If the ratio of beautiful to average-looking people that existed in the basement of our student’s union the other night (80:20) were to somehow ripple in sultry waves out of the doors and spread to the real world, we as a population would be sentenced to years of ugly civil violence within a generation.
While the lucky majority who would suddenly resemble the attendees of the Fashion Rocks fashion show on Thursday night rejoiced, allowing industry to grind to a forgotten halt as they fawned over each other and masturbated furiously in hastily-arranged rooms of fresh mirrors, the 20% left without shapely noses, straightened hair or adequately rimmed sunglasses would be driven underground like the proles in 1984 (I mean the ones from the book, not miners) to squander a decade in confused self-loathing before a unifying average-looking leader (later played by Mel Gibson) emerged to lead them to a bloody coup. The beautiful people would provide resistance by their number but ultimately capitulate via their reluctance to blemish their perfect faces with sweat. Beautiful heads would roll.
Stood in a £2 Primark t-shirt (with a shandy stain on the left sleeve) I contemplated this dystopia and my probable role in it as before me, on the ‘cat-walk’, another 9-foot monument to mankind’s aesthetic potential strutted and pouted in some sort of dress I was vaguely aware I was supposed to notice.
On one of those evolutionary scales that shows a monkey gradually getting his shit together and becoming a man, this girl would occupy a space six places to the right of the first straight-backed one, two spaces to the left of a great swirling orb of transcendental purity so beautiful and true it can only be seen by babies in the first 30 seconds after they emerge from the labia. ‘She’s hot’ was my dry-mouthed observation – as adequate a summation of a person as it would have been to tell Hitler: ‘you’re a bit of a tinker Adolf, aren’t you…’
There is no ambivalence quite like that which afflicts a man when he is confronted by a woman so unattainable she might as be perched on top of a 300 foot high greased pole, boxed in a force field of searing agony and orbited by angry crows.
Far be it for me to reduce people to merely the sum of their looks, but when seen for the first time from an unassailable distance that is precisely what people are - and so perhaps it is not too trite to compare a beautiful man or woman to a wave breaking on rock dappled by the first ascending shadow of dawn, or a summer breeze snaking through the tips of a corn field, or a really, really nice tree. They all make the same eloquent case for a God, after all.
The problem for men is that in the case of seeing the beautiful woman (rather than the wave or the wind or the tree) is that seeing is not enough: the compulsion to ‘capture’ resonates suddenly in your core with an aching jolt. Herein lies the ambivalence. You never feel simultaneously more alive or more dead than at the sight of a woman you know wouldn’t give you any more than a bemused smile if you ever hiccupped your way over to talk to her.
This isn’t because she’s shallow, unapproachable or even necessarily that put off by the fact you obviously only own one pair of jeans. It’s because the sheer disparity between her physical beauty and yours would manifest its self in negative ways: in my case, most likely, a cringing effort to over-compensate with abstract gags and lots of animated shuffling, like a tearful crab trying to make its self walk like all the other animals.
Best not to try. Best to stand in the basement of the union, a crude chip of slate strewn upon a glistening infinity of bright, colourful pebbles, washing back the ambivalence with a plastic cup of beer, gazing up in a suspended sigh at beautiful impossibility, silently thankful that the ratio is the freak, not you.
While the lucky majority who would suddenly resemble the attendees of the Fashion Rocks fashion show on Thursday night rejoiced, allowing industry to grind to a forgotten halt as they fawned over each other and masturbated furiously in hastily-arranged rooms of fresh mirrors, the 20% left without shapely noses, straightened hair or adequately rimmed sunglasses would be driven underground like the proles in 1984 (I mean the ones from the book, not miners) to squander a decade in confused self-loathing before a unifying average-looking leader (later played by Mel Gibson) emerged to lead them to a bloody coup. The beautiful people would provide resistance by their number but ultimately capitulate via their reluctance to blemish their perfect faces with sweat. Beautiful heads would roll.
Stood in a £2 Primark t-shirt (with a shandy stain on the left sleeve) I contemplated this dystopia and my probable role in it as before me, on the ‘cat-walk’, another 9-foot monument to mankind’s aesthetic potential strutted and pouted in some sort of dress I was vaguely aware I was supposed to notice.On one of those evolutionary scales that shows a monkey gradually getting his shit together and becoming a man, this girl would occupy a space six places to the right of the first straight-backed one, two spaces to the left of a great swirling orb of transcendental purity so beautiful and true it can only be seen by babies in the first 30 seconds after they emerge from the labia. ‘She’s hot’ was my dry-mouthed observation – as adequate a summation of a person as it would have been to tell Hitler: ‘you’re a bit of a tinker Adolf, aren’t you…’
There is no ambivalence quite like that which afflicts a man when he is confronted by a woman so unattainable she might as be perched on top of a 300 foot high greased pole, boxed in a force field of searing agony and orbited by angry crows.
Far be it for me to reduce people to merely the sum of their looks, but when seen for the first time from an unassailable distance that is precisely what people are - and so perhaps it is not too trite to compare a beautiful man or woman to a wave breaking on rock dappled by the first ascending shadow of dawn, or a summer breeze snaking through the tips of a corn field, or a really, really nice tree. They all make the same eloquent case for a God, after all.
The problem for men is that in the case of seeing the beautiful woman (rather than the wave or the wind or the tree) is that seeing is not enough: the compulsion to ‘capture’ resonates suddenly in your core with an aching jolt. Herein lies the ambivalence. You never feel simultaneously more alive or more dead than at the sight of a woman you know wouldn’t give you any more than a bemused smile if you ever hiccupped your way over to talk to her.
This isn’t because she’s shallow, unapproachable or even necessarily that put off by the fact you obviously only own one pair of jeans. It’s because the sheer disparity between her physical beauty and yours would manifest its self in negative ways: in my case, most likely, a cringing effort to over-compensate with abstract gags and lots of animated shuffling, like a tearful crab trying to make its self walk like all the other animals.
Best not to try. Best to stand in the basement of the union, a crude chip of slate strewn upon a glistening infinity of bright, colourful pebbles, washing back the ambivalence with a plastic cup of beer, gazing up in a suspended sigh at beautiful impossibility, silently thankful that the ratio is the freak, not you.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment