[thechat] Beardvolt and ugly nuts

Chris Marsh chrism at puffofsmoke.net
Wed May 22 08:31:00 CDT 2002


[..]

> >Why so much leaping to defend the beautiful people?
> >
> >Is everyone else round here so beautiful they got uppity?
>
> My point had nothing to do with defending beautiful people.
> My point was and is that I don't agree with stereotyping,
> judging others by their looks, skin color, race, gender. I do
> NOT agree with lumping people into a category as you did with
> your comment:

I would agree that if people wish to be perceived as merely people they
should be judged on their merits. However[0] one should not forget that
in the real world people have a tendency to stereotype *themselves* and
demand discrimination; albeit positive. Many, many physically
good-looking people demand that they be treated differently because they
are good-looking. Women demand that they be treated differently because
they are women, people of different cultures demand that they be treated
differently, and people of different ages demand that they be treated
differently because of their age. "Positive discrimination" or tokenism
leads to racism because of the resentment of people around the
discriminatee that someone should be awarded status not for their
merits, but for their race/gender/disability/sexual orientation.

> Now come out of your cave, go and get a shave and get that
> girl and report back to us what she's really like when you
> find out!  My guess is she's a really horrible person inside.
>  Most beautiful people are!

The main problem with this statement is not the generalisation about
"beautiful people", but the fact that physical beauty is subjective. How
can one comment like this if one is unaware of whether the subject
conforms to what the writer perceives as "beautiful"? The people that I
have found most beautiful throughout my life certainly haven't conformed
to the societally normal expectation of beauty. I think too few people
*really* differentiate between "beautiful" and "extremely pretty". There
is a certain logic that if you expend more than a certain amount of
effort to make yourself look pretty (or handsome) that you are
self-obsessed enough that you probably aren't a particularly interesting
person. Note: this doesn't make you horrible, bad or evil; just boring.

> >Way I see it is this... appearances create expectations... high
> >expectations
> >+ average performance = relative disappointment = perception of inner
> >ugliness in the outwardly beautiful.

I would also agree that this is a fair statement for an emotionally
naïve or very young individual. After spending more than a quarter of a
century viewing the opposite sex as anything from a distraction to a
quarry, I pay very little heed to prettiness. Prettiness is the hook.
Beauty is something you realise about someone after responding to the
hook. I have no failed expectations, as I have no expectations until I
know someone. After this you are in possession  of the facts, as it
were, so you have no expectations to be failed. Just the potential of
unrequited love and rejection crushing and suffocating you like the cold
hard ice of a shifting glacier :)

> And that's my point and where you and I disagree. I don't
> agree with creating expectations like that. :-) It has
> nothing to do with whether it's an expectation of someone
> outwardly beautiful, ugly, a certain skin color, gender,
> whatever. I've seen that it ends up creating a type of bias,
> potential discrimination, treating someone differently,
> whatever, whether subtle or severe.

Especially when you are younger, the expectations can be worth the pain
of rejection. That feeling that you get when you are young, and see an
object of desire enter your field of vision... Anything is possible!
Alas with age comes pragmatism. How I wish sometimes that I could
recapture the intensity of emotion from my late teens, even if the
following reality was often a disappointment.

*leans back, stares into space and reflects on days gone by*

Regards

Chris Marsh

[0] Anecdotal evidence from the UK




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