Beauty vs The Glow of Youth

Before the MGTOW movement gained a significant foothold online, most men tended to speak in an obsequious manner about women. In fact, it used to be a more or less uncontested view in the mainstream that even aged women had "dignity" and still looked beautiful --- in stark contrast to reality, which has girls mature faster than boys, and women age at a dramatically accelerated pace, compared to men.
It's one thing to look at pictures of an actress at age 20, and at age 30 or 35, where she is still quite good-looking. Pictures of famous people are frequently manipulated and thus a poor representation of reality. Also, you don't know how much plastic surgery they have had. Enhanced noses, lips, and tits are only easy to identify if the modifications tended towards the garish. It can be safely assumed that financially well-off women age much more gracefully since they can always pay their favorite beauty surgeon a visit.

This brings me to the opposite, regular women. Probably every boy who attended a co-ed high school may recall that a reasonable percentage of girls was certainly not ugly. My recollection, which transferred to university studies as well, is that a random sample of women in those age groups contains a much greater percentage of attractive women than the post-university crowd. Sure, if you look at women well in their 30s, this is not a great surprise. However, even if you focus on women who are roughly in the 25 to 30 age bracket, it makes you wonder what all the good-looking teenage girls evolved into.

In fact, this was an observation recently shared by a friend of mine, who dryly commented that there are basically three categories of women: unattractive ones, attractive ones, and a third one: those who are attractive as long as they are young. This struck me as a rather sarcastic statement, but as I thought some more about it, it struck me as a rather deep insight. Think about it: if a person has physically attractive features, say a dominant chin for men, or high cheekbones for women, then those features, assuming proper nutrition, will still be noticeable in individuals in their 30s and 40s. In fact, any genuinely attractive woman in her 30s will have such clear beauty attributes.

Indeed, you sometimes see regular women in their 30s or 40s who are still very good looking. Of course, they are no longer 20, but they are nonetheless attractive. At the other end of the spectrum, you have ugly kids who grow into ugly adults. Yet, the third category is more interesting: look at a group of random teenagers --- objectively, not as sexual objects --- and it becomes obvious. Many boys have "boyish good looks", which will dissipate. Likewise, the not-ugly-not-beautiful girls have the glow of youth, which they will lose --- and won't be able to replicate with a bronzer in her mid-20s, let alone 30s. Thus, you end up with such a lot of rather unremarkably looking women, once their youth has worn off.


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