Good Things Are Good

The privilege checkers are never going to be fully defeated

Skye Sclera wrote a post that references at least one of mine. I’ve got thoughts!

Skye shares my surface-level read here. She fully acknowledges that beauty usually helps and that beauty combined with poor social skills is generally a worse situation than beauty without them. The mechanisms she notes are plausible too, and shared with my own: beauty shrinks your margin for error, so if you’re the kind of person who makes a lot of errors, being beautiful will be a much more mixed bag for you than it might otherwise be. People will absolutely project onto you if you are beautiful, and not always in flattering ways. The key point I most disagree with is here: “To this day, I’m inclined to believe that Helen would never have ended up where she did — floridly mentally unwell, using heroin, doing time, regularly kissing death full on the mouth — if she looked like an average human woman, or even a normatively attractive one.”