At What Price Beauty and At What Sacrifice Denial?
The enmity coming out of the Olympics which has pitted some women against each other is so troubling that it has stopped my brain and left one of my characters stranded in a flying 7-11 (long story). When this happens, I have to go all non-fiction and get it out of my system.
The world has many beauty standards but I concern myself only with the one we’ve built here in America. I say this because there’s always someone who wants to point out that in Kwasafroland, they worship fat women with bald heads. Well, in America if you look like that you’re the trailer park homewrecker on the Jerry Springer Show.
Beautiful people as they are defined are probably less than 1% of our population. Beauty, outer beauty, is not earned. It is inherited and so there is a definite lack of respect that goes with it from the non-beautiful.
And yet, we exalt beauty and why? Because we need to.
Beauty excites the pleasure and euphoric regions of our brains and this is an inborn instinct that has been with us since we were writing on cave walls.
And yet we are all full of shit when it comes to what is beautiful. We lie and try not to hurt people’s feelings. We fall into political correctness and get vague when we want to compliment someone who hasn’t won the gene pool lottery. "Oh your baby is sooo pretty."
And we all want to believe that good-looking people have it good, that they shit money and fall ass backwards into pools of happiness. And whenever some nice looking person complains about their lives, we resent them, believing that they should never complain about anything.
Which brings me to LoLo Jones and the other two runners who criticized her behavior and her non-medaling performance. Publically, people have said “they are all beautiful” but privately people have said far worse things, like one of them looks like Wesley Snipes.
Why can’t we just say they are not as nice looking as LoLo and that’s why she gets the endorsements because her beauty stimulates our brains and makes us want to buy the crap she’s hawking?
We can’t because we never want to acknowledge that we have a standard and that most of us are not in it. Well, if that’s the case, why not change it? There are more of us than them, right? Then why can’t we just flip the script on this and put Gabourey Sidibe in a Speedo and have her sell us sneakers? (If you're laughing or cringing right now then I rest my case)
Well, we’re not going to do it. We’re not because we really do want to believe that real beauty is on the inside and that it is more significant than outer, inherited beauty. But mostly we won’t do it because we can’t. We are naturally predisposed to be attracted to beauty according to the societal (if not human) standard and opposed to anything outside of it.
So let’s say that LoLo’s criticizers are just as pretty as she is and let’s laugh at her because she didn’t win the race. After all, she won the Fine Ass Lottery, right? Let just keep lying until our neighbor with the ugly baby really believes the kid doesn’t look like a potato.
Or we could be honest and let people have all of their assets inherited and earned and accept what life has given us and admire what it has given to others. And I'm not saying that we should be mean. We can still spare feelings so no one will have to tell that one Kardashian sister she has a jaw like Jay Leno. But it won’t happen because it is not who we are as a species. God don't like ugly and apparently, we don’t either.
Copyright 2012
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