Published: Good Men Project (March 31, 2015)
Human beings are clumsy, hairless monkeys obsessed with looking beautiful. How is that not funny?
___
For as long as I can remember, I have found the emotion of awkwardness to be endlessly amusing. It’s why I enjoy TV shows like “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job,” so-bad-they’re-good movies like “Troll 2,” and reciting anecdotes from the Darwin Awards to my always-politely-uncomfortable parents. Explaining why I tend to crack up at awkwardness (including my own, although that’s usually in retrospect) is as difficult as deconstructing why my favorite food is salami or my favorite color is green. For whatever psychological and/or biological reasons, my taste in comedy runs in that direction. It is what it is, for better or worse, with the salient point here being that possessing a healthy appreciation for the comedy in awkwardness helps you notice its presence when others don’t.
This brings us to the concept of beauty, and with it that fleshy vessel that hapless homo sapiens are saddled with finding attractive – the human body.
???
From a purely physical standpoint, human beings are pretty unremarkable. That is to say, although our bodies are bio-mechanical wonders produced by eons of evolution, they are distinctly lacking in those qualities that are most likely to stir up a sense of beauty in the eyes of beholders that aren’t instinctively predisposed to perceive us as attractive (i.e., other human beings). In appearance, we’re no more or less interesting than our fellow higher primates, aside from how we have considerably less hair than most monkeys. Without clothes or technology, we fail to stand out from the other animals in terms of colorfulness, agility, grace, symmetry, or any of the qualities that might make an organism visually pleasing to a total outsider. What’s more, the human body—like most organic matter—produces an inordinate share of revolting stenches, undignified sounds, and unsightly blemishes, before inevitably succumbing to the aging process in a sort of pre-mortem process of ongoing decay. Our one truly remarkable quality is our intelligence, which manifests itself in our disproportionately large heads and prolonged periods of child-rearing (more on the implications of those big brains in a moment).
The very fact that one of our most popular platitudes is the proclamation that every woman is beautiful only proves that the problem of female objectification has very deep roots. After all, you don’t hear comforting cliches about how every woman is intelligent or every woman is athletically gifted—or, for that matter, insisting that every man is handsome.
I would argue that this is true of both genders, although depending on one’s sexual orientation, the chances are you’ll find one sex distinctly more appealing than the other. For a standard heterosexual male perspective, we can turn to Jerry Seinfeld’s observation: “The female body is a work of art. The male body is utilitarian. It’s for gettin’ around. It’s like a Jeep.” Certainly this captures how I’ve always viewed my own body. For most of my life I haven’t cared one whit about fashion or neatness. My sole concern has been hygiene, and since a rumpled shirt and mismatching socks are as inoffensive to the nose as smoothly-pressed color coordination, I tend to not care very much about what I wear so long as it’s been thoroughly washed. Even my one concession to vanity, my facial hair, is as much a sentimental as it is an aesthetic decision; since the child Matt Rozsa used to daydream about having a beard, the adult version grows one as a sop to his pre-pubescent counterpart.
This is only one example of male vanity, and a rather paltry one at that; it would help enormously if I had a plethora of male friends who obsessed over developing ripped muscles (to use one popular gauge for male “beauty”) or being fashionable (to use a comparatively newer, but no less prevalent, masculine ideal). Then again, because women are far more likely to be judged predominantly or even solely based on their physical appearance (both within and outside of the dating world), it’s probably for the best that I devote a tad more attention to their gender here. Since I’ve already written about this subject from a feminist perspective before, I won’t reiterate the profound moral problem with female objectification, and instead quote an essay from H. L. Mencken that assesses women with the same detachment that Seinfeld used for men. “Below the neck by the bow and below the waist astern there are two masses that simply refuse to fit into balanced composition,” he observed. “Viewed from the side, a woman presents an exaggerated S bisected by an imperfect straight line, and so she inevitably suggests a drunk dollarmark.”
In other words, women are just as ridiculous-looking as men, even though society places cruel demands on them to appear otherwise. The very fact that one of our most popular platitudes is the proclamation that every woman is beautiful only proves that the problem of female objectification has very deep roots. After all, you don’t hear comforting cliches about how every woman is intelligent or every woman is athletically gifted—or, for that matter, insisting that every man is handsome. That would be self-evidently absurd, since we know that neither nature nor nurture are that kind in how they dispense the most treasured attributes. Because women are far more likely to have their social value tied to their perceived attractiveness than men, however, the whole subject of an individual female’s aesthetic and sexual appeal is very sensitive.”To tell a man flatly that his wife is not beautiful is so harsh and intolerable an insult that even an enemy seldom ventures upon it,” Mencken wrote. “One would offend him far less by arguing that his wife is an idiot.”
???
Inevitably, a topic this densely packed with raw nerve endings is prime real estate for awkwardness. Some of the hilarity is more slapstick than psychological (see: the huffing, puffing, grunting, and sweating of someone trying and failing to lose weight), but a great deal is based in a philosophical recognition of how absurd it is that we care so much about looking good. We go to extraordinary lengths to please contemporary sensibilities—make-up is frantically applied and re-applied, hair is chopped off or ripped out by the root, fortunes are sunk into clothes and jewelry—and waste countless hours passing judgment on the successes and failures of others (and, at least in private, ourselves) in the so-called “looks department.” And to what end? Simply that, for those of us fortunate enough to reach old age, all of our efforts will deteriorate into a mass of wrinkled, flabby flesh, at least until the great equalizer comes and reduces us even further to a pile of long-forgotten dust and bones. Viewed from this perspective, it’s hard not to see the awkward struggles of those who place a premium on being beautiful as inherently comical. When those efforts are successful, it’s at least comedy with a temporary happy ending; when not, there is an insensitivity to it that can cross over into mean-spiritedness.
When you learn to appreciate the inherent comedy in the notion of human beauty, you learn how to fall in love. And once you’ve experienced true love, you can leave superficiality to the chumps.
Ultimately, though, my sense is that this appreciation for the cosmic absurdity of human beauty has more pros than cons. By recognizing that we are all going to be fat and old in the blink of an eye, and that most of us have to struggle constantly to even remain un-obnoxious (indoor plumbing wasn’t invented until two centuries ago, so the mere act of not smelling awful was pretty tough until recently), much less aesthetically presentable, catching the joke can help us keep an even keel. We learn to avoid the error that Mencken attributed to the truly stupid man, who “succumbs to a pair of well-managed eyes, a graceful twist of the body, a synthetic complexion or a skillful display of legs without giving the slightest thought to the fact that a whole woman is there, and that within the cranial cavity of the woman lies a brain, and that the idiosyncrasies of that brain are of vastly more importance than all imaginable physical stigmata combined.” Instead we strike a balance between our carnal instincts, which demand a reasonable amount of intangible physical chemistry, with a desire to discover to develop a meaningful and intimate connection with someone who we can value for reasons that far transcend all considerations of the flesh. On the occasions when we find such a person – a woman or man who makes us break into a goofy smile whenever we think about them, and whose brain we always want to pick for musings on the topics that fascinate us, who laughs at our weird jokes and can make us genuinely laugh in turn, and who we can trust when we seek confidential advice or need to just be around someone who will put up with our bullshit – when that happens, we count ourselves inestimably fortunate.
In other words: When you learn to appreciate the inherent comedy in the notion of human beauty, you learn how to fall in love. And once you’ve experienced true love, you can leave superficiality to the chumps.
???
Before concluding, I feel compelled to emphasize one thing: I have nothing but the highest regard for women and men who are able to make their own bodies beautiful (mostly women in my opinion, obviously, although the typical American heterosexual male vantage point is only one in a broad spectrum). Creating and maintaining physical beauty is, like most gifts, the product of fortuitous genes, developed skill, and hard work. It is just as admirable to be beautiful as it is to be intelligent or athletically gifted – and the rewards of the former, though unnecessarily cruel in how they depart, are only somewhat more fleeting than either of the latter. As we contemplate the inherent transience of everything that is truly valuable about the human experience, we should at least take comfort in the knowledge that there is a whole lot of hilarious awkwardness that occurs between the extremes of joy and pain. If you can just see the humor in it, it makes the journey a lot more bearable.