Beauty & the Beast

11.12.06

I saw a marred man tonight, his face the recipient of some long ago, well repaired, incendiary assault or the voracious appetite of a dermatologic cancer. With barely a nubbin of a nose and half size, silver dollar shaped mouth, his eyes were hidden behind black glasses. He lightly held onto the arm of a young woman, his girlfriend, perhaps and I thought about love. I wondered if she has nursed him though whatever accident had sheared his profile into a sandy white pancake. Or had she met him aftewards and seen through the facade to the core beneath? Was she maybe his sister or even a paid guide? I thought again about what it means to love someone who goes through a horrific change in life, that forces both to reconsider who we really are inside and out. If we fell in love wiht someone for their looks how would we react if they lost them?

Further along, Abercrombie & Fitch, loomed large in the outdoor mall where I searched for coffee. The huge cathedral like doors were open displaying a 40 foot wide by 80 foot tall B&W photo of the typical A&F model, sultry, long dark haired, man-child with pouty lips and langourous eyes. Standing in front of his chin was what looked like a carved tax wax God, curly long blond hair, V-shaped torso completely bared to reveal stunning musculature, with rippling abs and an arrow shaped abdomincal muscle cage pointing straight down to his shaved pubis. Open buttoned jeans hung loosely on his hips and his languished pose offered no other suggestion than, "If I shift one inch, these plants will fall down revealing the package you all which you could access." Next to him slouched a fully, yet, baggily, clad woman in jeans, t-shirt and jean jacket. she may have been a highly paid model but absolutely paled in comparison to this golden creature next to her. Inside the store, disco music, dark lighting and flickering mirror lights promised a cross between Greenwich Village canoodling and high end cotton khakis for sale.

Inside the movie theatre, Eddi Murphy's latest movie features an obese woman completely in touch with her sexuality and not afraid to flaunt all of her assets, who's obsessed with his character. Many fat jokes followed and I was struck with these three images I had just witnessed. The face of tragedy, the face of beauty and the face of comedy. And how they all relate to how we are perceived in the world.

We know Madison Avenue sells goods by using impossibly idealized models to make us strive ever harder through our purchase power, to become little Gods & Godesses. Whether we are capable of ever acheiving these goals is irrelevant. We look to these benchmarks of perfection and aim high, often creating the chaotic cognitive dissonance which manifests itself in obesity, alcoholism, nuerosis, anomie, chronic debt to name a few dis-orders of the self-image. One day, some of us look in the mirror and see ourselves for the first time, as some of my clients report when asked when they decided to have surgery to lose weight. The first gray hair, the second wrinkle, the sagging skin, the inappropriately short skirt, the liver spot, signs of aging one day hit some of us and off we got to get Botoxed and Restalyne injected. We fight aging and imperfection in the hopes holding on to a self-image of perpetual youth and attractiveness.

But once we've mated, achieved success, why do we continue to care about how we look? Studies do show that "attractrive" people seem to have an easier time in life, rising higher up career ladders, mating "better", receiving more services so perhaps it's all really about keeping in the game of competing for scarce resources. When brute strength and fertility alone served to perpetute the species, looks as such probably weren't as important beyond good musculature, clear eyes, firm breasts and lush hair, all indicators of phsyical and procreative health. But now that we need not much more than some supple wrists for flicking ATM cards and racing across keyboards in order to survive, the "looks" thing seems superfluous. And with high tech fertility treatments, we can postpone child-bearing into our wrinkled, graying years, so those indicators of mating are less relevant as well.

I've read studies that show the mechanical, mathematical parameters of beauty which seem to transcend culture; ratios of eye width, nose length, space between nostrils and upper lips etc. And there is a particular formula which seems to prevail across borders and races. What's interesting is that this formula also applies to natural creations such as plants and geological formations. So perhaps there is a perfect ideal that we subconsciously understand and strive for because it represents health, vibrancy, nature's balance, life at it's best. Every culture has its idea of beauty whether the A&F model, the scarred faces of some African tribes, the zaftig figures in food scarce countries, the heft of warriors in ravaged lands. What's disturbing to me, is when one culture's ideal begins to become the ideal for all, as in the blond booby babes of baywatch, and AMerican eyelids in Asian Countries, height in China (people having their shin bones broken and stretched through surgery) and Youthseeking hiring practices in Mexico.

Where does this leave the scarred, the marred, the less than perfect to find their friendly mirrors? I think in the eyes of their beholders. For this woman who walked with her faceless man must love him for his personna, and the man marreid to the obese woman for her humor, and the aging homosexual lusting after the chiseled model for the promised memories of his own desirable youth. One man's beast can be another's beauty, but the ultimate admirer must be our own selves. Would that we could say: Mirror, mirror on the wall, I hold what I see in my own thrall.