Beautiful Women Work At It

No matter what you were born with, beautiful women work at it. Here's a short about Marilyn Monroe and some of her tricks.

When I was younger, I also worked at. I had high color and didn't need much makeup but I worked at other things.

For example, I had porcelain fine skin and dark steel wool for leg hair. Unlike some of my friends, I had to shave that morning if I wished to wear shorts or a skirt.

Madonna works at it. She still works out -- as did Marilyn Monroe, who lifted weights before that was something women typically did -- and watches her diet.

I've been in no position to pursue both my health and a conform to conventional expectations for female attractiveness and also had objections to the highly sexualized bent of those standards. Nonetheless, I worked hard on my health, so I look surprisingly good for my age even before accounting for my condition. 

Men dress in a desexualized fashion for the office. It's not a weirdo bizarre standard that women are typically expected to cover up the cleavage for an office job.

Men aren't supposed to be there with unbuttoned shirts and chest hair sticking out. This can be an uncomfortable imposition on me too, who sometimes wear a white undershirt beneath a short sleeved shirt so they don't have visible sweat beneath their arms in hot summer weather.

More than one man has shown up at work in a dress during a heat wave to protest the expectation that he sweat to death in long slacks while his female coworkers can wear a skirt above the knee and tank top styling if the straps are at least an inch wide. I've never heard of an office that allowed tank tops for men.

The expectation that you not dress like a sex object trying to pick up a lover is more strictly enforced for men than for women. If a man bears his chest on film and has long hair, it's considered sexy, he's still assumed to be heterosexual and he gets called a himbo AKA male bimbo.

Successful men are attractive because they are successful. Their intentionally desexualized appearance that is essential to social diplomacy and moving the uncomfortable question of sex out the way as much as possible to focus on work gets associated with having money and most women will want him for his money.

Men don't dress in some hyper masculine,  look at the size of my cod piece fashion. They dress in a desexualized manner.

Because you shouldn't dip your nib in the company inkwell and whether it's against the rules or not, romance at work frequently is problematic for the company and may cost the company a valuable employee even if strictly speaking no one is doing anything wrong. See Career Manslaughter for more on that.

Madonna is an entertainer and sex sells. Male entertainers have more options than female entertainers and are more able to make it on talent alone without being "sexy" but male entertainers are frequently also making it on looks and series.

Though what other people remember Terminator for is that Schwarzenegger shows up naked at the start of the film, in interviews he jokes it was the first movie where they let him wear clothes because for Conan the Barbarian, he was hired entirely for his physique and wore next to nothing the entire movie. He jokes he was later allowed to speak because neither of those roles had much dialog.

Men have more options than women. They can be sex objects or something else. Women in the US only really have clothes for being sex objects. 

The First Lady is one of the highest status female role models in the US and it's an unpaid position given her entirely because of to whom she's married and marriage is a null and void contract that can be annulled if you've never consummated. 

We grant married couples extraordinary latitude for privacy reasons, including spousal privilege to decline to tell the courts what you know about their crimes, so no one is asking how often you have sex, but you are assumed to be having sex as a primary purpose of the relationship. Furthermore, extremely upper class couples, such as The President and First Lady, may have servants doing most of the women's work done by wives in other marriages.

An upper class wife is assumed to be his lover and a social asset for furthering his career, not necessarily someone raising the kids, cooking the meals and personally cleaning their big house on the hill to impress guests at parties to further his career.

In short, First Lady or any respected married well woman is a respectable whore earning her living and spiffy public title on her back because of whom she she's married to.

And female entertainers are typically overtly dressed sexily. Dolly Parton's stage personae is literally dressed like a prostitute she once saw and she openly admits that. 

The US has never had a female president. We effectively have no female role models for what powerful women look like who have power in their own name without sex being implicitly how they got somewhere in life.

Male engineers and CEOs can be socially awkward people who aren't really fashion plates and are simply good at their job and adequate at relying on existing standards for dressing appropriately for work to meet some minimum standard of social acceptability. 

Women can't do that. Women need to be good at the job and highly interested in fashion and social stuff to try to figure out how to dress in a socially acceptable AKA "attractive" fashion without signaling "I slept my way into this job and will probably do you too if you ask."

And then we are simply mystified when they are failing to reach the highest ranks in similar numbers on par with the guys.

Footnote 

Ironically, First Lady is probably an important position with staff of its own because our first President, George Washington, married for money. She was an heiress and her social position and financial assets helped put him in power.  

But that's not the story for most presidential marriages and probably few people even realize that's likely why the US has this unusual tradition. I write some about the role of First Lady elsewhere, though be advised that not all posts on that site containing that phrase have anything to with people in Washington DC.