Have you ever met a drop-dead, gorgeous, this-person’s-face-could-launch-a-thousand-ships woman? Then you may dig this article I read on The Gloss called “Do You Ever Hate Women Because They’re Beautiful?” Jennifer Wright sees a Victoria’s Secret model coming out of her apartment building (she either lives there or has a friend/partner there) and of course the doorman and men in the lobby are falling over themselves. “And my first thought,” Wright writes, “was ‘f**k you, bitch, I hate you.’”
OK, it’s not the most sensitive — or rational — of responses. (Wright acknowledges it’s “a stupid, pre-feminist cliche to hate someone because they’re prettier than you are.”) Jealousy makes us feel this way, of course. But I think those of us who have “I hate you” moments also make a lot of assumptions about beautiful women.
I checked with my fellow Frisky bloggers and here’s some of the assumptions we’ll cop to having made about the Giseles, Angelinas, and Tyras of the world:
- She’s dumb.
- Anything she’s accomplished, it was because she’s pretty.
- She’s confident.
- She can have any guy she wants!
- She’s straight.
- She barely eats to maintain her perfect figure.
- She’s never had her heart broken.
- She’s never lonely.
- She’s boring and has nothing interesting to say.
- She looks just like that when she wakes up in the morning.
- She always flies first class.
- That guy is only with her because she’s hot, not because she could be a really nice person or hilariously funny.
- She thinks she’s beautiful
Of course, that Victoria’s Secret model in Wright’s building could have a chronic disease, or a parent who is dying, or a painful love life. We simply don’t know: we just assume her life is perfect because she has the type of body society tells us we’re supposed to want.
Most of us will never bump into a Vicky’s model while checking our mail, but many of us will still have those “I hate you” moments in our own lives. In the spirit of the sisterhood — a quaint notion, that! — let’s all try to remember no one‘s life is perfect, not even Veronika in the lace teddy.
Original by Jessica Wakeman