1
I am as addicted to beauty as anyone.
For months I sat behind a woman in church who was something of a pariah
on account of being crazy, not the sweet kind of crazy but the
desperate-mean-clutching-hitting kind—not literally hitting but she might as
well have—she needed people so badly that she tried to eat them alive, and when
they protested she would viciously attack them. But her hair, in back, was dark
and glossy, and it swayed and fell absolutely perfectly, and if all twelve
apostles had risen from the dead and joined in the praise songs I probably
wouldn’t have noticed, because I was so fixated on that hair. Struck with both
a real appreciation of its beauty and a desperate envy, because my hair doesn’t
do that. And I can hardly muster the decorum to even feel bad about this,
because I am an American woman in the early twenty-first century. And I wonder
if there has ever been a time and a place where physical attractiveness has
been so necessary, so worshiped, so easy to buy, so difficult to possess, so
absolutely central to everything women think about themselves and everything
that is thought about them: it exhausts me, it rules me, it enrages me, and
most of all
It confuses. The fuck. Out. Of. Me.
2
Now there’s a tentative movement afoot to try to counter the push towards
clone-femme beauty. It manifests itself as, for example, the Dove Real Beauty
campaign, wherein the Dove company, maker of soaps and assorted toiletries,
posts pictures and videos of women who don’t quite look like our regular
stick-thin models. There was, if you remember, the picture of a bunch of women
in their underwear who looked sort of like normal women, or were meant to
anyway. Since I (like most American women) have no idea what normal is, I have to
take their word for it. And I think there are videos of little girls with
freckles talking about their career aspirations and such. And the message is
that you, too, are beautiful, even if you don’t look like Kate Moss and her
descendants: you, with the freckles and the hips, you are also beautiful, and
we can prove it, because there’s a photo posted on a website with women who
kind of look like you.
Don’t think I’m cynical about this. I am wistful about it, really. I mean
I’m cynical about the fact that Dove is probably trying to make money off the
insecurity of women, but I assume that somewhere in the bowels of the
money-making machine are a few underpaid Dove employees who actually have a
child with freckles, or a set of hips of their own, that are driving them to
try to make a change. I applaud it. I just don’t know what to do with it.
Because the message is that all women are or can be beautiful, even if we don’t
quite match the standards, so it actually changes the standards, but it leaves
untouched the commandment that Thou Shalt Be Beautiful Or Thou Art Not a Woman,
and that’s what’s really bugging me . And what I’m wondering about and have
been for many years and probably will be till I die is this: are there any
women on earth of value who actually, objectively, verifiably, aren’t
beautiful? At least most of the time—they may be sweet, and smart, and talented
at many useful things; they may be tender-hearted, interesting, resourceful, or
any number of superlatives, and they may even have attractive pieces here and
there—nice hands, smooth ankles, what have you—but taken as a whole, the lady
in question is homely or plain or just plain ugly?
I mean reach deep down and remember the grade-school teacher who had such
wispy hair you could see her scalp in the sun, and she also had a scalp
condition so what you could see was scaly and flaky, and her nose looked like a
potato, but she never wrote notes home to your parents when you screwed up
because she seemed to understand that they really would beat the shit out you
if she did. Or the girl down the street with the scars on her face that no one
ever explained that got red and shiny in the sun, who could tell great jokes
and helped you the day your cat had kittens in the garage. The babysitter with
a thousand moles who let you stay up late while she read interesting thick
books to you when you were nine and only read at a second-grade level and
didn’t want anyone to know. They were not beautiful. No matter how wonderful
they were, they were not beautiful, not on the outside anyway, not for more
than a fraction of a second in a certain light in the midst of one particular
movement of the hand or turn of the head; they were ugly, dammit. If they’re
still alive they are probably more ugly now. And what I want to know is, does
that make them less valuable, less lovable, and less wonderful? Do we have to
find a way to think of them as beautiful in order for them to have value? And
could no one fall in love with such a woman, knowing she wasn’t
beautiful—listen to the voices of the culture, saying “but if someone did fall in love with her, she’d be beautiful to him
(or her)”—but I dunno, now, I’m talking serious scars, serious moles,
serious potato nose and scalp condition, friends. Are they beautiful? Must they be beautiful? This is not a
feminist polemic, not that there’s anything wrong with feminist polemics. This
is a real question.
3
Ostensibly for someone to be in love with you (as opposed to just loving
you), you have to be fuckable. Fuckable
is different than beautiful; you can be one without the other, but they sure do
share a lot of characteristics, unless your partner has some odd fetishes.
Although many of the most-seen models are hardly fuckable (unless people have
some odd fetishes indeed; what’s a human-bone fetish called?). Yet a whole lot
of women want to look like them, and it seems a lot of men want to date
them—not sleep with them necessarily but date them, or own them, or be seen
with them, or something. What do we make of that? By our culture’s standards they are not
really fuckable, but they are beautiful, and that’s better. That’s always been
better.
The Bible addresses this only occasionally. Job’s daughters were
beautiful; Abraham’s wife Sarah was beautiful or, at least, other men wanted
her (and that was a problem), thus fuckable; Abraham’s grandson Jacob married
two women because he wanted the younger, prettier one and got tricked into
marrying the older, less pretty one who must have been nonetheless fuckable
because she had a lot of kids. Esther had beauty she used for godly purposes,
so it was a good thing, and, per the book of Proverbs, beautiful women are
dangerous. The Song of Solomon has a whole lot to say about beauty, but it’s
all overlaid with allegory and symbolism about God and Israel or the
church—plus you have to kind of feel ok about rantings on a woman’s beauty that
include “temples like pomegranates” and a nose “like the tower of Lebanon.”
In the New Testament the issue drops completely away. St. Peter only
wants us to worry about inner
beauty. St. Paul doesn’t want us to braid our hair[1]. But the actual women we hear about—Mary the
mother of Jesus, Mary of Bethany and her sister Martha, Mary Magdalene, and the
few non-Marys—Priscilla, Lois, Eunice, Lydia, Dorcas—we have no idea what any
of them look like. Even the woman taken in adultery is not described. Obviously
she was fuckable, but St. John doesn’t actually use that word in his gospel.
And that’s it. Oddly, Jesus does not seem to factor our beauty or our
fuckability into his final judgment of us. At least it never says he does.
4
And what do you make of the “vaginal rejuvenation” trend? They are
sending out coupons in the mail now, in case money is what’s stopping us. I
think originally the focus was on tightening up one’s ladyparts after some
highly loosening event, say, giving birth to a 12-pound baby or something. But
if I understand it aright the most recent emphasis is on making all those outer
parts, those confusing flaps and folds, look more “feminine” –oh, how the
Jezebel girls went
crazy about that, how can a vulva not
be feminine??!! But after I read about the procedure, of course, I became
uneasy about my own. I found a website that has pictures of a million vulvas on
it, just to show what they really look like, and I was stunned. Most women
don’t see other women’s naked bodies; we have no idea what women are supposed
to look like, and whatever pornography we see makes it worse, since many of
those ladies already had the operation or were the prototype for its specs. The
vulvas are here if
you want to look.
I came away from that site re-converted, if I needed to be. No one but
God could think that up. Such baroque extravagance, such a riot of frills and
flourishes for no apparent purpose but the holy love of embellishment. They’re
like sea anemones. None of them look like mine, exactly, but then none of them
look like each other either. I perfectly understand the impulse to cut them
down to size, make them something human senses at a normal pitch can take in.
But I think that’s probably blasphemous.
And of course, gentlemen, I don’t mean to leave you out. I realize a lot
of you felt the touch of the knife early on, and either way—cut or uncut, up or
down, hard or soft—naked, it’s obvious that God had his fun with you too.
5
There are videos out on YouTube called “thinspiration” videos, which are
made by and for anorexics to help them stay true to their cause. They show thin
women, naturally. And the clips of your average Anorexic At Home showing off
her razor-edge hipbones are merely frightening and disgusting for a woman only
normally fucked up about food and weight (I once took a test at a student
health center that was supposed to help people figure out if they had an eating
disorder. It was quite bewildering, since the behaviors described applied to
every single woman I’d ever known. You gotta really go a long way out to get to
a diagnosable illness, but the “thinspiration” girls surely go more than far
enough).
But the videos that use professional photos—just a montage of images,
usually in soft focus, of waif-like models sitting at tables, looking out
windows, standing in doorways—oh, those will pull you in. The look of
fragility, of flower petals masquerading as girls. They’re posed and styled,
and on top of that photographic techniques are applied to create an atmosphere
of mystery and allure—strip those girls down and put them in the middle of your
living room and they’d look like awkward, Dali-esque bone sculptures. But in
the pictures they’re everything you think you ought to be. And no matter how
much you know it’s an illusion, it still can make you hate yourself, turn you
into a believer whose whole goal is not to make the body attractive, but to
escape it altogether, to transform into a fleshless shimmer of light.
This is much like what some early Christians wanted. It was and is a
popular heresy to reject the body in favor of pure spirit, to believe you must
manifest only the eternal transcendent through your temporal bones and skin, or
be damned. To remain living, yet overcome the body’s needs and betrayals:
whatever is perfectly beautiful is also perfectly safe and perfectly holy.
Become music, become poetry; become the wavering shadow of violet light in
cities with alien names, the echo of phrases from lost lullabies. The only way
sex factors into that, I think, is that if you can penetrate it, maybe you can
possess it. If you could get inside it, surely you also could break free of the
grimy cost of the everyday into the fire of constellations. We want to be that,
own that, believe that would save us, even though perfectly beautiful girls
keep dying horribly every day. We don’t learn, you see. There’s something in us
that steadily, stubbornly refuses to accept the reality of being in a body at
all.
6
In the evangelical Christian tradition of which I am more or less a part,
women are very quiet about appearance issues. They almost never talk about it.
You can tell someone she looks nice, but I don’t usually hear Christian women
admit to being obsessed about their faces and bodies--and maybe a lot of them
aren’t. I don’t mean to speak for them all. Well, weight can be talked about.
You can talk about how fat you are, or feel, but the problem with wanting to be
attractive is that there’s a couple thousand years of tradition that says that
beauty is a snare evil women use to deceive and generally draw men away from
God. Yet, hand-in-hand with that is a strong undertow of cultural belief that a
good girl is a pretty girl—as in all the fairy tales. Ugly women are hags and
crones (read, witches). But women with any sexual charm are probably witches
too, besides being whores. It’s no coincidence that Mary Magdalene for years
was painted as a sexy prostitute, even though the Bible never says she was
either. So you’re kind of screwed either way. The proverbial good woman of
Proverbs 31—which is the closest thing the Bible has to a template for women—is
mostly strong and hyper-competent at everything. She keeps everybody fed, busy,
and rich. She’s well-dressed, but as for her looks—well, “Charm is deceptive,
and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.[2]” But
that woman is so confident that you can’t help the impression that she is, at
least, handsome, and probably more. Sela Ward could play her, if they made a movie.
In the church, the trick is to be beautiful without being too sexual, and
women come down on every side of that. One option is the
practical-wife-and-mother look, which usually sports minimal or no makeup, very
sensible hair, and, say, a jumper over a tee shirt and tennis shoes. Or a kind
of missionary dress that covers everything. This look says “I’m a servant of
the Lord and I’m not trying to lead anyone off the straight-and-narrow.” It’s the
closest thing to a secular nun look, and very popular. Another possibility is
to cultivate an absolutely polished, coiffed-and-made-up image—for this one it
helps if you can afford thousand-dollar suits, and like to stand in the front
of the room with a microphone. I think that version started in the south. This
look is not necessarily aiming at beauty; it has more to do with perfection.
The word “impenetrable” comes to mind, and there is great safety in that. It
allows a woman to look good and still be virtuous.
Then there is the really-big-hair-and-fake-eyelashes look that Tammy Faye
Baker started, and Jan Crouch and maybe a few other Christian celebrities
copied. This is a kind of bizarre charismatic morphing of the
coiffed-and-made-up thing. I got a real soft spot for these ladies, naturally.
They look pretty insane, and they’re not exactly sexual, but they’re just to
the left or right of sexual, if you know what I mean. Like they might be sexual
if you could just calm them down a little, but the flame of the Holy Spirit has
engulfed every other passion. They are like one of those melty chocolate cakes
for the microwave that you heated a little too long and it’s likely to explode
as soon as you put your fork in it. But sweet.
I wish church women could talk about these issues. I suspect a whole
bunch of us are secretly tormented by them, skirting the schizophrenic
double-bind every time we get dressed for a worship service. Everything in our
culture teaches us we are not really women at all if we are not beautiful, and
the church never contradicts that openly; it only sets up a second vortex on
the other side of the room.
After all, God is the author of beauty, in all its forms; God is the one
who invented it and keeps it coming generation after generation; it is, we
know, one of his primary characteristics. Is it, then, a duty to be as lovely
as we possibly can, given whatever real limitations we have? God is said to
manifest himself to people as beauty, truth, or love—maybe some of us are meant
to be more truthful or more loving than we are beautiful. The poem by John
Keats says “beauty is truth, truth, beauty,” but perhaps ugliness, whether
cultivated or unavoidable, is also a form of truth. I have a feeling good
Christians would say a loving woman is always beautiful. But is she fuckable?
And what does that have to do with being created in the image of God, who, by
the way, also invented sex?
7
There are women who are utterly beautiful when they get up in the
morning, without any help at all. And many who think the whole beauty industry
is stupid and are perfectly happy in baggy pants with their hair pulled back
and not a stitch of makeup, because they are busy doctoring cancer patients or
gardening or creating maps of the ocean floor or what have you. And poor and
desperate women far too overworked to have time for the mascara and the hair
dye. And women marooned in a drought of beauty knowledge, like maybe they came
up in the FLDS church or something, and they simply don’t know and don’t know
how to find out how to reduce cellulite or pluck their eyebrows. And women who
have been hurt, who have no interest in being attractive because they believe
it will lead to being hurt again. And people with serious body dysmorphia who
can’t leave the house because they truly believe they’re monsters, only they
aren’t, but their suffering is just as bad as if they were.
But awhile ago Tyra had this show on with women who are jealous of some
other woman in their lives, their roommate or best friend or sister. And Tyra
gave those women makeovers and she gave the objects of their jealousy anti-makeovers
to make them ugly and then she took everyone to a shopping mall and a bar to find
out how the other half lived. The jealous girls felt all hot and self-esteemish
and the newly-ugly friends/roommates/sisters felt really awful about
themselves, and like most of Tyra’s shows it left you feeling like everyone
learned a good lesson only for the life of you you couldn’t tell what it was.
Here’s the thing: all the jealous women were fine from the beginning.
They were all reasonably good-looking. They just stuck their hair in sloppy
ponytails, wore sweats, put on no makeup and generally did not make an effort.
The implication was that perhaps their self-image was so debased they were sort
of emotionally disabled from prettying themselves up, but I have to tell you,
this sort of thing drives me crazy. This is news, that lipstick and hair care products
will make you prettier? This is rocket science? If you don’t like how you look
and you feel bad about yourself, but you are even somewhat normal-looking, then
good makeup and hair styling and nice clothes will make you look hot. There.
Now you can’t say you don’t know.
I will confess to a small amount of satisfaction when the pretty girls
found out what it’s like not to be so pretty: they were ignored, people avoided
them, men made rude remarks under their breath, etc. But that was a very petty
feeling on my part and really points to the fact that I probably shouldn’t
watch shit like that, because it’s bad for me and skews my moral compass
somewhere to the southwest of where it should be.
So, trying to get back to true north, let me ask: is the problem that
making an effort, with the mascara and the jewelry and the fancy hair and all,
exposes you to potential ridicule? Does it say “I actually think I am a woman,
a sexual being, a potential partner for someone,” and if the person looking at
you finds you disgusting then they can laugh at you and if you find out about
that you will want to kill yourself?
If so, let me point you to a particularly vile website, http://idontlikeyouinthatway.com/,
written by a guy named Todd who persistently makes electronic gagging noises
over celebrity bodies, usually in bikinis or otherwise undraped. If the women
(or, sometimes, men) display anything resembling normality, they are ruthlessly
mocked and reviled. I watch that site like a train wreck—something else I
should not do, though I occasionally put in an anonymous comment to try to
inject a tiny bit of sanity. Then I myself am anonymously mocked and reviled,
but (I tell myself) I at least offered an option for a different way of
thinking. But in a way that site overshoots the mark so far that it clears the
mind. For Christ’s sake, if Jennifer Lopez in a bikini is not acceptable, then
none of us are, and the playing field is completely level. Stick on your false
eyelashes and sashay your ass out wherever it wants to go.
But I certainly wish that just once one of these goddamn makeover shows
would bring on someone with real appearance problems. A women with her jaw half
gone from cancer, or that poor little Haitian girl who had the enormous tumor
on her face. Enough with the low-hanging fruit, Tyra. Seriously.
8
Lately I’ve been pondering the phenomenon of the “hot mess.” Sometimes
women are called this because there is absolutely nothing attractive about them
(hot as in a fresh pile of dog shit, not hot as in sexy). But sometimes it’s
because they are both hot, and a mess. It’s frequently applied to Helena
Bonham Carter in a good way, and to Amy Winehouse in an
I’m-not-exactly-sure-which way. Patti Smith, a punk rock hot mess for many
years, recently shocked an interviewer because she seemed to have split ends,
surely a mortal sin which completely erases her musical and poetic
contributions. Women are called hot messes who are not completely polished,
buffed, and tanned: whose hair is out of control, who may be sometimes drunk or
otherwise intoxicated, or even just don’t dress to match the current fashions.
Really, my highest ambition in the beauty department is to be a hot mess. My
favorite celebrity women tend to fall into this category. You never know what
to expect from them; their sexuality (and usually their money and talent)
belongs to them, and they really don’t give a shit what some loser like that
Todd guy thinks of them. In fact, while lying in bed with their usually-famous
lovers and counting their usually-plentiful money, I think they read comments
like his and laugh their asses off.
Tyra Banks is not a hot mess. I wonder if she wants to be.
9
I am not a wife. I have never been a wife, but I am aware that the rules
for appearance seem to be different for wives. In fact a lot of women sort of
stop trying to look good after they’re married, at least for a period of time,
and I will confess to a tremendous envy of a woman so loved, and so sure of
being loved, that she will chop her hair off, leave off all her makeup and
still walk around the world radiating confidence. I’m guessing some of the
husbands don’t like it (well, I don’t have to guess; I’ve seen the talk shows
where the wives get makeovers), but there are men who seem completely oblivious
to any kind of culturally-defined appearance deficiencies their wives may have.
It is, I am actually asserting here, completely possible for a normal man to be
wildly in love with and attracted to a woman who does not look like a stripper.
And yes, I have trouble believing that. But I’ve seen it.
Still, the same man, if he were single and set up with a woman like that
on a blind date, would likely not call her again. This is what is so confusing.
Many single men, regardless of what they themselves look like, start their
lists of must-haves with the word “beautiful.” Many in fact seem to have a
rock-solid conviction that they are entitled
to a beautiful woman. The man can be ugly, poor, stupid, what have you—lacking
any quality that would put him on the culturally-defined Desirable Men list—and
yet seem blissfully certain that there is a beautiful woman out there somewhere
dying to spend her life with him. Maybe this is a pose; maybe no man can say
publicly, “yep, I’m pretty dumb and ugly, myself, so I’d be happy with a lady
who just had the basic set of features.” And luckily, maybe, men seem to easily
mistake “done” for “pretty”; a woman in a tight dress with highlighted hair,
sprayed-on tan, and heavy makeup will very often be considered… at the very
least fuckable, but a whole bunch of people, men and women alike, will pass
over that woman’s coarse or dull or unsymmetrical features and call her beautiful.
It’s interesting.
But once you’re a wife, your other qualities start to matter more.
Ostensibly, most men want to be married to someone kind and smart and
competent, someone who will stay up all night with them when they’re sick and
cheerfully bring in the chicken soup, someone who will laugh when their dog
drags garbage through the living room and clean it up without beating the dog
to death. Someone they can trust alone in the house when they’re out of town.
Someone who won’t drain the checking account in a day, or strand the
mother-in-law on the freeway, or drive the car to a crack house and trade it to
a guy for drugs.
But is any of that arousing; does it make a wife seem more attractive? Do
you look at the woman who brought you chicken soup last week and say, “Boy, I
sure want to do her”? Or is it another thing entirely? I know the stereotypes;
I know that supposedly men want a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the
bedroom (and, I imagine, at other times, a nurse, a confidante, a cheerleader,
or an interior decorator, in various rooms at various times), but I don’t know
if any of these things that don’t directly have to do with appearance actually
increase and cement desire, or if that’s purely the result of the swing of a
bare breast and the pout of red lips and all that. And of course, a large factor has to be
whether the wife wants to do her husband, but that’s a whole other topic.
I understand it’s complicated. I am not so unacquainted with human
relationships that I don’t realize that your romantic partner can be your
parent/sibling/other self/best friend/lover/rival/ child/enemy, all in a day or
in an hour, and that the ties that bind are often indescribable, that sex takes
a thousand different forms and meanings over the course of a long-term
partnership. I realize there aren’t a lot of simple yes/no answers as to what
makes a person desirable and that the answers shift and change and float on the
currents of power and need, truth and illusion, and that’s just while you’re
shopping for groceries and getting the mail.
Maybe for wives the stakes are higher but the margins are wider.
10
It occurred to me that one mistake we make about beauty may be a form of
mixing up climate and weather. I live in a hot and arid climate, where today it
was 109 degrees, though today, temporarily, the weather was humid. Into the hot
dry days come thunder clouds and there are nights when we are subject to
dramatic flash floods and terrifying lightning storms that can set your house
on fire. There is the occasional microburst, which is simply a tornado going in
the wrong direction.
People talk about beauty as if it were like climate, some fixed quality a
person has. Maybe sometimes it is; I suppose there are people who are beautiful
for their whole lives and die that way—probably at not too advanced an age. But
for the bulk and mass of us, maybe beauty is more like weather—something that
passes over us, created by changing conditions, which alters form. One hundred
and nine degrees in a city is generally not beautiful, though if you look very
hard there is a certain harsh drama to it—for those sufficiently hardened, it
may have a Tilda Swinton sort
of beauty. And lightning is scary, but pretty. In its way.
I have no idea if this climate/weather theory of mine is true. Go outside
at midnight sometime in a raging storm with a hand mirror and a flashlight and
look at yourself. Let me know.
11
There also seem to be women who, making it their profession, come to see
beauty purely as a commodity. That is, they sit still for hours while stylists
craft their hair and face and wardrobe, and then they do whatever it is they
do—walk down a runway, sing, act, throw themselves around a pole—with great
professionalism. They may even have fun doing it; they may excel at any number
of entrancing activities, say ballet dancing or playing the guitar like
Segovia. And both the dancing and the playing will be infused with
extraordinary loveliness and sensuality and power, channeling some archetype of
the Eternal Feminine, so that everyone who sees them falls in love. They have
managed to take that energy, which is theoretically within every woman and
which is usually shared only in a very small and intimate circle, and project
it outward to the whole world, and they have made it pay them.
But when they’re not working, when they’re hanging around with their
families or alone, these women often throw it all off, shed their style with
the Eternal Feminine like a coat on a hot day. They wear baseball caps and
dodge photographers. The requirements levied on professional beauties seem to
reverse the usual order of things; their sexuality can’t be truly expressed
with the trappings of attractiveness choking it. Their real femininity,
relentlessly divested of the illusions most of us carry, seems to be a
fortressed and uncompromising thing. And that must make them either much more
or much less fuckable than the rest of us. I haven’t slept with any of them, so
I can’t tell you which.
12
How does God see us? Does he not notice or care how we look, seeing only
our souls? The first book of Samuel, chapter 16, verse 7 says, “The LORD does
not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but
the LORD looks at the heart.” There is absolutely no indication in the Bible
that I can remember to say that he favors the pretty ones. In fact he seems to
favor the afflicted. Comfortingly enough to the appearance-challenged, all the
prophecies[3] said Jesus would not be good to look at and
none of the gospels mention people being impressed by his handsome face or
exceptionally toned body .
But I believe it’s something like money. God doesn’t hate rich people,
he’s just not impressed with their money, realizing it’s more a danger than
anything else. I don’t believe he considers money wealth and I don’t think he
sees beauty as superiority. But generally speaking God has some odd priorities,
so you can’t exactly tell time by him.
God sees both what we are and what we have been, not to mention what we
will be. Being outside of time, it’s not as easy for him to forget what you
looked like covered with mud and dog hair in your younger days, and all the
time you’re all dolled up in your prom dress or your Victoria’s Secret bustier,
he can see you years later in the nursing home bed with your sad, thin white
hair. The whole body for him must seem more like any given outfit does to us;
easily taken off and exchanged for a different look, and eventually it’s all
taken off entirely and discarded. Naked
in front of God means something different than naked in front of another
person.
But I know he cares about our bodies. Matthew 10: 30 says, “…even
the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” So he’s paying attention. From the minute consideration he seems to
give each snowflake and each fingerprint in creation, he seems like one of
those parents who go on and on about every characteristic of their baby—its
ears, its knees, the way it makes noises at the trees out the window in the
morning—as if all of that were intrinsically precious and amazing, when you
just can’t see it at all. The body matters to God, or he wouldn’t have taken
one on himself: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He likes flesh; he values it. Does he perhaps
find us intrinsically beautiful despite how disgusting we think we are? Being
made in his image, we are always reflecting some part of his beauty and glory
no matter how much damage has been done. Does he see the beauty and glory more
than the damage? Does that little piece of dazzle in the midst of all the dirt
make us absolutely desirable to him, attract him to us when a sensible deity
would walk quietly away and never look back?
Or does God see the ugliness and love us anyway? Ugliness being a part of
the fall into evil and death—our sin, our parents’ sin, the sin of the
corporation that released the toxins that gave you the bad rash and the awkward
extra digits—does God see our ugliness as something needing to be forgiven and
healed and redeemed? Is there a difference for him between things you can’t
help, like a birth defect or an injury, and all those things we do to
ourselves: when you haven’t bathed for days and you reek of sweat and bad sex
and cigarette smoke, when your skin is yellow from drinking or your teeth
rotten from drugs—does his compassion reach down, longing to gather us up and
heal us, feeling more love because we are so damaged? Is his holy repulsion at
the ugliness overwhelmed by tenderness?
My friend L. said (and I can’t believe I forgot this) that God wants our
inner self to be what he designed it to be—that unique, amazing person he
thought up in the mists of eternity, who most of us long for but don’t know yet
how to be—and then he wants the outside to reflect the inside. Meaning God finds
the most beauty in our authenticity, which can shine through any number of
physical calamities; at least it can if it’s God doing the watching. When you
are truly you, and you truly look like you, that is when God looks at you with
great joy and says: Yes. That’s what I meant.
13
It seems to me there are different kinds of beauty that we aspire to, and
we mix them up. The cheapest is the kind of beauty you can measure—symmetry, my
dears! —and also that you can sometimes attain through surgical means. Tummy
tuck, breast enlargement, dental work; plane the nose down, build the chin up,
implants in the cheeks, Botox in the forehead, and there you are. Assuming you
were not too frightening to begin with, you will look like every other passably
pretty female walking by on the street.
The Extreme Makeover show
(which launched a thousand appearance crises) and its semi-pornographic sister,
The Swan, were like factories that
processed women—I don’t think it’s too strong to say rendered them—into acceptably pretty girls. Sometimes they did look
like better versions of themselves at the end but often they started out as
women who were just unique looking, who had a sideways, intricate kind of
beauty. There was one woman with a long, ski-slope nose and a weak chin who
looked exactly like the angels painted by somebody or other, someone famous.
She really was oddly and extremely beautiful, but she just hated and hated and
hated herself. When they were done with her there was nothing left you’d ever
look at twice, and she was thrilled.
I know a woman who wears no makeup and certainly does not match all the
standards, but watching her is like watching a flock of birds. If you don’t
know what I mean, sit someday and watch when a flock of birds lights in your
yard. They will variously shake out their wings in the sprinkler, plant
themselves along the telephone lines and hunt among the grass, interacting with
the world on its own terms but with a single-minded, birdish concentration. And
after everything that can be gleaned from that particular scene has been,
finally the whole group will lift off and wheel away in their vanishing,
private formation. I think most people, divested of tasks, can be fascinated
for a very long time by that. It is, again, the variousness and unity combined;
the details of each distinct individual, down to the flick of a single feather
or the gleam of one black eye, combined within unity, a strange harmony within
diversity.
I do not find that same fascinating quality in myself, and I doubt it’s there,
but I suspect people can never see it in themselves. We are not capable of
receiving the impressions we make, unless we are so studied and artificial that
every impression is crafted. That is yet another form of beauty, I suppose, the
Oscar Wilde kind. I don’t think it’s art, but it’s artistic. You can study it,
like the violin, and if you study and practice it long enough, it may come to
seem (or maybe even be) natural to you.
I think American women tend to assume that beauty should either be completely
spontaneous, pouring out of them the way lava erupts from a volcano, or else
the architecture of an expert, prepared apart from them and grafted onto their
bodies. Whereas I believe women from older cultures see it more as an art to be
cultivated. What you cultivate is partly
the idea of the camera or the watching eye; to be always lovely means to be
always worth watching. In that paradigm, to forget you might be observed, that
you should please the observer, even in your most private moments, is to betray
yourself. I think this may be the allure French women are supposed to have,
which some filmmaker described as “a combination of delicacy, luxury, and
intelligence.” Ponder that, my friends. Does it mean anything? Does it mean
everything? If I could ever achieve it, would it make me beautiful? Would it
make me fuckable? Pump yourself a syringe full of botulism, and drink up. Tell
me what you see.
