Do you want your two -year -old son to be hot?

A story about you, your two -year -old daughter and hot girls everywhere.

This article was first published in Madeleine Holden’s self-titled Substack.

You are talking to a friend in an art exhibition, telling her how difficult to find her to be a two -year -old girl. Your friend has no children and a combination of qualities that you realize is very rare: she is one of the most sincere people you know and also one of the funniest. You talk frankly about the whole business of mothers and daughters, and then your friend says, through the subject, “Well, at least you know she will always be hot.”

You have a great laugh of that. “Always” is so wrong and your friend qualifies him immediately. “You know what I mean!” You know what she means. She means that her two -year -old daughter is beautiful, what she is, and that one day she will become a woman who is beautiful and, well, hot. This is a bet that you and your friend feel comfortable. Your daughter’s father, after all, is as beautiful as the day is long. Is this not part of the reason why you chose it? Did you choose to reproduce with him? You never get tired of people pointing out how beautiful it is, and this same funny and sincere friend often says. “I always forget how beautiful he is,” she said once, and that has enchanted him, especially because this friend is lesbian. It had the objective real ring – without sexual desire, only the eyes that work. Again, she said, “You two are the kind of couple that everyone wants to be looking for a third.”

This takes you to the subject of your own hotness. It is decreasing, because you are 37 years old, and because you were born and breastfed a child. You know you should pretend it is not. You were such a loyal acolyte of third wave feminism once. In particular, however, you think of a banana: still mature but irregular. According to some tastes, including your husband’s, it makes it as sweet as always. You, however, you will become non -edible and how long someone is guessed. You have decided to face this inevitable decline with good humor and humility. What other way should you face such a thing? You will certainly not insist on your continuous sexual appeal, pushing it to other people with the desperation of the darkening bananas around you. You are so intended to grow old that you can see yourself bowing into a stubborn and defensive ball, completely denying that you have years of yellow skin. It happens to you that this may not be funny.

Anyway, you can see it now, looking back with kinder eyes that you were so hard with your look when you were young. That you found yourself through brutal eyes – it seemed as Inez on the face of Estelle, which she herself could not see, pointing unpleasant and red spots that did not exist. That even the mirror told you. You can see now, looking back with more kind eyes, that you were more beautiful than ever imagined. Not that you are 10 years old. But you were not as ugly as you feared. Now impresses how sad is that whenever men told you that you were beautiful, they looked pathetic in your eyes. How sad that you have told all this to a friend once, who replied, “But you’re really pretty pretty,” and the only thing you heard was “really” and “a lot”.

Part of you should not be totally convinced of your ugliness, because you never left the game – you have never become one of those girls actually renounced your own clarity, with whom you felt jealous and contempt. At the turn of Millennium, you would go to a website called Hot or Not Dot com, and were impressed with what the men told you there. They said you were 7 or 8 years old. “They probably just want to fuck me,” you thought, even if it was 12 years old.

Many men they were Trying to fuck you when you were 12 years old. You could feel them breathing by the neck. Some bolder specimens began to prest even earlier. You remember, 10 or 11 years old, hanging at a party that your older sister gave, listening to an adult man tell your sister that you were beautiful and that he would “wait” you. You remember that feeling sinister. You knew it was a very green banana. When you turned 12, men stopped pretending to wait. They simply advanced, panting. This made you feel sick, but you also felt guilty: You didn’t delight, at least a little, in your emerging femininity? And if you did, why shouldn’t men? What you needed these men to understand is that although you wanted to fervently be hot, I didn’t want them to try to have sex with you. That is not the same thing.

Which brings you to your two -year -old daughter. Do you want her to be hot?

No nowobviously. This is why you and your friend laughed at the art exhibition about her “always”. But it’s not a matter of laughter, is it? Everyone without a serious mental injury agrees that pre -adolescent children are not hot, but people with this mental injury are lurking inside, and we all agree with it as well. Once, in a little underneath, you read a New York Times investigation about the proliferation of images and videos with the sexual abuse of children. The article said the internet was “invaded” with them, which was a “crisis” that the federal government was barely equipped to deal with. There was a warning, at the top of the article, which included “graphic descriptions of some cases of abuse.” You have decided to read the article in full anyway. You thought it was very important to avoid your eyes. When you read the passages that describe the abuse, alone in your apartment, you threw your head back and made a noise that half a shout, half moan – a primitive sound that surprised you even when you emitted it – so you soaked until you shake. Now, months later, you are still tortured by these text passages.

It is not a matter of laughter and not ambiguous: children are not hot. Once, at the end of 2010, a young father who lived in Berlin-a 21-year-old American with a one-year-old baby gave a straight line. “Babies are just not hot,” he said naturally. “They are Rolly and chubby. I can’t see what the pedophiles see.” This would be one of his life in his life that a conversation partner would say that, having thought of the subject seriously, they were not a pedophile. You found it encouraging each time. Always good to be on the same page about this.

You sometimes ask yourself what you do to you to read articles like New York Times, to know, how you know, how many children do not escape childhood unscathed by sexual aggression. If you are losing any perspective, forgetting how rare this mental injury is. You see yourself doing disturbing things, such as looking at your two -year -old daughter’s naked body and panicking. Will anyone see this and think hot? You ask yourself about some kind of pedophilic logic horseshoe, where neurotic mothers and royal patients come close to playing. All this rape occurring in the mind. This torture.

Just feminine things, as hot girls used to say. Hot girls establish trends, especially online. When Bernie Sanders ran into the 2020 democrats, hot girls promised their loyalty to him. This was called hot girls to Bernie. One of the most influential hot online girls made a good burn on them. She said that declaring herself a hot girl had the same terrible energy as declaring herself a philosopher. At the same time, many men were arguing on the internet about that Girl was hot. You remember the argument leaving you crazy. She is as hot as the day is long, you thought at that time and anyone with eyes can see it.

She was as bad about girls as you, however. Third wave girls. You were one of the girls with terrible energy, throwing your chips behind an old Vermont socialist and declaring yourself hot in doing so. You had been doing this trick for a while on -line, sticking how hot you were. Why did you shook an illusory self-medium to lunatic self-confidence? Ask Freddie Deboer. Or discovering yourself, it’s not very difficult. There are only two sides of the same coin.

Meanwhile, the really influential hot girls were moving away from feminism. Hot girls establish trends, especially online. Now the hot girls are declaring that transgenderism is over. They are entering the kind of racism that mediates the skull.

Which brings you to your two -year -old daughter. Do you want her to be hot?

Some people can not help thinking that hot people are good. This is called “halo effect”. Sometimes you think delicious girls are bad. You remember your teens and how hot girls could be cruel – as they would grouped into groups, pointed to the crazy and laugh. Where were you? Sometimes you were the aberration, you remember with injured pride. Sometimes you were the hot girl, you remember with a deep shame.

Not that you are 10 years old. But you would look at the most beautiful girls of all, the 10s honest, the girls you had no problem making friends and realizing what sweet they were like; Sweeter than the girls totally renounced their own clarity. This made perfect sense to you: with such a face, what else could you feel for the world, but not saved love?

Now your daughter has such a face. This forced you to face your true feelings about beautiful female faces and the feelings of culture in general. You can admit that they include jealousy, even contempt. You can admit some of the famous females, witchcraft, which comes in so many stories of your culture. But especially you feel admired. Like everyone, you can’t look away. Like everyone, you know that beauty is good. Like everyone, you know, deep down, that a certain kind of beauty disappears.

Do you want your two -year -old daughter to be hot? You laughed at the question, just as you laughed with your friend in the art exhibition. What are you wondering? Do you want your daughter to be cruel to other people and loot yourself because she is beautiful? No. Do you want your daughter to be the aberration that girls like, laughing? No. If a beautiful face could protect you from this type of treatment, would you not give it? You would. A beautiful face protects you from this type of treatment? Not entirely, and you realize that now – that beauty does not inoculates it to be cruel and experience cruelty. That there is no inoculation. Does this break your heart? Repeatedly. Do you want your daughter to be beautiful anyway? No matter what I want. She is only.

This article was first published in Madeleine Holden’s self-titled Substack. You can support her writing signing up as a free subscriber or paid below: