Women Like Me: A Study in Double Standards

There’s a song by Fifty Cent called “21 Questions,” in which he asks, “Girl, it’s easy to love me now, but could you love me if I was down and out?” I have always wanted to write a response to that song that goes something like, “Boy, it’s easy to love me now, but could you love me if I gained twenty pounds?” Even more aggravating, there was a video posted on social media a while ago in which a plain-looking guy approaches an extremely attractive woman, and she is not interested until she sees that he has a fancy car. The implication, of course, is that she is shallow because she is only interested in him for his money, but somehow he escapes the taint of shallowness even though he is clearly interested in her only because she is so hot. When a woman brings this discrepancy up to the men who engage in it (unlike, say, Travalon, who is not shallow at all), they have no idea what you are talking about because of course they are only interested in good-looking women, that’s normal. But if a woman scorns a man for his plain looks and/or lack of funds, then she is hopelessly shallow. Two real-life examples:

I have a very beautiful friend who is happily married now, but in her single days she was always being approached by men and having to turn them down. Rich felt she was being unfair by not giving these men a chance, and I had to point out that these men never gave us less glamorous women a chance, but they were scorning us by omission, not commission, so he didn’t notice. To his credit, Rich took what I said under consideration and had a talk with his housemates (that bore no fruit, as far as I can tell) about how physical attraction isn’t the only or most important thing to consider in a woman.

The second example was when Tiffy said a male coworker of hers was bemoaning how easy women have it, they just have men falling all over them, but he couldn’t get any female interest. When Tiffy told him it wasn’t like that for her at all, she didn’t have men falling all over her, he just kind of looked at her in confusion and then said something like, “I didn’t mean women like you.” When she told me this story, I replied that his confusion was caused by the fact that, to him, unattractive women simply don’t exist – we are invisible. I have learned to live with this invisibility, and in fact have used it to great advantage – nobody notices a plain, middle-aged white woman – but that is a post for another day. Suffice it to say I have had plenty of men back in the day complain about how no women paid attention to them, when I was right there paying attention to them. Because, of course, by “women” they didn’t mean women like me.

Famous Hat