Conservative Dad: Pretty vs Hot

For a long time, I've been planning to start a category of posts dedicated to topics of interest to conservative dads. Tina Korbe has a post packed with good points that have inspired me to launch my "conservative dad" series. The whole post is worth your time, so go check it out. With my two-year-old daughter's future in mind, I've selected a few key points:

"Why what women wear actually matters..."

Truthfully, I didn’t plan to write about this. We’re not a fashion blog — and, by and large, I don’t think what folks wear does matter. But, this morning, I read a brief blog post headlined “The Death of Pretty” — and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. This is a rather long excerpt, but it’s too good to not be shared (the whole piece is worth your time, too!):

"...pretty is dying.

"People will define pretty differently. For the purposes of this piece, I define pretty as a mutually enriching balanced combination of beauty and projected innocence.

"Once upon a time, women wanted to project an innocence. I am not idealizing another age and I have no illusions about the virtues of our grandparents, concupiscence being what it is. But some things were different in the back then. First and foremost, many beautiful women, whatever the state of their souls, still wished to project a public innocence and virtue...

"By nature, generally when men see this combination in women it brings out their better qualities, their best in fact. That special combination of beauty and innocence, the pretty inspires men to protect and defend it.

"Young women today do not seem to aspire to pretty, they prefer to be regarded as hot. Hotness is something altogether different. When women want to be hot instead of pretty, they must view themselves in a certain way and consequently men view them differently as well.

"As I said, pretty inspires men’s nobler instincts to protect and defend. Pretty is cherished. Hotness, on the other hand, is a commodity. Its value is temporary and must be used. It is a consumable.

"Nowhere is this pretty deficit more obvious than in our 'stars,' the people we elevate as the 'ideal.' The stars of the fifties surely suffered from the same sin as do stars of today. Stars of the fifties weren’t ideal but they pursued a public ideal different from today."

It’s so true — and it’s so sad...

...somewhere between childhood and adulthood — or, sadly, sometimes in the midst of childhood — girls begin to think it’s an embarrassment to be innocent, to be naive.

It’s not an insult to be called naive, though — not really. The first definition of the word is “having or showing unaffected simplicity of nature or absence of artificiality.” What’s wrong with that? To encounter the natural and artless — to escape cynicism and ugliness — is to be refreshed. Yes, it’s foolish to ignore ugliness — for it’s real and revealing. But we have such a limited amount of time in a day: Why not look to the beautiful, the good, the true at least as often as we look to anything else?

Here's the rest.

I would add that on another part of this spectrum (or perhaps on an entirely different plane) is a group of girls and women who may be neither pretty nor "hot," but who strive like rough men to be crass, brash and crude.

Pretty, hot... or crude?

I hope my daughter makes the right choice.