There was an interesting comment on my post, The Tragic Life of the Supermodel Toni Garrn, related to the uncertain future of that woman. She did not manage to cash in on her looks, is a single mother, and was seemingly not able to save up enough money to last until retirement.

Lucretius Carus writes,

She could also get training for a regular job and then just live a peaceful ordinary life – which is not the worst thing to experience. After all, she has experienced her decade of spectacular beauty, fashion fame and glamour, and Leo DiCaprios dick and NYC coke-filled parties, and maybe in the end all of this just wasn’t up her alley?

I am not sure this is a viable path at all for her. Women are deeply competitive about their looks. If you have never worked with women, you have no idea how nasty they are towards each other. I once had a female colleague who was at best a 5/10, your typical dim-witted secretary, and unfortunately not the hot kind. She talked about the wrinkles around the eyes of another woman in the department who was about twice her age. Yet, that other woman was taller, slimmer, moved more elegantly, and you could easily guess that she was probably quite a looker in her youth. The secretary once pulled up pictures from some company event, which showed her rival, and enlarged them tenfold or so. Everybody who walked past her desk she told about the wrinkles of her colleague.

Among women closer in age, there is much more direct competition. Any woman who has ever done some modelling will find ways of mentioning this, in an attempt to establish herself high in the social hierarchy. I am quite sure my ex-wife used to do this plenty of times. However, there was a time when she refused to attend university lectures, which seemingly came out of the blue. As I later learned, she had the great misfortune that one of the other girls in the course was a tall Danish brunette who made it onto national magazine covers, not glossy magazines. She took this as a huge blow to her ego and it took her a while to recover from that. For about a couple of weeks she did not want to be in the room with that woman because she could not compete at that level.

The aforementioned examples are quite harmless in contrast to what an older Toni Garrn working a drab office job, perhaps at AOK Hamburg, a healthcare provider and large employer in her city, would have to endure. Women her age would whisper that she does not even look that good, and that they could also have been top-models, had they been discovered. Younger women will compare themselves to her, desperately looking for ways to establish that they are more attractive than an ex-model fifteen years older than them. On top, there is the fact that Toni Garrn used to get railed by one of the most eligible bachelors in the world. Leonardo DiCapri had fun with her for about two years. Now imagine an office floor full of women, with insignificant to nonexistant status differences as most are simply replaceable paper pushers: they will not like that there is a woman among them who got one of the top men on this planet, albeit only briefly. Likely all her female colleagues have watched Titanic countless times, so much so that it was a formative experience for them. Toni Garrn could talk about how “Leo” used to bend her over and pounded her hard, but this will not get her any high fives. Quite the contrary. Her female colleagues will try everything to push her out. To them, being in the same room who has banged a guy they could only dream of banging is a threat to their self-esteem.

As a consequence, I do not think there is a good plan B for any model who made it big. If they do not manage to secure a provider or invest their money well, their options are quite limited. Surely, they would not enjoy working among regular women. This is not too different from the problems women working in porn face when trying to reintegrate themselves in civilian life. They will be shunned by other women. The root cause may be different but the experience is probably quite comparable to what ex-models who do not manage to firmly establish themselves in high society would have to go through.