How you look, your stance, your hair, your makeup, whether you appear pretty, your sex appeal: all of these things that coalesce in my brain, and maybe yours, to form a hum so low and so constant that I take it as a state of being—and when you want, they disappear. And I do want to know, sure, and I delight in hearing a compliment from a female stranger on the street, or from a friend of any sex.

When I was in high school, for example, I poured over fashion and beauty magazines looking for tricks and techniques that would change the way I looked. The woman who takes this approach to self-presentation might be just as much—or just as little—a “freak between the sheets” as her more publicly sexual forerunners. And appropriately so: They found ads that directly claimed superiority over other products to be flat-out false, and ads based on science to be vague or omissive.Beautiful people aren’t necessarily having more sex, nor are they necessarily more confident in their appeal. Breaking these associations would mean to break the Sex Myth, and for that matter, much of the beauty myth as well.

I have no idea who played the angel during my hiatus, because our congregation was short on kids, which is part of why I’d been cast in the role every year to begin with. The lights fell upon that strawberry blond hair, her fair skin and freckles seeming impossibly adorable, and she read with the kind of expertise that I recognized. When I first heard about eyelash extensions, I threw it into the bin of Things I Would Never Do, along with Vajazzling and placenta facials. You can read the whole thing here, along with a right honorable debunking of the idea that Audrey Hepburn penned it. Normally, his smooth words worked because I didn’t want to punish him for things out of his control.

In 1969, my senior year of high school, I chose to throw out all my cosmetics in rebellion to what I thought was society’s dictate to superficial beauty. That was far too easy, I thought, popping a grape tomato into my mouth while heading toward the dining room. He was no different than the lying deadbeats I’d dated before him, except he was just a highly educated one. One of the creatives at the agency says to him in anger after Don suggests he might want to work on some character-building, "You don't have any character, you're just handsome—stop kidding yourself.

These women are not thinking about how they look, how their faces are posed, how their bodies might be viewed. Not only was I salivating in anticipation of the zesty Creole cuisine cooking just feet away, but the loud music also had my hips swinging loosely on their own.Regardless of whether long lashes actually indicate a demure or coquettish demeanor, the fact is that if someone is peering at you through a thick fringe, you feel a sense of secretiveness: There’s a barrier there, one that separates eyes, those famous truth-tellers, from others who might discern how much truth is actually being told. And I personally know that he’ll never forgive you for costing him the best thing that’s ever happened to him, I hissed through gritted teeth.

A 7-year-old with strong reading skills, a flair for performance as evidenced during her occasional solo with our meager choir, and a headful of strawberry blond hair was the new angel.

That said, I'm not a snob about it, and as long as a bar is at least of Lindt quality (that is, quality chocolate but not like the top-notch stuff), I'm happy. So the MDRP’s eugenics mission was wrongheaded, but at least it bothered to be consistent with its own internal logic and wasn’t just cherry-picking its theories to justify a sexist vision. I've written about this before, and why I spent an ungodly amount of money on this particular facial.