Pretty Punishment: The Invisible Suffering Of Exceptionally Beautiful Women

Throughout history, there have been countless lessons about the fleeting nature, danger, and corruptibility of vanity, as well as its superiority, ties to virtue, and moral character. So, is beauty good or bad? Is it virtuous or corruptible? Is it to be coveted or treated with suspicion?

The Controversial Nature of Beauty

Beauty has been the subject of fierce debate for centuries. Plato argued that beauty was inextricably linked to goodness itself, believing it was connected to moral virtue and truth. In The Symposium, Plato outlines a ladder of love consisting of six stages, from love of “a particular beautiful body,” the lowest rung, to contemplation of the Form of Beauty itself. For Plato, lower beauties were pathways to higher truth and goodness. “Because the Form of Beauty is perfect, it will inspire perfect virtue in everyone who contemplates it.”

But just as often, beauty is a cautionary tale. Homer used beauty in his literary works to symbolize deceit and danger through the sirens of The Odyssey, who lured sailors from their ships with their alluring calls, only to drag them to their deaths. He also used beauty to symbolize tragedy and burden, as in the case of Helen of Troy, whose beauty is so consequential in Greek mythology that it directly causes the Trojan War.

Then there are fables such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which warn us of vanity and hedonism as pursuits in themselves, divorced from moral integrity—how pursuing beauty at the expense of virtue causes your soul to rot, as it slowly catches up with you. Dorian has made a deal to sell his soul so that a portrait of him will age in his place, while his physical body remains untouched by the passage of time or the acquiring of moral evils. The portrait takes the load of his conscience: slowly morphing into a hideous, wrinkled, truly wicked-looking being so that Dorian may remain unscathed.

However, because Dorian does not absorb the visible wreckage of his increasing wickedness and separation from goodness, he does not heed warnings that he has lost his way until he is confronted by the grotesqueness that has taken the form of his portrait. Believing the portrait to be the source of this great evil, pushing him to commit immoral acts like murder, he takes a knife to it in order to destroy it, and in doing so, destroys himself. Beauty, then, occupies a precarious role in society. It’s coveted by most and regarded widely as desirable, though it’s also prophesied as leading to moral corruption or selling your soul for the pursuit of material gain, hedonism, and narcissistic reward.

The Rising Salience of Pretty Privilege

Pretty privilege: we all want it, but we don’t all have it. For all the talk of the plight of the beautiful woman, the fact that so many do just about anything in their power to achieve the coveted status of beauty suggests the incentive structure is tipped more in favor of the beautiful than the average person. Certainly more than the ugly. The idea that more attractive people are treated better and are assumed to have more positive qualities because of their appearance is a cognitive bias known as the halo effect, or “what is beautiful is good.”

This beauty bias has been replicated in numerous studies, showing a subconscious association between those we perceive as beautiful and other positive characteristics. We assume they are smarter, warmer, morally superior, more altruistic, and more competent. As a result, people naturally gravitate to you. They feel safe with you and think you’re pleasant to be around. Just as we are naturally drawn to beautiful sceneries, works of art, and architectural marvels, so too are we drawn to people with harmonious proportions and facial symmetry. We can even calculate how beautiful a person’s face is mathematically.

Lookism is the recognition that society discriminates against unattractive people while giving preferential treatment to the attractive. Looksmaxxers posit that “due to the realities of lookism, by having a superior aesthetic, you will be treated better in all areas of life.” They tend to point to a series of scientific studies showing the various benefits linked to being more attractive, as well as simple pattern recognition—beautiful people really do have it better—for why it's so important to prioritize aesthetic optimization, often at all costs. 

The idea that more attractive people are treated better and are assumed to have more positive qualities because of their appearance is a cognitive bias known as the halo effect, or “what is beautiful is good.”

Looksmaxxers believe that because we live in a lookist world, where your treatment is directly determined by your looks, and as such, every societal outcome is pre-determined and downstream from this reality, it would be foolish not to try to “ascend” up the Perceived Sexual Level (PSL) scale as much as possible. These ideas, while taken quite literally and to their extremes in largely male online forums (and may have some association with autistic traits, much like incel forum participation), aren't baseless. 

Data does show tremendous social, professional, romantic, and even legal benefits to being more attractive. They’re better liked, make more money, and achieve more success in their careers. On a darker note, some studies suggest that more attractive people receive more lenient sentences and are perceived to be less guilty of certain crimes. However, some studies found that attractive people are perceived as being more guilty of sexual assault. Other studies found that the leniency effect was confined only to women and had no effect on men.

This bias can also translate into significantly higher earnings, an effect known as the "beauty premium." A 2025 study published in the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research found that, over 15 years, attractive MBA graduates earned 2.4% more than their less attractive peers, earning an average of $2,508 more annually (and $5,528 more annually if they're in the top 10% of attractiveness). Attractive people were also 52.4% more likely to hold prestigious job positions 15 years post-graduation.

Even in an educational setting, attractive students receive higher grades when instruction is in person, particularly when courses involve significant teacher-student interaction. A 2022 study published in the journal Economic Letters found that the grades of attractive females declined when teaching was conducted remotely, but that the "beauty premium" remained for males, even when education switched to online teaching.

The researchers concluded the female beauty premium observed when education is in-person is likely to be “chiefly a consequence of discrimination,” while the persisting beauty premium for men even after the introduction of online teaching suggests that, for males in particular, “beauty can be a productivity-enhancing attribute.” This suggests that society places greater value on female beauty, while male attractiveness may confer benefits through traits cultivated by positive social feedback, such as greater confidence, assertiveness, and perceived competence. 

The self-fulfilling nature of beauty biases suggests that society's positive assumptions about attractive people cause them to internalize that feedback, resulting in greater confidence, sociability, and assertiveness. These positive qualities may still be legible in online environments for men, whereas women may rely on and benefit more directly from being visibly beautiful.

The So-Called Benefits Come With a Catch

Clearly, there are unambiguous benefits to being an attractive person of either sex, but there is something about a beautiful woman, who benefits largely or even solely from beauty, that is highly controversial and paradoxical. Most people agree that “pretty privilege” exists, with the implication that it’s natural to both want it and feel jaded by not having it. But there’s also extreme stigma around artificially optimizing your appearance.

One of the biggest disadvantages to being “too beautiful” is being perceived as fake and vain. This is especially so if you’re suspected of having gotten work done, but even just being attractive is sufficient. In fact, nine experiments using diverse methodologies and measurement strategies reached an interesting conclusion: attractiveness can be perceived as both morally good and morally bad. 

Researchers found that attractiveness causally influences beliefs about vanity. People believe more attractive targets are less moral and more immoral. But what about “beauty is good”? It’s because of these attractive people’s perceived sociability that moral judgments became more balanced. So, attractiveness has both positive connotations (more sociable) and negative ones (more likely to be immoral), but because sociability is a component of warmth, it offsets the perceived superficial qualities.

Attractiveness can be perceived as both morally good and morally bad. 

The opposing force of the beauty premium is the “beauty is beastly” effect, in which attractive women are actually at a disadvantage in the job market in certain contexts. Specifically, when applying for traditionally male roles where looks aren’t relevant to competence or ability to complete the role. Researchers found a perceived incompatibility between the masculine job role and the perceived femininity of the attractive woman attempting to fulfill it.

The association of beauty with femininity leads to an inference that she lacks the necessary skills required to do the job, and even if she does demonstrate the requisite skills and experience needed for a masculine job, she “violates her gender role and is, therefore, seen as lacking communal traits.” This can explain why women who are successful in masculine jobs are seen as possessing characteristics opposite to the communal stereotype—bitter, quarrelsome, selfish, deceitful, and devious. 

Sexual insecurity can also make attractive women targets in the workplace. A 2019 study found a tendency they dubbed the "femme fatale" effect, where attractive businesswomen (but not men) were perceived as less truthful and more deserving of being fired than less attractive women for reasons that were rooted in sexual insecurity. The reason? When we feel threatened, we're more likely to project onto people who make us feel insecure. 

The effect was mitigated when the study participants were primed to feel sexually secure, suggesting that sexually insecure men and women both feel threatened by attractive women in the workplace. In general, however, people of the same sex are less likely to hire someone they feel is more attractive than themselves, according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Pretty Paradoxes & Punishment

You’d be surprised how many pretty paradoxes there are. Sure, hot people are more universally desired, but that doesn’t always mean that dating is easier or more straightforward. TikTok nowadays is rife with conversation about pretty privilege. Some complain about not having it, others lament that it’s all people value them for. For those women who unquestioningly have it, they regard it as a double-edged sword.

They’re abstractly desirable, but people are constantly trying to humble or objectify them. People assume you’re full of yourself, out of their league, won’t like them, or that you already have a head that is too big. This results in bizarre mind games, in which men are intimidated, assuming the woman is uninterested in them or that they have to compete with a lot of other men’s attention, when in fact they aren’t getting approached that often. Along with increased sexual attention also comes increased intrasexual competition, objectification, and sexual harassment.

Grace Draskovich talks about her experiences as a conventionally attractive woman and how people constantly project onto her. "When you're a beautiful woman, you become a comparison, a projection, a competition, a fantasy, and a target." She claims that “pretty punishment” outweighs pretty privilege, unless you intend to live a pretty superficial life. As a conventionally attractive woman, she reports dealing with a host of not just inconveniences, but a dark energy that either wants to take you down a peg or consume you. 

People make assumptions, she says, that you’re promiscuous, that you’ve had everything handed to you in life, that you’re dumb and shallow. It's a lonely, burdensome existence, she claims, because you constantly have to manage other people's insecurities. People project onto you and want to humble you so badly. A 2016 qualitative focus group identified several "beauty penalties" that above-average-attractive women face, effectively embedding them in a permanent paradox in which beauty is both a blessing and a curse. 

While the advantages of beauty are well documented, less discussed are the disadvantages, which include insidious forms of discrimination like jealousy from other women, social exclusion (especially if women are concerned their boyfriends will find the attractive woman more attractive than them), stigma from other insecure and intimidated women, including their friends, undermining of achievements (assuming that success was not earned, and in fact assumed that they had been due to sexual relationships), vulnerability to domestic violence and abuse in romantic relationships as well as threats by peers. 

They also had heightened awareness of gendered experience because of the stark difference in how men and women respond to them. Attractive women in this study reported having to overcompensate with kindness around other women to avoid being perceived as stuck-up, and having to downplay their attractiveness or the attention paid to other men in their presence so they weren't misinterpreted as flirting or competing for a woman’s boyfriend. They also reported needing to dress more plain-looking to be taken seriously.

"When you're a beautiful woman, you become a comparison, a projection, a competition, a fantasy, and a target."

The negative treatment that beautiful women experienced led to cognitive dissonance, which occurs when a person is confronted with two social realities that are in direct conflict with each other, and the person must reconcile them to determine which one is true. This caused the sufferers to experience anxiety and depression from the decision-making process. "Both beliefs are inherently cherished, but one belief must be dropped, while the other must be accepted." In this case, cognitive dissonance emerged when attractive women derived advantages from their attractiveness, while at the same time, they were subjected to contempt and hostility as a consequence of it. 

They reported being unable to discuss their concerns or gripes about the dark side of being attractive, because others assume they have it all, “at best, such voiced distress is met with contempt and animosity." Facing underdiscussed discrimination with no outlets to voice their distress results in others’ sense of schadenfreude, which is when you derive pleasure from the misfortune of others. In this case, in witnessing the downfall of a woman who is particularly attractive and talented. 

Outside observers experienced joy when they witnessed the failure of attractive women, which compounded the attractive women's sense of failure with rejection and ridicule. The authors of this study compare the effect to the carnal-like revenge fantasies people enact on celebrities, notably beautiful, young, female ones whose rise is meteoric, only for the public to derive a morbid sense of fascination with their public spirals downward. Examples such as Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Amanda Bynes are observed, where it seems the media and public’s delight in the crash-and-burn spectacle of attractive women’s lives has a component of schadenfreude or a revenge fantasy.

Malèna: The Madonna-Whore Complex & The Male Gaze

These findings remind me of the film Malèna, starring Monica Bellucci. It captures the harrowing experience of a woman in a small Sicilian town during World War II whose beauty is so enviable that men (and boys) can’t help but reduce her to an object to be voyeuristically gawked at, an image to consume, while the women gossip about her and try to ruin her reputation because they’re overcome with jealousy that she turns their husbands’ heads.

Despite capturing the attention of all the town’s men, they fail to see her as a person. She is “objectified” in the sense that she is seen but not understood. Meanwhile, the town’s women resent her for stirring up the attention of their husbands, which inspires rage and jealousy, as they lash out at her. These dynamics are amplified by her husband’s absence, having gone off to fight in the war. The women spread vicious gossip about her sexual proclivities, writing notes to her father claiming that he is dishonored, that his daughter has slept with the whole town. This leads him to quit his job at the school after his daughter’s reputation disgraces him, and he disowns her.

Now lacking any patriarchal protection, Malèna is left at the mercy of others’ perceptions of her. The women’s gossip about her sex life only grows more vicious and ubiquitous, falsely accusing her of promiscuity and charging her with adultery. Here, we see the double-bind that her beauty imprisons her in: men leer at her in the courtroom, and women are chomping at the bit for her to face retribution. 

A lawyer is eager to passionately defend her, almost speaking for the audience here, “She has committed no other crime than that of being ill-fated, alone, and beautiful. Here is her crime: her beauty. And from here, the envy, the lies, the disgrace that have deprived her of even her father’s trust.” Finally, someone stands up for her—only to weaponize his help against her, demanding she pay for his legal services with her body, and thrusting himself onto her, where he sexually assaults her.

The prostitution rumors only ravage further, as she is constantly put in precarious situations. Men objectify and assault her while others withhold services like access to food from the town marketplace due to her being ostracized, forcing her to resort to prostitution in order to feed herself. They all feel entitled to her body, especially the little boy, Renato, through whose gaze we view the entire film and subsequently, Malèna. He spies on her as if catching glimpses of some erotic angel rather than the woman of flesh and blood she truly is. 

When Malèna is grieving the loss of both her husband, who is reported dead, and the death of her father as a war casualty, the little boy continues to act as a peeping Tom who eroticizes her grief. As she walks behind her father’s hearse, the town’s teenage boys walk behind her, leering at her body. Renato doesn’t bring himself to cry when he witnesses Malèna being sexually assaulted. 

Rather, he looks away, disturbed, and tells God in a concerned tone that it was “only once” and that he forgives her. When Malèna truly is pigeonholed into making use of the one thing she has—her body—for survival, that’s when Renato is brought to tears. Not because he actually feels sympathy for her, but because she is now actively participating in the selling of her own body; something he feels should be reserved for him, despite the fact that she does not know that he exists.

The film explores Malèna’s transformation from Madonna (at one point literally being depicted as the Virgin Mary, the archetypal Madonna) to a certified whore. The film presents these two ideas as dichotomous. You are either one or the other. The town Madonnas grow further paranoid about Malèna’s capacity to steal their husbands when her husband is reported dead, and they are more entitled to weaponize this against her once her father is gone. The men, too, feel more entitled to her body, spreading lies about being engaged to her or having slept with her.

There comes a point where Malèna accepts the role that’s been forced onto her by virtue of her beauty and budding sexuality: the whore. She cuts her hair and dyes it a scarlet red. Donning red lipstick and seductively dressed, she walks up to the town square, sits down for the first time amongst the men, and pulls out a cigarette as swarms of men rush to offer her a light. A tear streams down her face. 

While the scene is an iconic bit of cinema that’s widely clipped and shared as some sort of empowering or badass aura, it’s (and I don’t think I’m making some big revelation here) meant to be tragic. She is surrounded, but completely alone. She is desired, but not understood. She is envied, but has no allies. She is fated to be leered at from a distance, and a tear streams down her face as she accepts the femme fatale role everyone has thrust onto her. She is imprisoned by the role forced upon her and was never free to choose anything different.

She is imprisoned by the role forced upon her and was never free to choose anything different.

Having turned to prostitution, Malèna prostitutes herself to the occupying Nazi forces. She has little other choice, as the narrative circulating about her has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The women continue to slut shame her and criticize her canoodling with Nazis, despite creating the conditions that forced her into this fate. When the Americans liberate this small Sicilian town, the women set out for revenge. One woman shouts, “Let’s go give that shameless whore what she deserves,” and drags her by her hair out of the brothel into the street. 

They beat her mercilessly until she is bloodied and bruised, tear off her clothes, cut off all her hair, depriving her of her only power: her sexuality. It's notable that, in all of this viciousness, not one of the town’s men rushes to her aid, signifying that they value Malèna as no more than eye candy and not for her human dignity. They have never helped her, offered her assistance out of altruism rather than opportunism, nor attempted to punish or prevent the women’s vicious barbarism towards her. 

Malèna’s beauty is a double-edged sword not just because she is both rewarded and punished for her attractiveness, but because even the supposed “rewards” are opportunistic double-binds. The subtext is that men’s prosocial behavior towards women, or “simping” as some put it, is conditional on women’s sexual availability, suggesting the courteousness extended to young, sexually attractive women is transactional, not altruistic.

Reconciling the Projection

Carl Jung once said, “A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.” What did he mean by this? He wasn’t saying “that girl everyone calls a 10 out of 10 is lowkey mid.” He was saying that exceptionally beautiful women have a sort of mythological quality because they are a great source of projection.

They tend to represent a mythical archetype rather than a fully realized person. Think of all the men who gave their lives over the beauty of Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy isn’t a functionally real woman; she’s like a feminine ideal or a goddess that couldn’t possibly be real. The second you recognize such a woman is real, the fantasy collapses.

They tend to represent a mythical archetype rather than a fully realized person.

When people engage in pretty punishment (attempting to humble women out of spite or revenge), it’s usually not about the woman at all, but about what she represents to them. In Jungian psychology, the “shadow” is the unconscious part of the psyche that contains repressed weaknesses, instincts, desires, and traumas. They’re parts of ourselves we refuse to recognize or accept. Beauty seems to activate so many ordinary people’s shadows, either because they resent what they cannot access or because they secretly desire the power afforded by beauty (and are painfully aware that they lack it).

The ending of Malèna sees her reunited with her husband, who did not die in the war after all. She lives a much quieter, subdued existence, free from the leering eyes of men, and the town’s women even treat her as an equal, engaging in pleasantries with her as they pretend they didn’t savagely beat her. She is no longer a threat. 

The idealized projection has collapsed, and Malèna has returned to human status. The tragedy of Malèna, common to all beautiful women who become archetypes rather than people (like Marilyn Monroe), is that no one sees them at all. Yet, as established by sociological research, acknowledging or seeking solace in this form of suffering only invites more schadenfreude.