"Beauty is often treated as an essentially feminine subject, something trivial and frivolous that women are excessively concerned with."

"Men, meanwhile, are typically seen as having a straightforward and uncomplicated relationship with it: they are drawn to it."

The implication is that this may be unfortunate — not exactly ideal morally — but it can’t be helped, because it’s natural, biological. This seems more than a little ironic. Women are not only subject to a constant and exhausting and sometimes humiliating scrutiny — they are also belittled for caring about their beauty, mocked for seeking to enhance or to hold onto their good looks, while men are just, well, being men.

Women have the power to rebalance things, but they are too nice/decorous/deceitful to do it. We would need to become more expressive of our desire for beauty in our male partners. If it's really true that men subject us to a constant and exhausting and sometimes humiliating scrutiny, then we could do the same to them. I don't think it's really that bad — constant and exhausting and humiliating — but we could put the same amount of pressure on men.

Men who seek other men seem to be putting much more pressure on each other than women put on heterosexual men. You might say that's because men desire beauty more than women do, but I think it's more that women hold back from demanding what they want.

We are hoodwinked into trying to be nice (which produces results that aren't necessarily that nice). So here we are, working at both beauty and niceness in ourselves, instead of demanding — and perhaps getting — beauty from men.

How about more direct expression and honesty? Women, like men, love beauty. Stop denying that you want it, and stop complaining that you don't have enough of it for yourself. What's really "trivial and frivolous" is endlessly fantasizing that other people are making you fritter away hours looking at yourself in the mirror and fiddling. Own your vanity, revel in it, laugh at it, or reject it, but move on to other activities, like finding a man who's as beautiful as you are.

AND: By saying "as beautiful as you are," I am not bullshitting that all women are beautiful. If you insist on getting someone who is more beautiful than you are, how is that going to work? You may say that men are looking for women who are more beautiful than they are, but that's my point. Why should that work? If you think it works because men sweeten the deal with money, that's something you might use to deepen your contemplation during that otherwise possibly frivolous time you spend at the mirror.