Ted Danson-envy

Is it anti-feminist to care about male appearance? Remove the "anti-" and I'm convinced, but as is?

Rachel Hills linked to a story by Cristen Conger in Bitch Magazine, introducing a series they're doing about the nefarious influence of beauty standards on men. Not as in, those poor men, who look at that billboard with Lara Stone in Calvin Klein underwear, and then have to go home to women of less Barbie-esque proportions, but as in, Ryan Reynolds exists, which is totally unfair to men who don't look like Ryan Reynolds, even though of course plenty of men who don't look anything like Ryan Reynolds get to be successful actors, but still, major unfairness here!

This strikes me as wrong in so many ways. But first, the hint of not-wrong. Undoubtedly men who are George Constanza-esque often feel self-conscious about their looks, and envious of the Ted Dansons of the world. And there is some similarity - some! - between height for men and weight for women.

But now, the very-wrong: women unquestionably have it worse than men when it comes to being judged on the basis of physical appearance. So this bit - "Just as Western female beauty ideals are modeled around straight, white women, Western male beauty standards worship at the altar of the straight, white, six-pack ab-toting man. And both are equally problematic." - makes no sense. Nothing to do with male looks in our society is "equally problematic" to the equivalent thing having to do with female looks. If this is the premise, then... not convinced.

There's a great deal of confusion in the piece between masculinity standards, which are real, and a real issue for men who are "queer, trans, non-white, short, sensitive, curious," and beauty standards. (Of that list, only "short" is a "beauty" factor more than any other kind.) If anything, a man who is too handsome (unless in a Jon Hamm sense) is looked at as being not quite masculine enough. Men who fail to be "beautiful" are not penalized for that in our society, while men who meet that standard are often assumed to be somewhat ridiculous, obviously not serious grown men who get that beauty is what they should seek in a partner, not cultivate in themselves. A pretty man is - leaving aside homophobic clichés - a gigolo, a toy-boy. The best way for a man to look, in our society, is nondescript. And most men - like most women - do.

Oh, and this is the clincher: age. Do we really think the cult of beauty-as-youth is equally harsh on men and women? Shouldn't this alone remind us that we do not need an equal tiny-violin concerto for male beauty standards as for female?

But then - and WWPD readers knew this was coming - there's the fact that it's actually feminist for (straight and bi) women to care more about men's looks, or, more accurately, to be less evasive and shy about the fact that we care. Not to the exclusion of other factors, and not in such a way that Ryan Reynolds is every woman's ideal (and he's not), but in that way that all of us with the capacity for vision use that sense in determining who might and who might not be a possible more-than-friend. This isn't about bringing men down to women's level, making them suffer for beauty, stuffing them into Spanx and Louboutins. It's about the fact that one of life's great joys is romantic involvement (and that includes just sitting across from someone at the dinner table) with someone one finds physically attractive. Men in our society consider themselves entitled to this, perhaps more than they ought to. Women, not enough.