Thread by @visakanv

noticed something interesting, obvious-in-retrospect via comments on tiktok

a conventionally attractive girl will get more criticisms for her less-than-stellar dancing (from other girls), compared to a more plain/average-looking girl who's equally mediocre at dancing

a sort of reverse-metaphor thought: being hot is like being a high-follower account. (some?) people feel more comfortable being harshly critical towards you, in part because they assume that you surely deal with abuse all the time already anyway, ie "eh, they can handle it"

it also influences people's assumptions of the person's intent

a hot girl dancing poorly is likelier to be assumed to be "showing off her looks", rather than trying to learn to enjoy dance

this is actually really cruel if you think about it

this makes me realize that this is a *really* clever strategy – by doing multiple things at once, you take the heat off any one aspect of what you're doing. very very savvy

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1411388130981146626

lol now I'm thinking, kinda half-jokingly, that maybe being hot (and having a high follower count) might be like having a resource curse

if you don't have the right mechanisms in place to manage them effectively, you're going to be overwhelmed in a bad way

... true I think

some amount of hotness comes from genetics – facial features, body type, etc – but a lot of hotness is actually quite variable, it's more of a performance.

and it makes sense to me that people do avoid getting too hot because they intuit (correctly!) that it makes them a target

all of which I think makes me circle back to the central thesis of: the nature of social regulation is such that we are remarkably dishonest (we call it polite fiction) all the time about what we think and what we believe about social reality, and ourselves in relation to society

it would be more elegant if people were honest with themselves and each other about who they are, what they want out of life, etc

but being dishonest is like, the foundation of peopling, lol. again, we call it "being polite", "being appropriate", etc

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1049573222029479942

well – it would be more elegant if people were honest AND multiple other things simultaneously (thoughtful, gracious, kind, etc)

simply reducing it to an honest/dishonest dichotomy means you get people doing the whole "I'm just being honest" dickery

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/860051524721926144