We live in a pretty vapid society. I would like to have argued that with social media and self-styled “influencers” cropping up like black mold across the media spectrum, that we even live in a particularly vain time. But I don’t think I can. The adulation of physical beauty standards have been part-and-parcel with civilization for a long time. Social media and the internet has just increased the bandwidth.
Many people… I would even say most people, are enamoured with the idea of physical beauty. Even if some of us have given up on the notion of attaining whatever golden standard floats around in our collective consciousness at any given time or place, we tend to be jarred out of our jadedness whensoever it slams us in the face like what some department store cosmetic section might.
We are undone by beauty. We are gobstruck by beauty. And so many of us act as if beauty is the greatest attainable attribute that a human can hope for.
But to me, human attractiveness and beauty looks not like a blooming orchid but rather a hissing cobra. As opposed to the norm, whensoever I am confronted by beauty, I retreat in fear of being bitten. Because I have learned, from sordid lessons supplied to me by beauty paired with cruelty, that human beauty promises nothing but manipulation, control, and inevitably hurt.
You see, no one is immune to the siren song of human-to-human attraction. Not a hormone-laden teenager, nor an old fart with nothing to show for but a bank balance. And not your garden-variety misanthrope either, no matter how hard I’ve tried to insulate myself. And once that force of nature (or force of botox and silicone, as the case might be for some) has snared another, it seems to me to be very difficult to untangle oneself from that trap again.
For very few labour to attain our ridiculous beauty standards without some intentions to push all those efforts along. Maybe they wish be better treated. Maybe they want to be adored. Maybe they want the attention. Or maybe they’ve applied sales market arguments to their whole sense of self: If you’re not seen, you don’t exist. No matter the reason, however, it all boils down to a particular desire. They want power. Power and influence over other people.
You see, people function not dissimilarly to an electric current. People tend to take the path of least resistance. They tend to make use of whatever advantage they’ve got. If they’re strong, they tend to rest on martial or athletic laurels. If you’re smart, you tend to labour academically. And if you’re beautiful, and can influence people to bend like reeds in the wind at your whim, you tend to make use of that handy ability over any other. Most people play to their strengths. And if you don’t have to work physically or mentally to get ahead in life, but can bend other people to your will to put the work in for you, odds are you will. It’s not a matter of laziness or psychopathy. It’s human nature. We, as a general principle, tend to make use of the path of least resistance.
Personally, I’m allergic to being controlled. To being manipulated and twisted without my consent. So when such perceived beauty turns its eyes upon me, my knee-jerk reaction isn’t to bend like a reed, but to shy away as if a vengeful deity suddenly turned its attention to me. If beauty smiles at me, my heart cries wolf and tells me to dismiss the attention as manipulation. If beauty touches me, my fluttering heart does not belie excitement, but rather anger that someone would so brazenly take advantage of me.
Because why would beauty grace me with any other intention?
It’s a bitter state of mind. It is a bitter state of being. I recognize fully that my convictions and spontaneous reactions stem not necessarily from truth, but harsh lessons ingrained by emotional scar tissue. But try as I might, I cannot unlearn those lessons. Because no matter how hard I search, I cannot find sufficient argument against them.
So what? What relevance does my emotional trauma and convictions have to society at large?
Well, I think plenty of people will agree that our current zeitgeist is too enamoured with the notions of beauty. I think most would agree that people would be better off if skin-deep allure wasn’t peddled so tirelessly as one of the chief virtues of modern civilization. And though I wouldn’t want to argue that anyone should share my fear of falling under the influence of someone’s beauty, I think everyone would be well served of giving up the notion that earthly appeal is somehow indicative of virtue, or even a virtue onto itself. Because as it stands, nearly fifty percent of the population of a supposed world power supports a gilded spoon fashion designer whose daddy president sortof kinda wants to fuck as a peer to a doctor of quantum chemistry chancellor of another nation state.
Beauty isn’t goodness. Beauty is power. And any power needs to be respected more than it is revered.
/Sebastian Lindberg 2/3-2021
WastedWords 