For men who want to be considered beautiful when handsome just isn’t enough

Last week, I sat in and participated in a discussion about masculinity and how men are indoctrinated into it early by way of cultural and societal norms imposed on us by family and music and other modes of impression and adoption. And then the host, Josie Pickens casually mentions calling the men she was with beautiful, and I both succumbed to a conception about masculinity and became undone by her phrasing and my own image issues. I do not recall a woman ever calling me beautiful, or a beautiful man, nor have I ever regarded my own visage or nature as anything remotely close to beauty. And so I sat and stuffed tears away, in some sense out of a desire to keep my own composure and a fear of opening up too much in the company of other men with whom I was unfamiliar. I thought about my relationships with women over the years, in that moment, in that brief moment I contemplated what it might have meant to have my own beauty affirmed and that moment led me to the verge of tears.

Obviously, all of this weight cannot be carried by women, particularly Black women who are not responsible for my own self image and society’s issues with seeing and promoting men as capable of being beautiful. A lot of this weight has to be placed on society’s inability and unwillingness to tell men that we are, we can be, we may be called beautiful instead of merely handsome. Handsome, a gendered compliment which is intended to be the male equivalent of beautiful but cannot bear the weight in a conversation. As men, we instinctually notice the difference between handsome, rugged masculinity and the kind of beautiful, intense and radical softness which emanated from the likes of Prince Rogers Nelson, who was unbound by a conventional definition of masculinity and its trappings. We notice the difference between being called handsome by a woman who we share intimacy with and being called beautiful by the same woman, there is something more to being called beautiful, a simultaneous knowing and a breaking with convention which calls us to be more open, and sometimes calls us to healing from the women with whom we share our intimacy.

I sometimes wish I knew the love of a woman who routinely calls me beautiful and I wonder if it would break me open like it broke me open to hear that admission from Josie. I didn’t know that there are indeed Black women who call Black men beautiful, I sometimes don’t know if I deserve it or we collectively deserve it, because I see I have seen too much of our/of my own brokenness. But not knowing if we deserve to be called beautiful does not cease my wondering and my desiring to be called beautiful, because to be called beautiful is to be freed to fly in a world which constantly reminds me that I am not a beauty. That my nose is too wide, my face not conventionally masculine and chiseled, my body is not strong enough, my demeanor is not aggressive enough and I am entirely too much of a Black man to be loved deeply and called beautiful earnestly.

I am constantly reminded by this world, by this society that my Blackness is too much to earn the title of beautiful, and I wonder what a society that calls its men beautiful instead of handsome could create. What kind of world could be built if men are told of our beauty and consequently our own innate worth aside from the crushing coldness of masculinity and this idea that men are handsome and women are beautiful? I wish I knew how it felt to be regarded as beautiful by a woman I love and share intimacy with, who I share a history with and a destiny and an America that is actively interested in our mutual destruction.

I am sad that I have been deprived of the term beautiful by a society that hates me, that hates my skin, that hates Blackness, that hates wide noses and hates Black women and hates to call me and other Black men beautiful unless they fit an exceptional mold. I do not know what it is to be considered beautiful and I do not know what it is to be held by the term beautiful and caressed by the term beautiful, but I know what it is to have the term beautiful applied with extreme discretion, and I want to know what it is like to be beautiful. To be considered beautiful. To have a woman I love and adore and respect to call me beautiful and mean it from her heart. To believe I am beautiful. Someday I will know all of this intimately, someday I will understand my own beauty despite an uncomfortable insistence that this world reduces me to handsome. I will call myself beautiful more, even if I never hear it from a woman, from a Black woman, because I deserve to feel beautiful for myself.