On Beauty
There’s no doubt that, as a species, we respond to physical beauty. It’s unlikely that the Ruddster would have sought so many photo opportunities with Cate ‘The Radiant One’ Blanchett if she looked more like the back of a water buffalo than a refulgent goddess. People like Blanchett inspire cults. It must, seriously, be tough for her; the poor woman only ever meets people with sweaty hands who stutter, speak bollocks, blush, then back away apologetically before tripping over a pot plant. It must be like being trapped in the first twenty minutes of every Hugh Grant film ever made.
Fortunately for the equanimity of all, people as genuinely gorgeous as Cate Blanchett are uncommon. Even though I work in the biz we call show, I’ve met very few traffic-stoppingly beautiful people, partly because they’re as rare as genuine Louis Vuitton handbags on eBay, and partly because they make me shy away like an unblinkered pit pony. Extravagantly beautiful people are, let’s be frank, intimidating.
They are also notoriously bad shags, which is not to say that I’ve heard anything on the grapevine about Cate. I’m sure she ‘goes off’. However, if life has taught me and my many loose-lipped friends anything, it’s that the more objectively good-looking a lover is, irrespective of gender, the more likely they are to lie there like a speed hump, yawning and expecting to be adored. To paraphrase Sex and the City, ugly sex is hot sex, because less attractive people work harder.
All of which raises the question, why would anyone want to join BeautifulPeople.com, the world’s most elitist dating website? BeautifulPeople shot to notice when they announced that they’d dumped 5000 members from their site for packing on the kilos over Christmas.
Apparently, their more self-disciplined members – the ones who said ‘no’ to a second mince pie and sulked when they found out the gravy wasn’t lo-cal – complained. Imagine their horror, rocking up for an assignation with a so-called hottie and finding themselves with a fistful of budding love handle.
I’ve been looking for a definition of ‘beauty’ that includes the words ‘judgmental’ and ‘shallow as an Adelaide bush grave’, but I’m struggling. I can understand the desire to be accepted by a ‘beautiful people’ enclave – particularly if you have the emotional intelligence of Ja’mie King. And, after a few experimental forays into online dating myself, I can appreciate the attraction of weeding out the sad sacks who list their hobbies as ‘watching television’ and ‘rearranging my collection of turn-of-the-century spanners’.
And yet, I fear that BeautifulPeople.com have missed the essence of beauty by, I don’t know, the distance between birth and death? For one thing, with enough Photoshopping you could make Mother Teresa look like a hottie, so the pictures on the website are largely meaningless. You’re not getting access to beautiful people, you’re getting access to people with computer skills and the willingness to cheat.
I’m presuming that most of the members on BeautifulPeople.com are young. Young people are nearly always beautiful, although they mostly don’t appreciate it at the time, and they also haven’t yet worked out that a pain in the arse is a pain in the arse, no matter how good-looking they are. As Kinky Friedman once noted, ‘Every time you see a beautiful woman, just remember, somebody got tired of her.’
I’d venture that the truly beautiful people – those who aspire to be lovely on the inside rather than just piling on the fake tan – wouldn’t touch that website whilst wearing an avian flu mask and rubber gloves up to the armpit. There’s nothing ‘beautiful’ about exclusion and cruelty, or, for that matter, narcissism. One of Warren Beatty’s over-12,000 lovers woke up one morning to find him admiring himself in the mirror; in terms of turn-ons, that’s up there with day-old offal wrestling.
Beauty cannot easily be defined, a truth understood by one of the last century’s great, and most unusual, beauties, Miss Piggy.
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary, from time to time, to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.’
This piece originally appeared in ‘The Big Issue’.
Fiona Scott-Norman is a Melbourne-based writer and broadcaster. Her book, ‘50 Reasons to Quit/Keep Smoking’, is published by Affirm Press. Visit her website.
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