Ugly is as Ugly Does

I spent some time a few weeks ago pondering the notion, often propounded by the media, that American women have unhealthy self-images.

I was sitting on a rock on the shore of Pinecrest Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains, surrounded by the beauty of nature -- and the ugliness of several hundred fellow vacationers -- when it occurred to me that "unhealthy" was a generous adjective. In some cases I was actually nauseated.

I don't understand how this happened. You'd think, after 30 years of magazine covers designed to make women feel ashamed of their bodies, that homely, outsized women would be at least a little reluctant to loll about on the beach with six square inches of sheer fabric stretched across their girth so tightly that they look like the captives of a particularly unmotivated brigade of Lilliputians.

Where is the shame, people? The puritans get a bad rap for their repressive views on sexuality, but at least they didn't have to see three inches of ass crack waddling down Main Street on a regular basis. I have it on good authority, in fact, that the Salem witch trials were merely a slightly overzealous attempt to stamp out muffin-topping.

Somehow, in the campaign to convince people that major surgery, botulism injections and a rigorous schedule of vomiting are essential to a young woman's physical and psychological well-being, something went horribly wrong. On one hand, we've produced a bumper crop of plasticized anorexics with poison in their eyebrows -- and we can certainly be proud of that. On the other hand, a considerable number of women seemed to have learned precisely the wrong lesson from this media barrage. Apparently a lot of them think those magazines work sort of like a mirror. They pick up a magazine with Jessica Biel on the cover and think, "Oh, so THAT's what I look like. I really need to expose more of my abdomen."



I hate to tell you this, but NOBODY looks like that. Jessica Biel doesn't even look like that. Jessica Biel could pick up six magazines with her picture on the cover at the checkout stand, tell the clerk that she is buying them because a lot of people tell her she looks like Jessica Biel, and pay for them with her Jessica Biel branded Visa card with the name Jessica Biel embossed on it, and the clerk would still snicker and whisper under her breath, "In your dreams, honey."



--Interlude--

While I was thinking these deep and important thoughts, dangling my feet in Pinecrest Lake, a boy who looked to be about 8 years old was chucking rocks the size of his head into the water for no apparent reason. After about ten minutes of this, he walked over me, carrying a particularly smooth, round rock and said, "Do you think this is the flattest rock there is?"

I told him in no uncertain terms, "Nope."

He tried to skip the rock, and it sank.

--End interlude--

Look, I don't have anything against ugly people. I'm glad you're comfortable with your body. The problem is, the rest of us are extremely uncomfortable with your body, and we outnumber you like six billion to one. We go to the beach to enjoy ourselves, not to see the world's largest open air cottage cheese buffet.

Don't get me wrong; I think we should treat ugly people the same as everybody else. What galls me is that ugly people don't seem to appreciate how much effort this takes. If you're ugly, keep in mind that the people around you are doing everything they can just to maintain eye contact with you. If you insist on having a crappy personality as well, they have no reason to keep you around any more. Unless they're also ugly people with crappy personalities, in which case they're only hanging around with you because they have nowhere else to go. And that's just sad.

If you're an ugly person with a great personality, at least you have the option of hanging around with other ugly people with great personalities or, if you prefer, attractive people with crappy personalities. But if you're ugly on the inside as well, you're just screwed. You can tell yourself that you're ugly on the outside with creamy nougat on the inside, but if everyone around you has the personality of Rosie O'Donell and the looks of, uh, Rosie O'Donell, then the odds are pretty good that you're just a big onion of ugly with layer after layer of ugly under a thin papery membrane of ugly. It's also a bad sign when people burst into tears everywhere you go.



My wife and I were once standing in line behind a group of ugly women who were engaging in the favorite pastime of ugly women: talking smack about still uglier women. It was during this exchange that I developed the First Rule of Ugliness. As the conversation went from catty to caustic, I turned to my wife and said, "You know, ugly people really shouldn't be superficial."

She gave me a long, hard look and said, "Yeah, I think you have something there." It's great to have a wife who is so supportive.

Also, she's hot.



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