Are you hot? I don't care.

[flamingsword]

A few months ago I resolved to take human attractiveness out of the things I notice or think about. I want to not judge people based on how many spoons and dollars they have to spend to fit into a classist, racist ideal. And the cool thing about my brain is that I can do that.

I can starve pathways of reinforcement until they fail to dominate my narratives. I can let them atrophy until I forget what doing that and feeling that were like. Yay for autism and trauma as superpowers!

I don't feel like I receive any value from feeling attraction to people; I don't feel like it's something I need to know about myself or other people; it's not useful information. It's an old heuristic from childhood that gets in the way of seeing people more than it tells me about them. So I'm just gonna dumpster it. See how that goes and reevaluate in another six months or so.

If you think I am making a terrible mistake, feel free to tell me in comments.

Comments

[bestmiaou]

that does make sense, as long as you can cleanly separate physical attractiveness from the nonphysical aspects. personally, i don't think that i could. the people i am physically attracted to tracks the people who i have the closest connection to, which seems like it would mitigate the negative aspects of attraction you mention.

[flamingsword]

I'm thinking of this as step one in a process of decommodifying attraction and social pressures toward same. I want to have my hair a way that is easy to take care of and forget about, and for me that defaults to long enough to ponytail. It keeps my head warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but it also causes people to think I am complying with femininity and start using more pressure to get me to conform. The less you comply, the more people give up on doing that.

But my head gets cold. Boo.

I dont want other people's expectations to even register for me, and a piece of that is my estimation of my own attractiveness. I will still know how to perform professionalism and makeup if I deem it necessary for whatever reason, but I hate the feeling of the weight of others expectations, and the best way for me to deal with that is to invalidate the basis of their expectations.

[bestmiaou]

what do you mean by "decommodifying"? i am not getting are reasonable meaning of your post using my current definitions.

I can definitely understand wanting to be able to do stuff without worrying about how it looks to others.

[flamingsword]

People use attention as a reward. We inherently look at and regard people less who don't conform to our standards of attractiveness as a sort of carrot/stick economic transaction. Attractiveness is a commodity - and I do it, too. But it's sick and inherently wrong and flawed to disregard others humanity based on that. It's not part of the respect culture that I'm trying to build inside my head.

Also it is an open avenue for manipulation that I would rather not be distracted by.

[bestmiaou]

i agree that it is harmful when attractive people's looks are commodities, and we should work to carve out spaces where we aren't commodifying basic human interaction. i don't think that it is inherent for us to do so. commodities are a feature of some (but not all) economic systems, and even where they do exist, there is not always the drive to commodify all of the things.

the part of this line of thinking that really worries me is the moralization of basic human social behaviors. humans are going to be attracted to other humans, and short of a morally questionable mass reeducation campaign or evolutionarily significant events that isn't going to change. labeling a huge swath of human behavior as "sick and inherently wrong" is not particularly productive.

[flamingsword]

Being attracted to other people is not the bad/wrong part of that, it's that we *reward/punish people* based on that unfair system.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's your perspective, do what you want with it. If noticing attractiveness is more of a nuisance than an asset, by all means bin it for a while and see how that works for you. Yes, it's a thing some people can do. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't or it's wrong.

[starlitshore]

I don't think it's a terrible mistake. I mean, many things in the world are beautiful in their own special ways but I think you can still appreciate that, whether for an aesthetic reason or not, after removing attraction as a value.

[ilzolende]

If you want to see a lot of arguments on this general subject, read Liking What You See by Ted Chiang.

For me finding people unpleasant-to-look-at and finding people physically attractive don't seem particularly coupled together, and so getting rid of my sense of attraction wouldn't make me more comfortable around people who don't have reliable access to soap.

I've found that cultivating more aesthetic appreciation for humans has been pleasant for me, and I'm rather selfish. I can gloss it as acknowledging and accepting my attraction to women or something, but I'd be doing the same thing if I were straight probably. I also think that reducing one's cognitive abilities and perceptiveness is generally a bad idea, though just paying less attention to things is obviously different.

I think this is probably the kind of thing you can back out of if you decide you don't like it or want it, so I'm not going to say you definitely shouldn't do this. But I will say that the contents of your thoughts should be for you, and you shouldn't feel obliged to stop having entire categories of feelings just because they might give you more positive affect towards privileged people.

[flamingsword]

I'm constitutionally incapable of not taking in the information that this person does stuff to their face and hair and clothes, but what I do with that information and how it is interpreted are up to me. My personal attraction to physical markers of health, wealth, and luck is not external information, and not how I would like to experience attraction.

And if I am attracted to those markers I *will* pay more attention to those people. I can't fix that one, and I have tried.