You may have already seen this video, in which Caroline, an attractive young journalist, hits central London in two different get ups and observes how people - “people” in this case meaning “presumably heterosexual men” - respond to her.

In one set of scenes, she asks for free bus rides, taxis, ice creams and drinks dressed in a long skirt and long-sleeved top, hair tied back with no make-up on. In the other, she attempts the same wearing a short dress, curled hair and make-up.

You can probably guess the results without watching the video. “Sexy” Caroline gets everything she asks for and more. “Plain” Caroline gets turned away every time.

My first thought on watching the video was how much our perceptions of what is and is not attractive are dependent on self-presentation and artifice. It’s not the face or the body we register as ”hot”, in other words, but the effort they put into dressing and grooming themselves in a manner that suggests “hotness”. ”Plain Caroline”, after all, is not actually plain.

“If you want to understand why women worry about the way they look, watch this,” I shot off in an email to The Boyfriend.

But the more I thought about it, the less I was convinced by my initial response. “Plain Caroline” may not have had free stuff flung at her, but it’s not like she was treated terribly. Rather than being illustrative of the way women were rewarded for conforming to a particular aesthetic and punished for not meeting it, “Sexy Caroline”s treatment looked more like a convergence of privileges: the privileges of being a young, middle-class, cisgender female who conformed in appearance and behaviour to a popular feminine ideal. It wasn’t that “Plain Caroline” was underprivileged so much as “Sexy Caroline” was over privileged.

Thoughts?

Related: No make-up week and compulsory beauty work
Britney Spears and Why It’s Painful to Be (Conventionally) Beautiful
Article: The secret lives of beautiful women
Article: Beauty By Numbers

Elsewhere: Sexy girls have it easy (Bright Hand Pictures)