You don't have to look pretty
stephanie_pegg gave me this link, and now I'm all thoughtful;-)
I would totally agree with what the post says. You definitely don't have to look pretty, and you do not owe your prettyness to anyone. If you feel happy and nice in your unfitting clothes and being overweight according to modern standards, if you are not bothered by not looking pretty and attractive, if you don't wanna change it because you prefer to stay as is - that's your right, right?
Now comes the "but" thing.
First of all, there are situations when you do have to look in a certain way. Like, when you go to a job interview. I assume not all people know it, as some recruiters make a note "please come in business attire".
The whole thing of business attire is a tricky one. I live in Central Auckland and so I often see people with business look. They do look good and impressive. Now, I wonder: sometimes I see people in the streets who wear very nice and well-fitting business suits, and appropriate hairstyle - but sport shoes. Do they come to work like that because it's more convenient, and there they change the sport shoes to business shoes, since they spend time in the office and so don't have to walk around much, and can endure the business shoes even if don't find them very comfortable? I always prefer to think this. Because a person in business suit and sport shoes looks ridiculous. When I see that, I can hardly restrain myself from laughing, and so I always tell myself they travel to their office like that and change to business shoes there. I very much would like to think that, so I do. No matter how tolerant I am, I can't imagine a business person wearing business suit with sport shoes. Because it looks stupid and demonstrates total lack of taste and knowledge. So I prefer to see good sides in people and assume that the bad side is not there.
(Note: if any of you, by chance, does wear business suit with sport shoes, please take this post not as offence but as advice).
Now about the actual prettyness. I've done my Master thesis on this, and I've studied a great deal of researchs on this topic. No matter how much we want people to be objective, they often look at how pretty we are and make their conclusions about us basing on this. Yes, talking to the person may totally change their first impression, but it doesn't always come as far as talk, not even mentioning that if you wanna present a beautiful soul instead of beautiful appearance, your soul should be beautiful;-))) People often complain about their appearance, sometimes they complain about their intellect, but, as one of my smart lecturers said, "nobody would ever say "what a bad personality I have!"". It's very difficult to be objective with that, and even though people can actually say something like that, they would probably not think it.
So, as the studies demonstrate, basing on appearance poeple think that pretty ones are more kind, more smart (not necessarily work for women), more sociable, more sexually hot, more caring, more... Lotsa things. And yes, I'm still crazy about loosing weight, and not the last reason for it is that overweight people are seen as lazy and lacking willpower. Not a good impression for an employer, e.g.
Yes, it is said a lot about how those first impressions are wrong. However, I'm not gonna talk about how unfair people are in this matter. What I wanna say is that you can be seen differently depending on what you look like, and you just have to be aware of it.
A similar subject: women in provoking outfit. A friend of mine was once complaining that her distant relative who came to Moscow to visit them kept talking about how lecherous Moscow men are. They kept making her indecent offers all the time. "And she's wearing very short skirt with an extremely low neckline, and net-patterned tights, and high heels, and a bright lipstick - all this during the day!" My friend was very pissed off with that relative, and I wasn't yet smart enough that time, so I asked: "So, what to do to avoid this?" "To not look like a slut!" my friend said angrily. In fact, she's quite right.
Obviously we are not talking here about situations when men try to justify the rapes they commit by saying the women were dressed provocatively, so don't mention this, it's not about that. It's about the fact that when woman wears provocative clothes she should expect an appropriate reaction from men. If she wears stuff like described above and then gets indecent offers and start complaining about "lecherous men", I would think it's either of three cases: 1) she's an idiot and really does not understand. Not sure if it's curable. 2) she's lying, she's doing it all intentionally, maybe even for the sake of demonstration of how attractive she is ("five men told me just today they want to fuck me!"). 3) she does not understand because she's a little girl. Doesn't matter how physically old she is, but if she has a mind of little girl she would be truly surprised with getting such a reaction. This should be curable with explanation. Maybe she just never had an adult woman around to explain her things like that, but she's definitely not hopeless.
Btw, even though wearing long skirt, all-covering blouse and no makeup may still not help to avoid the harrassement, in most of cases it does;-)
This is total imho, as I see it. However, it's based on real life events.
So, what this is all about: you totally do not have to look pretty, you do not owe a certain look to anyone, and you have a right to look however you want.
You just have to be aware of appropriate reactions that might come in reply to your look. Yes, life is unfair, but you can't change it. It doesn't mean you have to change yourself. However, you need to know the ways of this life. If you don't know them - you can learn them, and usually you can find someone to help you.
However, if you don't want to learn - it makes no sense to ask for advice, you won't listen to it anyway. So, to finish, one more story.
A friend has asked me to help her buy a business outfit as she needed it for work but didn't know the style. We went to a big shopping centre and eventually found a suit that she liked and that wasn't too expensive. She tried size 12 and size 14. I told her 14 looks perfect on her. She said "No, I like it more how I look in 12". "It's too tight", said me. "Exactly! That's what I like!" "Business outfit must not fit tightly" said me. "It's ok", she said, "thank you very much for helping me, I'm taking size 12". Dear gods, that looked on her as if it's gonna tear any moment, and it made impression she was fitting it before and then gained weight and still trying to wear her old costume. I was very terrified.