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What you look like matters. Big time. Being beautiful will earn you power, respect, jealousy, adoration, and maybe even fame and fortune. Beautiful women have their choice of mates and friends. Being ugly earns you contempt, disgust, and ridicule. Here's a fun exercise: ask a few people to name 25 women that are famous for being hot. Now ask them to name 25 women that are famous for anything except being hot. See how people do.
Is it fair that beauty equals power? No. Is it the way things "should" be? No. Does beauty have any inherent worth? No. But beauty matters - that's just the way it is. Even infants prefer attractive people.
So there are three ways to deal with it:
1. Pretend that looks don't matter - live in your own little world (as recommended by many commenters here) where you don't care what you look like. Everyone else will still care. Your co-workers will make fun of you behind your back, your children will be embarassed, and your lover will insist on keeping the lights off in bed. But as long as you're blissfully ignorant, it's all good.
2. Play the game - Do what you can to live up to society's ideal of beauty. It's in your own self-interest. Besides, you can't stop the beauty machine anyway, so resistance is futile. People have been bitching about it for decades and yet it's only grown worse. If you achieve a certain standard of beauty, you'll be rewarded. Beautiful people have more power than those that don't - period. But you might feel guilty, like Ayelet, about helping to perpetuate the system.
3. Take down the system - Write articles about how oppressive beauty standards are. Send angry letters to beauty companies, and to magazines that push these images on young children. Enlighten others about how shallow, wasteful, and destructive the quest for beauty is. Your efforts will have absolutely no effect, but your conscience will be clear.
Come on people, Ayelet was just writing about her struggle to choose between the three options. None of them are good, so give her a break. While many of you righteous folks choose to just ignore the role of beauty in our culture, most of us are too engaged with our culture to genuinely make that choice.
