I hadn’t realized that this essay was underneath them all.
I couldn’t be included or otherwise considered attractive in the world, because beauty is classed, and as I have written about at length, that was never available.
The strangest realization of all has been that men are more objective evaluators of beauty because their motivations are, in a sense, more honorable than those of women. This is because women compete with one another for status and attention, and male attention is a status currency. I argued this in a series on the male gaze:
The gaze is currency among women, both in person and online, but especially online
Women also bolster their status based on the status of who gives them attention, which is why accusations of malevolence accompany the event of a man evaluating a woman visually
The gaze is a reason given to police other women, basically calling them a pick-me.
Being the object of female sabotage throughout my life has made me highly sensitive to its operation, and the attribute of plausible deniability may even be at the root of my depression. When reality doesn’t align with people’s stated behaviors, or when they get away with being horrible, a foundational moral wound is reopened.
My mother got away with abuse, my grandmother with lifelong sexist treatment of the girls in the family, the girls who mocked me but pretended to be friends, and the women who destroyed my standing at multiple workplaces.
All of these have the same underlying cause — status competition among women.
This tendency is shown by how girls are more likely to gang up and socially punish girls who are more attractive or who display competence. This has a dual purpose: getting the girl to dampen her intellect to fly under the radar and to erode her self-esteem.
