Inner Beauty and Outer Beauty

The false dichotomy between inner beauty and outer beauty has been a source of confusion to many. This is to make the clarifications needed to overcome this confusion.

The two concepts - inner beauty and outer beauty - refer to very different and unrelated things. A better term for "inner beauty" is "personal goodness." And there is no reason why personal goodness would be related, one way or another, to physical appearance. Unrelated concepts mean: zero correlation. It will be possible to find both personal goodness and lack of personal goodness at every level of physical attractiveness; and it will be possible to find physical beauty and lack of physical beauty at every level of personal goodness.

Thus, my daughter, my mother, my sister, and the women I've loved, all had both inner beauty and outer beauty. Whereas Andrea Dworkin and most of her followers are both physically ugly and horrible people. These horrible people then claim ridiculously to speak for a half of the world's population even as they command other women to toe their malignant line and maliciously attack and abuse those who would not. I doubt I am the only person who believes that women deserve a better representation than is afforded by these jerks.

It is much more sensible that women's representatives be the best, not the worst, among women. The women possessing of both personal goodness and physical beauty have far more to offer the world than women who possess neither and are against both. They also stand to make vastly superior role models to other women and motivate other women to be their best, rather than their worst, even as they stand to improve men's view of women by presenting before them a different, vastly more deserving and sympathetic, picture of womanhood.

Being sympathetic toward women's rights and advancement does not require accepting wrongdoing on the part of those who falsely claim to be speaking for women. Instead a person sympathetic toward the preceding would very much take the side of the women who are being attacked by the same. A harpy is not, nor was it ever, a valid feminine ideal. Besides the "traditional" maternal ideal there are others - professional woman, artistic woman, activist woman, working woman, high achiever woman - that are also valid; and all of the above are better both for the women who are doing it and for the rest of the world.

The dichotomy between outer beauty and inner beauty is therefore a false one. The two are unrelated to one another. We will see both good people and bad people at every level of physical appearance. And we will see both physically beautiful and physically ugly people at every level of personal goodness.