CULTURE

You Are Not the Main Character in a Regency Romance Novel

We care too damned much about our looks

I hope she’s not considering throwing herself into the water because she’s 25 and still not engaged. Photo by on

In the past, it really was in a woman’s best interest to look as young, beautiful and fashionable as she could. She wasn’t allowed to have a professional career, so she needed to snag a man, and snag him fast, lest she become an impoverished old maid.

It was a matter of survival.

I think if a woman from the early 1800s could travel into the modern era, she’d have many questions:

“So you say you can earn as much as a man? OK, nearly as much as a man? You don’t have to hold your nose and pretend to swoon for some farting old duke? You don’t have to marry at all unless you actually want to?” Here the time-traveling young miss would reach for her smelling salts. “Then why, pray tell, are you so obsessed with your face?”

Someone out there is going to immediately comment that she doesn’t do all this beauty work to attract a man.

Nope, she does it for herself. And let’s assume that’s true. But let’s also question why, with all the possibilities that are open to women today, so many of us choose to devote our precious lives to trying to meet conventional…