"Sharkbait, I had noticed that it is popularly believed that men and women's brains operate quite differently in terms of hormones and brain function, but I have also read the actual research and looked at what the experts in the field are really saying. Simon Baron-Cohen published the book "The Essential Difference" and then spent the ensuing years tearing his hair out over the way that people like you have misinterpreted what the science says. We are quick to believe that women and men are hugely different because our society constructs men and women as chalk and cheese, but in fact there are only small and specific differences between male and female brains across large populations. It does not explain why there is a massive difference in the way that that men and women are depicted in society, why female beauty ideals are many times more prevalent than male ones, and why women are suffering hugely because of it. New technology is also debunking many of these ideas: for example 'men are more visual' has gone out the window: women and men are equally sexually responsive to images. I doubt this bulletin board allows the posting of URLs (hense why I haven't given any references before), but if it does, here's the article: http://mednews.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/7319.html (If that doesn't appear, Anokhin AP, Golosheykin S, Sirevaag E, Kristjansson S, Rohrbaugh JW, Heath AC. Rapid discrimination of visual scene content in the human brain. Brain Research, doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2006.03.108) People who find themselves considered beautiful cannot but be advantaged by it in some ways, but this is a result of the choices all of us make to consider beauty important. Privilege is another good example - we give people advantages because of it that people who have the same merit don't receive unless they have privilege. But people don't generally want to be given credit for things that they were born with, they want to be told it's their merit that got them ahead. That's why we have to tell ourselves lies like that the Miss Universe pageant values intelligence as much as beauty, or that the vast majority of politicians being from the upper middle classes is just a coincidence. We all have the freedom to choose to assess people according to their merit, not their appearance or priviledge. If you seek to do the latter, I'm sure you'll receive the quality of world that you deserve."

"Shark's claim that beauty pageants promote the idea that women should be intelligent and beautiful is fundamentally sexist. Why? Because there is no equivalent requirement for men. As a society we place little or no importance on male beauty. There is no (straight) male equivalent of beauty pageants: Mr Universe is competition for body builders - it measures effort not beauty. Then check out the research: mentions of female appearance in the media, entertainment and social discourse outnumber mentions of male appearance by 3:1 to 5:1 depending on the context. The real sad flip side of this is that women's merit, that is, their qualities aside form appearance, are mentioned one-third to one-fifth as often as men's merit."