(Read Part 1 here.)

Now, years later, I’m toting up the time investment now and marveling at it, but back then I didn’t mind it at all. It’s good to have a project, it’s good to be achieving your goals, and all of it made me feel good about myself. I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with that in itself. The problem, I think, is that it made up such a large proportion of my self-worth. I didn’t have much else to balance it out with, really: I had dropped out of high school and then college, and only had a GED. This didn’t particularly bother me at the time — and I still believe that degrees do not the person make — but it also meant I couldn’t point to education as a source of self-worth. I always read and wrote, but I wasn’t publishing much in my early 20s, despite a rash of continual publication in my mid-late teens. I hadn’t traveled much; in fact, I hadn’t been outside the state in about five years. So not much breadth of experience to point to, other than my adventures in the southern queer underground. I was just starting therapy then, and so hadn’t yet worked through much in the way of my issues. So not really a lot of self-knowledge, either. Everyone always agreed that I was smart and sometimes funny. But when I turned 20 and started a progression from presenting as baby-butch to fully femme, my place and valuation in the world shifted to the point that I still, to this day, present as femme*. And so I pursued the pretty. It brought me a lot, but it also caused a lot of problems. Bridget at My Beautiful Wickedness touched on them a couple of days ago in an insightful post on raising a girl:

In our society, the general perception is that you can either be smart or pretty — to be both, and to be nice on top of it, is some sign of greediness or something. I (who was both smart and somewhat pretty) copped out and eventually gave up on being pretty in favor of being smart. (Smart endures, but American fantasies of pretty take too much work to maintain and one eventually ages out on hottie-ness.)

Being smart and pretty and reasonably nice is indeed a difficult thing to deal with socially. Even as I’m writing this, I’m imagining a fair number of readers saying that laying claim to all of those things at once in public is pure arrogance and selfishness. The other half will say that at least one and maybe all of them were never true. (I actually think the second response is fairer, given that all those things really are in the eye of the beholder. Also, I’ll readily admit that pretty is generally my limit. I am not necessarily capable of achieving beautiful or stunning within in the usual cultural parameters.) Because of all this, there’s a peculiar elimination that occurs in daily social practice: at best, one of those attributes will simply be ignored. Which one becomes ignored depends on what an individual audience can deal with. This resulted in a common refrain in my dating life: someone would ask me out based on my attractiveness and break up with the explanation that I was too smart. It was more often than not smart people who were telling me this, and it happened more times than I can easily count. It also caused problems in the mostly-female office I worked in, with the end result that I let myself slip into not caring about being nice so much. Strangely, that worked better, since we already have an archetype of the smart and pretty but not very nice woman. Everyone knows what to call that and how to work with it.

So that’s where things stood for awhile. And then I went back to school. And I liked it. And I couldn’t quit the job because it offered full tuition reimbursement, so I did both. And the more I liked school the more I piled on the coursework. And even more time reading and writing left less than 72 hours a month (give or take) for devotion to prettiness. I kept up all my rituals full-steam for quite awhile, but eventually I had my hair cut a little less often, and then I went back to doing my own manicures on my real nails, and then I didn’t do double abs on the weekends because I would rather have the time to read more, and then I decided that I’d rather spend my money on books than on clothes. Eating on the run while driving to school added a few pounds and when my nice clothes no longer fit I started wearing khakis and a UPS polo shirt most work days. (By that time, I also planned to quit the job when I finished the degrees, and thusly I was damned if I was going to spend thousands of dollars on more suits I didn’t want to wear.)

By the time I finished up my two bachelors degrees in 2002, my priorities had shifted. There was still a fair amount of pretty left when I started grad school, though. The Queer Theory seminar that semester was perhaps the prettiest I’ve ever sat in: a stunning and brilliant Greek and a beautiful and quirky pagan, both more beautiful in a way I could never hope to match, Mister Husband, and me. I was probably the least pretty in the room, but I didn’t feel unpretty or that I couldn’t hold my own. And I wasn’t the smartest or most well-read, either, since both Mister Husband and the Greek ran circles around me. It was an arena in which the pretty was always faintly present, since classrooms do in fact hold bodies and we were talking very frankly about queer sex and various theories of the body, but what counted more was our brains. I read more faster and further in that course than I ever had before. And I came out the other side of the course having garnered respect largely because of my wit and intelligence.

I want to say purely because of it, but probably not, now that I think about it. By the time the semester ended, I was dating one of the other seminarians (whom I eventually married, yes), and been the recipient of an undiscussed crush from another participant (who was also very cute). I had declined several propositions from various graduate students in the Astronomy Department, where I was assistant-teaching, as well as invitations from the secretary. (I eventually quit going into that office except to meet with my supervisor or drop off paperwork.) In the spring, I ended up declining another couple of offers within my own department. It’s odd that I had forgotten all of this, because at the time, after having been subjected to a no-dating-within-the-company corporate policy when I spent every spare moment at work, it was all tremendously validating. Not to mention a huge surprise.

(Jeez. If those last couple of paragraphs don’t demonstrate how confused I still am about all this, I don’t know what could.)

So yes, the pretty still mattered. But, increasingly, so did being smart, and since I was now working solely within the Academy, smart counted so much more than it had in my corporate life. You can be average looking or even ugly at the university, and as long as you are hella smart and also nice you’ll likely do well enough within that social context**. One quality is also generally taken more seriously than the other. When my social landscape changed, I inevitably changed along with it. The fact that I was in my mid-twenties also had something to do with this shift, I suppose. At that age it begins to occur to you that while many, many years of pretty might indeed lie ahead, it will require more and more running in place for less payoff. The culture will always categorize you, and eventually you’ll “look good for your age” at best. As Bridget said, you just age out of the subjectivity of hottie-ness. You can do it gracefully, but it’s still inevitable.

*It’s not that simple, really. Part of the reason is also that my inherent curviness simply doesn’t bend effectively to a more queered presentation. While I’m most comfortable with very short hair and masculine suits, it results in a very awkward look. I have a femme body and a femme face, I’m not interested in surgically altering any of it, and that’s that.

**Not always, and that’s part of the next post. Lots has already been said on this subject, as some sectors of my audience are all too aware of.