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

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

You are chatting with a friend at an art exhibition, telling her how hard you find it to parent a wilful two-year-old girl. Your friend has no kids and a combination of qualities you realise is very rare: she’s one of the most earnest people you know, and also one of the funniest. You speak frankly about the whole fraught business of mothers and daughters, and then your friend says, by way of subject-changer, “Well, at least you know she’ll always be hot.”

You get a great laugh out of this. The “always” is so wrong and your friend qualifies it immediately. “You know what I mean!” You know what she means. She means that your two-year-old daughter is beautiful, which she is, and that one day she will grow into a woman who is beautiful and, well, hot. This is a bet you and your friend feel comfortable placing. Your daughter’s father, after all, is as handsome as the day is long. Isn’t that part of the reason you chose him? Chose to breed with him? You never tire of people pointing out how handsome he is, and this same funny, earnest friend tells you often. “I always forget how handsome he is,” she said once, and it delighted you, especially because this friend is a lesbian. It had the ring of objective truth—no muddying sexual desire, just eyes that work. Another time, she said, “You two are the type of couple everyone wishes was looking for a third.”

This brings you to the subject of your own hotness. It’s waning, because you are 37, and because you’ve birthed and breastfed a kid. You know you’re meant to pretend it isn’t. You were such a loyal acolyte of third-wave feminism once. Privately, though, you think of yourself like a banana: still ripe, but spotty. According to some tastes, including your husband’s, that makes you as sweet as ever. You will, however, become inedible mush, and how soon is anyone’s guess. You have decided to face this inevitable decline with good humour and humility. How else should you face such a thing? You certainly won’t insist on your continuing sex appeal, thrusting it at others with the desperation of the blackening bananas around you. You’re so intent on ageing gracefully that you notice yourself curling into a stubborn and defensive ball, denying altogether that you have any yellow-skinned years left. It occurs to you that this might not be grace.

Anyway, you can see now, looking back with kinder eyes, that you were so hard on your looks when you were young. That you saw yourself through brutal eyes—looked like Inez at Estelle’s face, which she herself couldn’t see, pointing out nasty, red spots that didn’t exist. That even the mirror told you lies. You can see now, looking back with kinder eyes, that you were lovelier than you ever imagined. Not that you were a 10. Settle down. But you weren’t half as ugly as you feared. It strikes you now how sad it is that whenever men told you you were beautiful, they seemed pathetic in your eyes. How sad it is that you told all this to a friend once, who replied, “but you’re actually quite pretty”, and the only thing you heard was the “actually” and the “quite”.

All stills are from the BBC adaptation of No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre (1964).

Part of you must not have been entirely convinced of your ugliness, though, because you never quit the game—never became one of those girls truly resigned to their own plainness, about whom you felt both jealousy and contempt. At the turn of the millennium, you would go on a website called Hot or Not dot com, and you were amazed by what men told you there. They said you were a 7 or 8. “They probably just want to fuck me,” you thought, even though you were 12.

A lot of men were trying to fuck you when you were 12. You could feel them breathing down your neck. A few bolder specimens started panting even earlier. You recall, aged 10 or 11, hanging around a party your older sister threw, listening to an adult man tell your sister you were pretty and that he’d “wait for” you. You recall it feeling sinister. You knew you were a very green banana indeed. When you turned 12, the men stopped pretending to wait. They simply advanced, panting. It made you feel sick, but you felt guilty, too: didn’t you delight, at least a little, in your emerging womanhood? And if you did, why shouldn’t men? What you needed those men to understand is that while you did fervently wish to be hot, you didn’t want them to try to fuck you. That it isn’t the same thing at all.

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

Not now, obviously. That’s why you and your friend laughed at the art exhibition about her “always”. But it’s not a laughing matter, is it? Everyone without a serious mental injury agrees that prepubescent children aren’t hot, but people with that mental injury are lurking in the hinterlands, and we’re all agreed about that too. Once, at a low ebb, you read an investigation by the New York Times about the proliferation of images and videos featuring the sexual abuse of children. The article said the internet was “overrun” with them, that it was a “crisis” the federal government was barely equipped to handle. There was a warning, at the top of the article, that it included “graphic descriptions of some instances of the abuse.” You decided to read the article in its entirety anyway. You thought it was too important to avert your eyes. When you read the passages that described the abuse, alone in your apartment, you threw your head back and made a noise that was half scream, half moan—a primal, wounded sound that surprised you even as you emitted it—then you sobbed until you shook. Now, months later, you’re still tortured by those passages of text.

It’s not a laughing matter, and it’s unambiguous: children are not hot. Once, in the late 2010s, a young father living in Berlin—a 21-year-old American with a one-year-old baby—told you this straight. “Babies just aren’t hot,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They’re rolly and chubby. I can’t see what pedophiles see.” This would be one of two times in your life that a conversation partner would tell you that, having thought about the matter seriously, they were not a pedophile. You found it encouraging each time. Always good to be on the same page about that one.

You wonder, sometimes, what it does to you to read articles like the one in the New York Times, to know, as you know, how many children don’t escape childhood unscathed by sexual assault. Whether you’re losing some perspective, forgetting how rare this mental injury really is. You find yourself doing disturbing things, like looking at your two-year-old daughter’s naked body and panicking. Will someone see this and find it hot? You wonder about some kind of horseshoe of pedophilic logic, where the neurotic mothers and the actual sickos come close to touching. All this rape taking place in the mind. This torture.

Just girly things, as the hot girls used to say. Hot girls set trends, especially online. When Bernie Sanders ran in the 2020 Democratic primaries, hot girls pledged their allegiance to him. This was called Hot Girls for Bernie. One of the most influential hot girls online did a good burn about them. She said declaring yourself a hot girl had the same terrible energy as declaring yourself a philosopher. At the same time, a lot of men were arguing on the internet about whether this girl was hot. You recall the argument driving you nuts. She’s as hot as the day is long, you thought back then, and anyone with eyes can see it.

She was so mean about girls like you, though. Third-wave girls. You were one of the girls with terrible energy, throwing your chips behind an old socialist from Vermont and declaring yourself hot as you did so. You had been doing this schtick for a while online, hamming up how hot you were. Why did you swing from delusional self-hatred to lunatic self-confidence? Ask Freddie deBoer. Or figure it out yourself, it’s not too hard. It’s just two sides of the same coin.

Meanwhile, the really influential hot girls were turning away from feminism. Hot girls set trends, especially online. Now the hot girls are declaring that transgenderism is over. They’re getting into the skull-measuring type of racism.

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

Some people can’t help but think hot people are good. This is called the “halo effect”. Sometimes you think hot girls are bad. You remember your adolescence and how cruel the hot girls could be—how they would cluster into groups, point at the freaks and laugh. Where were you? Sometimes you were the freak, you recall with wounded pride. Sometimes you were the hot girl, you recall with deep shame.

Not that you were a 10. Settle down. But you’d look at the most beautiful girls of all, the honest-to-God 10s, the girls you had no trouble befriending, and notice how sweet they were; sweeter even than the girls fully resigned to their own plainness. This made perfect sense to you: with a face like that, what else could you feel for the world but unguarded love?

Now your daughter has a face like that. This has forced you to confront your true feelings about beautiful female faces, and the feelings in the culture at large. You can admit that they include jealousy, even contempt. You can admit to some of the famous female cattiness, the witchiness, that crops up in so many of your culture’s stories. But mostly you feel awe. Like everyone else, you can’t look away. Like everyone else, you know beauty is good. Like everyone else, you know, deep down, that a certain kind of beauty fades.

Do you want your two-year-old daughter to be hot? You laugh at the question, the same way you laughed with your friend at the art exhibition. What are you even asking yourself? Do you want your daughter to be cruel to other people and get away with it because she’s beautiful? No. Do you want your daughter to be the freak the hot girls point to, laughing? No. If a beautiful face could protect her from this kind of treatment, wouldn’t you give her one? You would. Does a beautiful face protect you from this kind of treatment? Not entirely, and you realise that now—that beauty won’t inoculate her from being cruel and experiencing cruelty. That there is no inoculation. Does this break your heart? Over and over. Do you want your daughter to be beautiful anyway? It doesn’t matter what I want. She just is.