I was thinking about all the different Beauty and Beast stories I’ve heard, and I realized there are two kinds. In one, the beast is eventually transformed, turned handsome. Beauty and the Beast. The Frog Prince. (I count Shrek in this category, although there, beauty is the one transformed. But in the end they match.)
In the second kind, there is no transformation. The beast stays a beast. Think Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dam, Cyrano, King Kong.
Here’s what’s interesting: In every transformation story, they live happily ever after. In every story where the beast stays a beast, he dies. The beast is never allowed to consummate his love. We don’t allow beauty to be defiled.
Even in the true beast stories–My Left Foot, Mask, The Elephant man–the beast dies young. Beauty correlates not just with youth, but with health. They’ve shown that athletes’ faces tend to be more symmetrical than average. And that goes a long way to explaining why we evolved to be attracted to beauty and repulsed by ugliness. But it’s hard news for the unattractive. It means not only do you get less love, you get less life.
Beautiful people face their own unique set of challenges, but their lot in life is still better than that of the ugly. Yes, it must be hard for beautiful people to always feel in competition, but at least they are in competition! They’re like Olympic athletes. They face tremendous stress. Their value is measured without regard to their inner selves. They devote their lives to something that is quickly lost as youth is lost, at which point they have to redefine themselves or feel worthless. But everything is fleeting. At least they have their moment of glory.
Yes beautiful people want to be seen and acknowledged as whole human beings, but that’s rare for everyone. Beautiful people at least get affirmed for something. Ugly people are rejected for artifice reasons. You can tell them (us?) it’s what’s inside that counts, but the world says different on a regular basis.
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Once in my early 20s, I went to a nightclub with my friend Christo. We were both shy guys so we made a deal that we’d each force ourselves to approach at least ten women and ask them to dance. We did it. and Between the two of us we very quickly collected 20 “no thanks” and our night was over early. The female to male ratio in that place was at least two to one. But all these women preferred to sit or stand around than to just have a dance with either of us. We joked about it, but it hurt.
But in fairness, you go to a nightclub with a fantasy. Our fantasy was not just to dance and have fun. Our fantasy was sex with an attractive woman. I’m not sure what their fantasy was. But it wasn’t short, scared and awkward.
This is a problem with beauty: It’s too wide a net.
Or, to change the form: You prepare a delicious picnic for your lover, but then here come the ants and the bees and the flies.
Everyone wants beauty. If you’re beautiful, you attract the ones you want but also the beasts. Then the beasts have to be rejected.
That’s why there are so many lonely people in the world. Lots of us are holding out for better than we are. We want someone gorgeous like the people on TV.
Christo and I could’ve gotten a dance that night. But we were aiming high. We also preferred nothing to giving up our fantasies, and so we went home alone.
How much love have you missed because the person offering it, some part of their face or body was the wrong shape or size?
In the Beauty and the Beast stories, the Beast never says “damn this shallow world that looks only at surface! It’s what’s inside that counts!” The Beast doesn’t hate superficiality, just hates himself. He shares the values that make him an outcast. But at least he’s not a hypocrite like me.
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Usually fairy tales are happier than reality, but in real life, beasts do sometimes win beauties. I live in LA. This town is full of such pairings. I hope to one day be a part of one. And really, who impresses you more – a beautiful woman or the ugly guy sitting with her? Beautiful people are all around us, but ugly people winning them over, that’s a bit more special. We don’t see that couple and say wow look at that beautiful woman. We see them and say, “What’s his story?” “That guy must be successful or a great lover or funny or something.”
As in life, so it is in the stories, the beast is always a man. Even in the true stories (at least the ones that are chosen to be made into movies). Beauty standards may shift and evolve across cultures and time, but one thing that has never changed is beauty is on women. We can’t handle a female beast. We can’t sympathize with ugly women. At least our storytellers don’t think so.
They made a gender-reversal version of Cyrano, The Truth about Cats and Dogs, but in the roles of Cyrano and Christian, instead of a beautiful man and an ugly man, they did it with a beautiful woman and a cute woman. So it made no sense.
Hollywood does that a lot – when they need an ugly heroine in a movie they take a pretty woman and put glasses on her. No offense to Siegel and Shuster, but glasses don’t change a face that much.
Villians can be actually ugly. It helps. We have a natural aversion to the unattractive. It sounds mean to say. And I might feel bad to say it if it wasn’t merely a restatement of the definition of unattractive. You see a bald guy in a movie and it’s a good bet he’s a bad guy or an idiot.
And really if you look at movies like this – there are so many beauty and the beast stories. They’re not just about good vs. evil, they’re about beauty vs. ugliness and we’re just waiting in suspense to see the good looking guy shoot the ugly guy. And since beastliness correlates with bad health and we are wired to be attracted to healthy specimens and repulsed by unhealthy, maybe the beauty vs. ugly story is also a little bit about life vs death.
But I feel like our storytellers could give us a little more credit. I love ugly faces! They’re interesting. I’d much rather look at a random sampling of what you’d find on a city bus than the blandly good-looking cast of just about any TV show.
Why does Wally Shawn always have to play a buffoon? He’s a cool guy. He’s smart. A playwright. But all the world knows is “Inconceivable!” Just once I’d like to see him as the hero…
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So I have this prejudice towards the ugly and some might say it’s encouraged by our literature, ugly writers romanticizing themselves, making themselves heroes. You can tell Cyrano was written by a writer.
But don’t you see, if you say that literature prejudices us against the beautiful, then you’re admitting that literature is made by the ugly. Which kind of supports my case.
Last episode I offered the idea that beauty can be bad for you. It suggests that ugliness is good for you. If beautiful people can be tempted to coast on their looks and turn out dim or mean, then doesn’t it make sense to imagine unattractive people will do better? Shouldn’t expecting parents hope for their children to be ugly? Is all the money spent on braces a bad investment?
Sometimes I fantasize having a deformed child. At a certain age, maybe after she was upset by some cruel treatment at school, I’d take her to a gym full of bodybuilders. I’d say “look at those men. Look at how big their muscles are. They didn’t start that way.” I’d point out one, bench-pressing a great weight, his shiny skin pulled tight around massive arms. “See that? Their strength comes from the weight. Life has given you more weight than most, but if you bear up under it, you will get stronger. It will get easier. And you’ll be stronger than anyone.”
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What are we?
We exist in a physical world, but we experience it from the inside. All our love, and anger, and worries and wishes, just about everything that makes up our human experience – happens inside, behind our faces. But our experience of everyone else, is from outside.
One thing I like about the medium of podcasting is it’s a more direct conduit from one soul to another. The word medium means something between two more extreme things. A go between. With visual media, TV and movies, and in real life, we often bounce off the surface of the other and never get in.
The Little Prince says:
“It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
I agree. but it’s so hard to ignore what’s right in front of you. The face is a medium. Our gift-wrap, the part of us that has so little to do with us, is the first thing anyone else sees, and for the most part, the only thing. We’re all lonely at times because of this. You can tell people how you feel, but how they feel about that, is going to depend greatly on how you look.
Prejudices don’t feel wrong when everyone around you shares them. Will people in a few hundred years look back on our anti-uglyism the same way we look back on racism now? Is it possible we will evolve to the point that today’s focus on surface will seem not only primitive but bizarre? I wouldn’t bet on it, but I’m not sure. I don’t even know what to hope for.
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So we’ve noted more than once that women seem better at looking past surface. But why?
Sheril Kirshenbaum, author of The Science of Kissing, says, “A woman puts a lot more investment into the [sexual] decisions she makes, because she is fertile for a much shorter period of time each month, and a man can theoretically inseminate countless women throughout his life.” I think this goes a long way to explaining the gender divide on beauty. The bee is not pretty. The flower is.
So I do think it’s natural we feel about beauty and ugliness the way we do. But not every natural instinct is a good one. It’s hard to think that loving beauty could be an evil, but it’s also hard to see how hating ugliness doesn’t go hand in hand with that. Sometimes I think the world isn’t fair and some people are lucky and some are unlucky and that’s just how it goes. But then other times I think even if the universe is random and harsh, what’s best about us are all the things we do to allay that.
