Does self-image explain who will believe that “looks don’t count”?

It can, but only if the person is well adjusted. But there are also less goodlooking people out there who believe we SHOULD judge a book by it’s cover so they walk around depressed by their looks all the time. And there are goodlooking people who believe we SHOULD judge a book by it’s cover and they think they’re better then everybody else.

I think it’s the not-so-beautiful people that are told looks don’t count from an early age so they don’t get their feelings hurt. They grow up believing it.

The beautiful people grow up being told they are beautiful and they learn how to use that to their advantage. They know that looks really do count.

Looks have far more than just our physical features.
How we look involves how we present ourselves which is very important.
If we dress well and and take some care with our appearance, it will only benefit us.

They say looks don’t matter and that’s correct to an extent but how you present yourself is very important.

I have no clue what prompts a person to believe that looks don’t matter.

I’m sort of interested that some people can grow up with a great self-image being told that looks don’t matter. I was told that, and yet I knew it was a lie forever. It was horrible for me believing I didn’t look good. I decided to make it worse, and grew all kinds of hair and wore tattered old clothes and really dorky glasses. I didn’t make it worse consciously. It’s only after years of perspective that I can see what I was doing.

Still, some people can be told by their parents that looks don’t matter, and they grow up believing it. Maybe they are unaware of the way looks play into their behavior. I have a friend—she’s not bad looking, but neither is she good. She thinks she is gorgeous, and she has the best self-esteem of anyone I know. It blew me away when I first found that out, and I’ve teased her about it since then.

As a person with low self-worth, I tend to think looks really count for a lot. I don’t know what other people with low self-esteem think.

@daloon: I grew up being told I was an ugly child and I believed it because I was teased for my looks all through my school years. My family tried to tell me looks don’t count and to “get smart”, that those with looks will fade and then have little of value left to themselves; I didn’t believe all of that either. Honestly though, when I see attractive people now as an adult, I can admire their physical beauty but I’m also very wary if they show interest in me and then I feel bad about judging them as one dimensional before considering their looks are just another asset they may have in a repertoire. I admit I don’t always catch myself to weigh what makes sense against my basic initial programming.

I’ve learned not to hold beauty against beautiful people. If a woman is really extraordinarily beautiful, I can still get tongue-tied. This last happened a few years ago with a client I had. I have no idea if I said anything sensible to her. All the time I was thinking in my head, ‘don’t stare, don’t stare, don’t stare’. I tend to assume that beautiful people will not be interested in me for my looks, so I don’t have that kind of running start. If they are going to be interested in me, I have to be smart. Often, my insecurity leaves me trying too hard.

Anyway, a lot of the people who apply for the job with me are beautiful, and I have to remind myself not to be prejudiced against them or towards them because of their beauty. But I don’t know. Maybe my judgment gets clouded by it, no matter which way I think about it. I worry, too, about some of my hiring decisions as being biased against men. I’ve only hired one man, vs 7 women. But, hey, my boss was cool with it. Of course, he likes the women, too.

Anyway, you can see that all this crap messes with my head. I try to do things based purely on people experience and qualifications, but if I weren’t in my head, I’d say I was not unbiased.

If I look in a mirror and say that I am ugly, on one hand, I can buy it. On another, though, I can’t. My mother is beautiful, her sisters, my sister, and we all look the same. (To me, out of all the women in the family, I am the ugly one.) So, if I look in the mirror again, remember that when my mom stands right behind me, I look like her, physically, I cannot say I am ugly. But we grew up with mixed messages from the women in our family. My mom being the queen of the mixed messages. Since beauty – they couldn’t deny where their looks came from – wasn’t something that stood out, well, you best be strong in something else. Out of all the women in the family, I am the lone shorty. It wasn’t necessarily a unique factor, it was (possibly) viewed as a weakness – so, there I was – the weak one…I had to be something else. I worked hard in school and participated in sports. I also listened to my dad. (very sane man)

My self-esteem didn’t come from being pretty or even beautiful, and hearing that looks don’t matter. If anything, I was more confused by the fact that I was pretty (or beautiful) and still seemed like I was weak. It was my work in school, sports and listening to my dad counteract the kookiness of the women in the family, that led me down a road to better self-esteem.

I don’t know it is solely being told looks do or do not matter. It’s other influences. It’s what you are taught once you realize that looks can influence how people perceive you.

The whole idea of self-image is bullshit. This is a pop-psychology term that we use as a benchmark to still judge ourselves based upon the opinion of others.

You are the only person inside of your head. You are the only person that has direct access to your emotions. You are, ultimately, the one who has to decide how you feel about yourself.

We let ourselves get caught up in all of these petty, day-to-day judgements because it’s much easier than being honest with ourselves. Worrying about how you are perceived by others is a losing battle. You only have control over how you perceive yourself.

Once again this is one of those “Simple Truths” that is so hard to implement. Once you let go and embrace the idea that nobody but you controls your mind and body you’ll wonder how you ever lived any other way.

“Beautiful” and “Ugly” are such subjective concepts that they should be considered as fictitious as unicorns and “a living wage”.

@Blondesjon – You are so smart. You really are. You remind me a lot, with what you just said, of my father. The sense that I have, is because he put me on that path and gave me the tools to find it. He didn’t give it to me. I had to find it. Sometimes, this is why I think psychology, group therapy and all of that crap should be banned.

I once asked a question similar to this about how beautiful people get better treatment than the less than so people. Personal story follows. My wife is very plain looking, short, a little heavy, and a host of other things that would detract from the beautiful people’s book of ‘hottie’ details. She sometimes has self-image issues. It is up to me to help her see that you can’t put blush and eyeliner on real beauty.

Blondesjon hits it right on the head. My wife might not be the next fashion model on some glossy paged magazine, but you should see how she interacts with the DD individuals she works with. There are literally dozens of people in that category that truly love her, and they come and find her to help them out when no one else can do it. She has a heart as big as the sun and she TRULY cares for them, and they know it. They are people, and people (disabled or not) know when you are fake. She isn’t fake, and she has more compassion for the ‘special people’ she works with than probably anyone else in the agency where she has been employed these last 20 years. She never ceases top amaze me with her love and empathy for those people that most others would shun. I wouldn’t trade her for fifty ‘hotties’.

Real beauty is internal. Outer features aren’t important. Too many men I know focus on the outer covering of a woman, and the truth is, it’s a person’s ‘soul’ that counts. I use the word soul not because I believe in the existence of a soul, but because it is the only word I can think of to describe that part of a person.

Self image is important, but only if the real you shines from the inside, and you aren’t just all packaging with no qualities worthy of admiration on the inside.

I don’t know if it exists or not generally, I can only speak for myself, but if the relationship does exist, I would be the exception to the rule.

I can freely admit that I’m a huge narcissist. I perceive myself to be gorgeous. When I see playboy models, I pretty much think, “She’s really hot, but I could be in there if I wanted to”.

And I don’t believe in judging a book by its cover or treating people differently because of how they look.

I had a friend, not that long ago, who said she didn’t want to bring a mutual friend somewhere with us because she thought said friend was “ugly”, and I called her out and said that if she wasn’t invited I was going either.

@VzzBzz
“Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.”