...she's made a lot of nice career hay out of disguising her envy of other successful women as concern. Has she _ever_ had anything positive to say about her peers--or is she stupidly convinced that by savaging them, that makes her look more feminine and appealing to the macho lunkheads she thinks are "real" men?

...it's a beautiful thing. :) Gotta agree with ditmas--you've been not only more privileged than most women, but you mentally take out your insecurities on them?!?! Some _nerve_. And it's not the loss of beauty you are feeling--you are realizing 1) you have invested far too much of your life in your looks, 2) you're deathly afraid that you really don't have any substance in there. In short, LW, unless you start enjoying life for other things besides beauty and drawing your sense of self from your accomplishments/interests, you are going to become increasingly bitter and unpleasant the older you get. That is what ages people and makes them truly ugly.

>All my 40+ male friends and I agree that, whatever else, Maureen Dowd is smoking hot. Smoking.<

Well, for the love of God, will one of you all _please_ date/marry her already so she can stop tearing other women down because she can't find a "suitably" manly-man to treat her like the good little submissive Irish-Catholic wifey she longs to be? Come on, guys. For the sake of humanity...and opening up the NYC editorial page to a truly intelligent female writer...:).

>Maureen, dear, what's the common denominator in all those failed relationships? That's right, honey. It's you.<

That...and her inexplicable taste for men who simply can't deal with smart women. Aaron Sorkin? John Tierney?! Michael Douglas!?!? Man, how desperate do you have to be to want to put up with their mess--and become wifey to any one of them? Yeesh...

>If you've got this much schadenfreude concerning this letter then you're obviously as neurotically obsessed by looks as you claim the LW is.<

Nah. We just can't stand women who automatically take out their self-hatred and fear of aging on other women. It's the same kind of shit non-pretty women get from grade school on up. One gets _really_ tired of getting grief from someone else's sickness--especially from women who should be enjoying their beauty, not tormenting others because the latter lack it.

>She confesses some of her closely-held, completely human-sounding neuroses in a letter and gets branded a "mean girl" who deserves to wither into frog-like dotage -- by someone who has never met her.<

Girlfriend is losing her looks and her first impulse is to constantly dis other women's beauty choices?!?! Sorry, That's not the thoughts of a basically nice--or particularly un-self-centered--person. And she will certainly deserve to wither if she doesn't develop more interests than her looks--and stop mentally taking her craziness out on women who have done nothing to her.

>Sounds to me like she's working through to a deeper understanding of her life.<

She needs to keep on a-digging. To say the least...

>Think of how awful Melanie Griffith looks now.<

Ain't it the truth. Honestly, whenever I see actresses who've gone in for plastic surgery, I don't admire their "beauty." I wonder how much more interesting and vivid their faces would have been if they had just gone with the flow.

>In our culture we are not given permission to feel good about the way we look. This is especially true for women, and even the most beautiful women are afflicted by this (and at any age). They will always find a flaw or two and magnify the significance. So we have to live by our own rules, because the rules we are told to live by are a recipe for misery.<

Yup. As well, the goalposts for beauty are always changing. Even if a woman wanted to live by the rules or could do so, she'd spend her life perpetually worried and insecure because no matter what she did, it would never be enough. It's like dealing with boyfriends who constantly suggest ways to "improve" your looks--no matter how much you give in to them, they are never, ever satisfied. There is always some "flaw" you could fix. That sickness is _their_ problem, just as society's insistence that women constantly work to be "worthy" of attention or love is its problem. One is a lot happier once one learns to ignore that crap and live as one wants to. And, as I've said before, do women really want to spend their lives trying to please unpleasable people? Are these people worth a second of your time?

Yo, man, your first post in this thread was quite insightful and good. Kudos. And it sounds like you would be happier pursuing older women--much less drama and high-maintenance and all. (Though you _really_ have to drop the "women rule everything and men are just their worms" attitude. It isn't true and never has been.)

>Sounds like you still haven't gotten over it. It's not LW's fault you weren't born with looks. It's not her fault that she was born with looks.<

But it _is_ her fault she takes out her insecurities on other women. What exactly is beautiful or kind or mature or productive about doing that? What good does that do for her or anyone else? I have no beef with LW's looks. But it shows a real lack of character to by default take your insecurities out on women who have done _nothing_ to you except "offend" your eye. And it is a major character flaw she needs to address (along with her loss of beauty issues) if she's ever going to come to terms with aging.