Beyond Beauty

My friend John Ashford asked me to speak about beauty. He’s got a good heart, John does. I know how he wants me to talk about beauty. But I’ve got a different relationship with beauty the way alcoholics have a different relationship to liquor, so my thoughts on this may not exactly be what John was looking for. But maybe it needs to be said.
The first thing I need to get out in the open is that I’m guilty of just about every male stereotype where beauty is concerned, especially as it pertains to women. I used to see a woman’s beauty before I saw anything else about her, and I didn’t understand why any woman could get angry over a compliment.
But me today is different than me yesterday, and what I see now can’t be unseen. Not by me, anyway.
I’m watching this show on Netflix called Vikings and every man on the show is described by his courage and his valor and his skill in battle, and all the women are described by their beauty and their ability to bear children. This is a show about people in the 13th century, so you can explain away some of that with context, but when I see the value we place on women’s beauty today versus what those women are actually good at, I don’t know that we’ve evolved as far as I’d like on the subject.
Beauty, when all is said and done, is a judgment. And any judgement, no matter how well intentioned, is not a kindness.
Whether or not I find anyone beautiful is a subjective opinion on my part, and what I perceive and what I prefer and what I find attractive is a wholly internal process. There’s no crime in finding people attractive, but sharing that judgement with people — especially people who may have their days filled with unwelcome external judgments—can be like parading past a row of Olympic judges at a competition you didn’t even enter while people you don’t know throw up their score cards and expect you to acknowledge them.
Just typing that sentence was exhausting. I can’t even imagine having to live it.
I’ve been speaking a lot about manliness lately and I think this view of beauty plays a part in that. We, as men, are hard-wired in about a million different ways to respond to physical beauty. We’re socially engrained in a world where sex is used to sell absolutely everything. But while we can spend all day defending our instincts and trained reactions, we do so at the peril of ignoring the fact that we have choice.
I have struggled with this subject a lot over the past few years because not all flattery and praise is unwelcome. Not all women (or men) will get defensive or angry if you give them a compliment. But at this point it’s not about them. It’s my internal mechanism that has been retrained so that when I recognize that judgement of others solely on their appearance, I immediately follow that up with the question, “What is that person awesome at? What makes them a gift to the world?”
And now I have the chance to truly see them, because now I’m actually looking.
When John asked me to talk about beauty, I could have talked about art or architecture or mathematics or music. There’s an almost unbearable amount of beauty in the world. You need only look to see it.
But the beauty of a woman has been, for me, my lifelong obsession, my guilty pleasure, my kryptonite. I think there is nothing so beautiful in the whole world as the feminine form. And I look at this and I talk about this and I write about this because it is not a wrongness to like what you like.
But I have been the guy who got caught staring too long at a girl in a food court and had to watch her hastily leave because while eye contact is a time-honored flirting technique, there’s a fine line between a playful glance and the piercing gaze of a psychopath and I’ve been on the wrong side of that line.
There’s a point where your externalization becomes judgement, and that’s not a kindness to others. That’s what I’m looking at here. I will never not love women, but there’s a time and a place for compliments, and I’ve learned to be more aware of other people’s willingness to receive them.
I have friends who are scientists and doctors and body guards and power lifters and healers and jewelry makers and politicians and they all just happen to be women.
I am coming to see that it neither adds nor detracts from someone’s being to recognize their inherent beauty, but that the greater part is to look at the choices they have made in their lives, and to what heights those choices have taken them.
Beauty can be symmetry. Beauty can be grace. But my favorite brand of beauty is a possibility that has been made real by the power of choice.
