Learn to love your body

I agree you shouldn't have been negged, people don't seem to realise it isn't meant to be a place where you state your disagreement on a point - that is why this is a forum.

But calling vogue editors 'the people who count' is ludicrous. Why? So that if they happen to see you in the street wearing the clothes they peddled they'll smile to themselves knowing they've influenced another random member of the public? You should look how you want to look for your aims and desires.

Surely it depends on the sort of man you are looking to pull? Looking reasonably healthy and having average looks might be enough to pull a chav, but you will need a bit more than that to pull someone with any ability/talent/status.

I do aspire for things that I find aesthetically pleasing. I dont understand, though, how putting greater store by a group of people who have top degrees, and years of experience in the world of aesthetics, who have given their lives over to this pursuit, and who eat breath sleep and live it every day of their lives can possibly be more ridiculous than caring what potential boyfriends think, or worse what randomers on an internet forum think looks good. Surely it is logical that the former is more important than the latter.

What pisses me off is that you seem to be suggesting the only point of looking good is to attract a mate. And that, my friend, is a comment a lot of women, including me, find deeply offensive.

Surely it depends on the sort of man you are looking to pull? Looking reasonably healthy and having average looks might be enough to pull a chav, but you will need a bit more than that to pull someone with any ability/talent/status.

Does every man with ability and talent (I am not much interested by status unless it is in evidence of the former two) have a girlfriend who is incredibly attractive?

Not really. If a girl has average or good looks, I'll try and find out about her, and that's where the all-important factors of personality and sense of humour come in. Even the most popular guys I know use this approach.

Does that mean you are easy to please though as allymcb2 claimed? If men were easy to please why do women spend so much time trying to improve their looks? They certainly are not doing it just for their own personal self-esteem as allymcb2 is claiming.

No, not every man becasue obviously personality is just as important. I just disagree with you when you say that 'men are easy to please'. Inevitably some men will have higher standards than others and often those men with higher standards are the ones who are the most successsful. I certainly think that the more talented or more ability the man has the higher his standards will be in terms of a potential partner. Looking reasonably healthy is not enough to pull any man with any sort of standards I'm afraid.



Does that mean you are easy to please though as allymcb2 claimed? If men were easy to please why do women spend so much time trying to improve their looks? They certainly are not doing it just for their own personal self-esteem as allymcb2 is claiming.

Thats my whole point. Most women are doing it for their own self esteem and no other reason. We dont just exist to pander to, please and obtain men. If I had a choice between a) being me and going out with Colin Firth or b) being rachel Weisz and being single forever, I would choose the latter.

And I disagree with your comment about increasing standards. Many highly successful men date women who Vogue would not put on their front cover. They have lower standards than vogue.

I find your assumptions about what women want entirely offensive. They do not apply to me, they do not apply to a lot of other women and the fact that people make that assumption is EXTREMELY irritating.

And by the way, in the world we live in, you dont need a man to have a family. We have sperm banks and adoption.

No, you find a correlation between successful men and what men find attractive which is entirely different from the models that we see walking down the catwalk every day. The article was talking about the extent to which the media and the fashion world makes ordinary women who are perfectly capable of attracting successful partners who they are in love with, feel bad.

All I can say is that you are very superficial if you want to look attractive, just for the sake of looking attractive.

You can't have a proper family without a father.

I don't particularly try to look attractive in order to attract guys, I put the effort in so that I feel confident and happy with the way that I look. Sure, it may be superficial, but I'd definitely prefer to go to the gym and eat healthily in order to feel confident than be fat with no confidence, as it would affect my relationships with friends, boyfriends, anyone really.

If a person's father was to die, that wouldn't immediately mean they had no family, however I'm with you in that I wouldn't START a family without a father.

I don't particularly try to look attractive in order to attract guys, I put the effort in so that I feel confident and happy with the way that I look. Sure, it may be superficial, but I'd definitely prefer to go to the gym and eat healthily in order to feel confident than be fat with no confidence, as it would affect my relationships with friends, boyfriends, anyone really.

I believe that you can set up a proper successful family without a father, and I would certainly consider it. Maybe women support and buy into an industry which has an ideal of feminine perfection which is different from most men because they care more about looking how they want to look than how men would prefer them to look. I dont see how that is superficial. I am not saying that beauty is all that matters. But beauty is an achievement in itself it is not just a means to something else.

Surely it depends on the sort of man you are looking to pull? Looking reasonably healthy and having average looks might be enough to pull a chav, but you will need a bit more than that to pull someone with any ability/talent/status.

Sure, maybe seeking the pleasure of looking like a supermodel isn't to everyone's tastes, but since when did we all have to agree on such a personal issue anyway? Freedom of choice is exactly that, that we can choose whether we want to seek [seemingly shallower] pleasures over others, if we so please.

And the article was about 'accepting yourself' ie accepting that you are not perfect and being happy about it. In other words, it is telling everyone who is unhappy with themselves to lower their standards so they can be happy. Personally I have more respect for people that hate themselves. At least they have standards and are able to make judgements about themselves. That is not true of people who just lower their standards to make themself feel better.

But I dont care what the men think. Men are easy to please. I care about what the vogue editors think. They are the people who count.

One of the effects of living in an intensely visual world, in which we see 3,000 ads a week portraying digitally enhanced (and decreased) women, is that our own eyes have become a critical lens. We don’t see ourselves as living, breathing bodies so much as body parts and surfaces that fail compared to the “perfect” body parts presented to us. We are bound not to have those kinds of bodies because no one does. As Claudia Schiffer famously said, “Even I don’t look like Claudia Schiffer.”
Looking good is really important to women today. It always has been, but in the olden days it was the reserve of the wealthy or the glamorous; for the rest of us it only mattered for a short period of our lives.
Now, the idea of beauty has become more democratic. We can all be beautiful, which slides into we should all be beautiful.

I think its awful. 'Stop trying to improve yourself and accept being crap in order to make yourself feel happy'. If I get THAT desperate for happiness I'll go down the heroin route.

I would have said it's only ugly, fat and frumpy peolpe who said this but that would be unfair in this day and age and incorrect when you look at your photo. Mabye you're saying it because you look nice and have no idea how it feels for the less attractive women (a less insulting description apparently) to be surronded by the gorgeous and glamourus(sp?)

You see, I dont believe happiness is more perfect than a six pack. I dont believe success has to be a means to happiness. It can be an end in itself. And yes, so what if you were going to be disappointed? I'd rather be 8 stone 7 and miserable than 8stone 8 and happy.