Weary of being judged and found wanting (based on nothing more than my thumbnail profile picture), I conducted a little experiment. With my daughter’s permission, I posted an ad at a popular internet dating site, using her gorgeous image and likeness. Her “ad” (profile) was carefully written, sprinkled with a few not-so-subtle suggestions that she was high maintenance and had some serious gold-digger leanings. Purposefully, I dumbed her down so she wouldn’t sound too interesting or too well-read. Her age was listed at 35.

Within 24 hours, she had more than 20 emails. By the end of the first week, she had 75 emails from 75 men, pleading for a response. Within 30 days, she had received more than 250 letters from men (ages 25 to 62)  who were begging to meet her.

After reading through this deluge of emails, I became incensed. I was an intelligent, capable, independent, interesting, well-read, well-traveled, self-educated, nationally known author, and men were ignoring my profile because I didn’t have The Look. In 24 hours, my daughter’s picture brought in six times the response my picture garnered in 90 days.

The majority of those 250 emails said, “Something about your profile really spoke to me.”

They were either liars or fools, or perhaps both.

If these men were even bothering to read the profile, they might have noticed that it didn’t speak to much of anything. It was fluff and silliness and trivial nonsense. Other men cut to the chase and waxed poetic about her great beauty. More than 20% of the emails included graphic descriptions of the men’s wealth.

One lonely soul wrote, “I’ve done very well in the stock market and I can provide you with all that you’ll ever want or need.”

Another man said, “Thanks to some very wise investing, I’m now retired and just hoping to find someone who wants to travel the world with me.”

Some were more blatant.

“I’ve got everything a man could want: plenty of money, a beautiful home and fine cars, but I don’t have you.”

Reading between the lines, it’s not hard to figure out the formula that these men - and apparently society - have settled on. You have plenty of beauty. I have plenty of money. We’re a perfect match.

These are the mathematics of a woman’s social value.

Some call this a “social price,” the sum total of our desirable qualities and attractive features, as judged by members of the opposite sex. But what’s a woman to do if she doesn’t have this supremely valuable asset of physical beauty in her arsenal?

I wish I had an easy answer to this. I don’t.

In Fay Weldon’s poignant novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, the protagonist Ruth Patchett states plainly, “As an [ugly] woman my physical match is an old, epileptic, half-witted man.”

Beautiful women, such as my daughter, don’t need help in attracting men. As proved by my experiment, they can post a head-shot and write a meaningless profile and within moments, hoards of eligible bachelors will magically appear, sniffing around their virtual yard and begging for a date.

To read the rest of this chapter, click here.

To learn more about Rose’s new book on internet dating, click here.

To read another excerpt, click here.

A gorgeous 25-year-old woman named America Ferrera plays “Betty Suarez” on the popular ABC sitcom “Ugly Betty.”  The Hollywood-inflicted “uglying” of this Hispanic beauty is a paper-thin veneer, and really does little to hide Miss Ferrera’s natural good looks. It’s not hard to look beyond the extra-bushy eyebrows, gray-metal braces, uncoiffed hair and unattractive glass frames, and see that Ms. Ferrera is quite beautiful.

In addition to her lovely facial features, Ms. Ferrara has a well toned, shapely, feminine form. Slap on some braces and stir up the extra-bushy eyebrows and voila, you’ve got instant ugly? If that’s the case, there’s little hope for the rest of us.

If “Ugly Betty” is the measure of an ugly woman, we’re all in trouble deep. We “average women” are in trouble. Mainstream media is constantly force-feeding us the crazy notion that we have to be beautiful to be worthy, or even worse, to be loved.

In the powerful book, Flesh Wounds author Virginia L. Blum talks about an interview she had with a famous plastic surgeon. He told her,

The way you look has a lot to do with whether you’re going to attract somebody else. Let’s be pragmatic about the fact that if a woman cease to be attractive physically, it affects the physical, intimate relationship. I’ve seen women who have not had particularly good relationships or haven’t had a relationship with men for a long time and I make them look younger and prettier and they go on to get married and have wonderful, stable relationships. There’s absolutely no question that the face-lift helped them. We live in a real physical world (p. 127).

Ms. Blum responds to this with her own insights:

[The plastic surgeon] spoke with such authority. Yoked to his honesty is a kind of fiction about the transformative possibilities of plastic surgery. You can change her life. You can make her someone whom someone else would be willing to love. More to the point, if she isn’t succeeding on the dating/marriage market, it must be because she’s not attractive enough. That’s the most unsettling part of his account, isn’t it?

The self-evident undesirability of the woman who isn’t young and pretty. Young and pretty. You can’t have pretty without the young. As a feminist, I am indignant. Outraged (Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery, Virginia L. Blum, p. 127).

Like Ms. Blum, I also feel indignant and outraged. And Ugly Betty may be an award-winning sitcom, but the problem with it is, it perpetuates the tiresome message that’s been drilled into women’s heads for decades now. Ugly is a problem. Fix ugly with money. Spend money. Get pretty and then you’ll get love, because then you’ll be worthy of love.

In other words, money buys love.

In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes that women’s magazines make their money by selling women on the idea that they’re suffering from a disease of “terminal ugliness,” and that this opens the to sell billions of dollars of “cures.”

And that seems to be the subtle message of Ugly Betty. We “less-than-beautiful” women need to spend a little more money on better glasses and better haircuts and invisible braces and electrolysis and then - only then - will the burdensome mantle of “ugly” be lifted off our shoulders and our true beauty will be revealed. And then, maybe then, we’ll find true love.

We just need to spend a little more money to be cured of that horrible disease of “terminal ugliness.”

I live for that happy day when I turn on the evening news and find that the male news anchors are young, svelte, well-coiffed and gorgeous, and the women news anchors are pudgy, untanned, hairless and unkempt. That’ll be my proof that the age of enlightenment has begun.