Physical Beauty – A Curse?
I have been seduced more than once by the face of physical human beauty, and I have been disappointed almost every time. Funny how that has worked out with really physically beautiful men and women in my life. Especially as a youngster, pure physical beauty drew me in relentlessly, hooked me and had me playing out some weird, mindless rituals to get close to it. Physical Beauty holds extreme, almost hypnotic power – it doesn’t necessarily have scruples.
Let me get real, as a youngster, I craved physical human beauty and pursued it at high cost. Most of the time it evaded me, however, I have ended up across the bar from it, in bed with it, best friends with it, looking back at it in the mirror, in strip joints with it in Tijuana and hitchhiking away from it in Yosemite. Physical Beauty has been dangerous in its power to lure me away from my own best interests.
The way I see it, physical human beauty in some ways is a curse. Beautiful people – acknowledged, appreciated, admired and adored for their striking beauty don’t have much impetus to develop what lies beneath the surface. Is a matter of fact it behooves them not to – any display of humanness actually detracts from pure physical beauty.
Think about it, images of extreme flawless physical beauty presented across the pages of fashion magazines are without a personality, they are flat – homogenous – static ideals of perfection. They certainly don’t open their mouths to reveal spinach between their teeth, or a self-conscious giggle.
Extreme physical beauty demands perfection – it is not human. I am starting to see that people with high levels of physical beauty are slave to it – boxed into an expectation of perfection. If I were to get really honest I could admit that I don’t want my visions of extreme physical beauty and ideals of perfection to open up and reveal spinach between its teeth.
I guess that means I do my part in de-humanizing, objectifying and exalting physical beauty. I need to work on that. Bring on the spinach.
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Sandy
Interesting to think about it. Sometimes I do imagine those women/girls in the magazine with a hideous horse laugh or self-conscious giggle. But mostly I’m just jealous. I guess it never occurred to me to feel sorry for them because they didn’t have to try as hard and therefore didn’t have to develop character. Here’s to character building.
Nov 13th, 2009