This morning on "Talk of the Nation" -- with the singularly uninspired Corva Colman filling in for Ray Suarez -- and there was a discussion of the power of beauty in our society. The first caller was a man named Greg from Boston who pointed out that a)everyone, no matter their gender, race, size, or body is beautiful and b)there were no men on the panel.
A panel of two, that is, with Corva Colman as the moderator.
I could be wrong, but issues of beauty and body seem to affect women more than men in our society. Look at the covers of men's and women's magazines. Which sex appears on both? Yes, contestant 2, that's right: women, usually with medically enhanced and starved bodies.
There was a little discussion on how women considered "beautiful" in the 30s and 40s tended to be a bit more, shall we say, mature than the women today. Or should I say, the girls today. Of course, even the young women then came off as way more mature than their counterparts today: Greta Garbo was 23 or 24 when she arrived in America. Can you imagine a maturity skirmish twixt Garbo and Winona Ryder? I didn't think so.
Anyhow, I know the point that "Greg from Boston" was trying to make, but I'm sorry, he totally missed the point. Of course men like to look good, and we shouldn't judge people by how they look and everyone is beautiful, in their own way (la la la la)...but hello, welcome to the 1990s. Now that women are stronger and more independent than ever, we have to deal with Kate "I've-never-eaten-a-thing-in-my-whole-life" Moss. No matter how fast we run, we can't keep up.
I'm not immune to this, by the way. One of the things I noticed a lot at the ComicCon in San Diego was that there were a lot of obese people there. Not pudgy people, not fat people -- I mean obese people. Men who needed two chairs at the conference presentations, women who breathed loudly from sheer effort. People with large rolls of fat the size of loaves of breads affixed to their backs. Whose arms stuck out at awkward angles because there was no place to put their hands.
I discovered the depths of my bias against the seriously obese. I didn't want to sit near them, I hated looking at them, I wanted to slap whatever food -- yes, it was usually junk food -- out of their hands and say, "Take the stairs!" I was filled with loathing at the sight of people I don't even know, simply because of the way that they looked.
I know I'm not the only one out there who feels this way. And I know that seriously obese people know about this: the last two groups of people in our society it's okay to despise are smokers and the overweight. People who wouldn't dare say anything to the crazy driver who cut them off or to the shopkeeper who just stiffed them will walk right up to smokers and the overweight and insult them to their faces. Makes us feel good, I guess.
Judgement about looks goes on all the time, Greg from Boston, and it's vicious and it's horrible and it's unfair. And saying that we should celebrate our differences and everyone's beautiful is just pablum until we no longer hate the sight of someone who's overweight...or automatically assume certain things about "beautiful" people.
Last Updated: 10-Jul-96
©1996 Diane Patterson