What it takes to be hot
The hottest woman I ever knew had thick ankles. Not ugly you understand. It was more that if you stood back and coolly assessed Stephanie, you'd notice that, proportionally speaking, her ankles were a bit thickish on her long, slim legs. The only reason I ever noticed was because she told me. I didn't believe her at first but once it had been pointed out to me the truth was inescapable.
It wasn't a problem for, well anybody. By general agreement Stephanie was the hottest girl in my year at my university. The really important thing, though, is that it wasn't a problem for her. It didn't stop her. She, like any woman, had strengths and weaknesses and she'd decided to use her strengths and minimize her weaknesses and she did that very well. That's the thing about hot girls. They really, really want to be hot. It would be easier to hate them or minimize them if it was just a gift, a fluke of genetics and age. You see girls that does happen to and they get a year or so but Stephanie wasn't naturally hot. In high school she'd been this gawky, awkward teenager (and still was in our first year). She got to be hot because she'd made herself hot by the time she was in her early twenties and she still was hot the last time I saw her, when she was in her late 40s.
Most women don't want to be hot that much. They want to be valued. They want others to look at them and think the best. They want others, especially men others, to look for what is good and find it. And that is an understandable emotion in both women and men. It's not just that we want to be loved, although we certainly want that, we also want to be appreciated, even by people who don't particularly care about us. And that is where we can get a little crazy.
We can all learn a lot from hot women. Women like Stephanie don't get to be that way by fluke. Stephanie got to be hot the same way good athletes get to be good athletes—she kept working at it. When most of us wouldn't have bothered, Stephanie was in the gym. She looked at her body and evaluated it in a really objective way the rest of us would never dare do. And her workouts, her clothing were designed to make her hot. She didn't spend more money on clothing than most other women in our circle but she did spend a lot more attention.
I remember her telling me about it once when we'd gotten past all the awkward stuff. She told me that the thing that really had been a barrier for her was her posture and the way she moved. 'Good posture is like losing five pounds and gaining a cup size,' she said. And she somewhere along the line she realized she looked awkward in high school because she was awkward. As she'd gotten into better shape she'd actually gained weight. She'd moved up to 145 pounds, which was a perfectly reasonable weight for a twenty-two year old woman who was five feet, ten inches tall. Everyone who tried to guess her weight pegged her at twenty pounds less than that and other women were sometimes quite shocked to find out how much she weighed but Stephanie remembered full well how she'd looked when she'd weighed a hundred and twenty-five and didn't have the muscle mass to stand and move gracefully.
At this point the temptation is to say, 'There are more important things in life.' Which is another way of saying, those grapes are probably sour. But I have even worse news for you. Stephanie is good at those other things too. She has a successful career and a successful marriage. Last I heard, her kids are growing up well too. We were friends for fifteen years until she moved to Vancouver and she was everything you'd want in a friend.
Hotness for Stephanie was never about what other people thought or about what she hoped/wanted other people to think. She didn't do it because she wanted to be loved. She, like a significant minority of women, believed that this was a big part of being a woman and she mastered that aspect the same way she learned how to drive a car, hold down a job or pay the bills because knowing how to do those things well is something every adult is supposed to be able to do.
You could see this in the way men responded to her. We couldn't stop telling her she was hot but, after being her friend for a few years, I quickly realized that this made zero impression on her because she already knew she was hot. It was a simple objective fact. Telling her once was a nice compliment; it was to say something nice about her and she appreciated that. Telling her over and over again was all about us. Telling her over and over again was to reveal something weak and pathetic about ourselves. It was to demand some sort of response from her.
Hotness was something she'd achieved and that pretty much any woman (or man) can achieve if they really want to just as anyone can be good at their job if they really want to be.
Now, the perfectly reasonable question from any woman at this point is, 'Why should I want to?' And the perfectly reasonable answer is, 'No reason at all. No one is making anyone do anything.'
And you're satisfied with that aren't you? You don't feel some nagging need for more justification do you? Because asking the question over and over again is a lot like guys telling Stephanie she is hot over and over again.
Because, if we are being honest here, the question is not whether hotness matters. Of course it matters and we all know it does. When we ask ourselves that we're really already on to the next question; which is, 'Does it matter that much?' That's a perfectly reasonable question but it is also perfectly reasonable to ask ourselves why we are asking it of someone else. Why are we demanding a response of them?
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