More Grappling with Beauty
I can’t stop coming back to it, the problem of beauty: how important, yet wholly unimportant it is.
“Everyone’s beautiful,” I say into the cell phone’s tiny receiver. On the other end, Tim* guffaws. Not even my softest male friend, a yoga-instructor-in-training and a committed enough poet to have earned a PhD in the subject, is willing to cop to this bromide.
“Well, sure,” he says. “But some of us are hot.”
I push back with a mild argument about the cultural and historical relativity of the thing; how the specific physical features that connote hotness can vary from time to time, place to place, person to person.
He agrees—but nonetheless, insists: physical beauty, in all its frank unfairness, is real. Conceding, I go off on a tangent about my recent ex-boyfriend’s slender thighs, the precision of his jawline.
“You’ve got it so bad, dude,” Tim says. Correctly.
Later, the ex-boyfriend in question and I are talking about everything exploded between us, half-hoping we can set ourselves to some sort of rights. He mentions my body image anxiety, my requests for reassurance about my beauty; the way I’ve fallen so often into bed with him, as with others, even when I didn’t really want to—couldn’t tell if I wanted to in the first place, my body reacting not so much to men, exactly, as to the soothing power of sexual validation vis a vis the male gaze.
He understands, he adds, that he can’t fully fathom my experience as a woman.
“Half the economy depends on my feeling bad about the way I look,” I say.
“Sucks,” he says, with genuine regret.
He goes on.
“I think, though, that you underestimate guys sometimes. It’s fun to look at a girl on a billboard or in a video, but real beauty is… more than that. It’s an energy. It’s joy.”
He has demonstrated this to me—this, the man I have deemed most beautiful of the few dozen I’ve slept with. I remember the way he gazed at me, my unshaven armpits and unkempt pubic area, dark hair traveling up to my navel and out across my thighs; how he leaned back to take in the whole picture, to look slowly. He’s the reason, or one of them, that I don’t wear makeup anymore: early on, he admitted he preferred me without it, though he supported whatever I chose to do. It was the first time I’d ever considered the possibility that skipping my slash of eyeliner could be not just a comfort, but an improvement. The tube of mascara thickened at the bottom of my makeup bag as I realized I liked my face better naked, too.
We are lying in bed, fully clothed, our bodies slung haphazardly and familiarly and problematically over each other’s. It’s not sexy. I look at his ceiling—the ceiling of this sublet he’s renting through the end of the year as he decides whether he wants to skip town entirely. Three months ago, we’d called a single ceiling ours.
I half agree: yes, but. This time, I’m taking the other side of the argument.
Having lost 80 pounds in my early 20s, I know firsthand how wholly the world’s reaction depends on the body in which you walk through it—and how much praised is heaped upon women who fit the du jour description of beauty. At 24, newly thin, my meticulous diet still a few years away from full-blown anorexia, men followed me into movie theaters and passed me surreptitious notes in coffee shops, all superlatives and phone numbers. Once, one dropped to his knees as I walked by on my way to the post office, hands clasped at his chest as if he’d seen a real-life angel.
It wasn’t exactly comfortable, this influx of attention—so demonstrably tied to the most superficial things about me. But it was intoxicating.
This conversation is happening a few days after my 34th birthday. My deep brown hair shimmers with shards of gray, and recovering from my eating disorder put 40 pounds back onto my hips and butt and belly. I feel strong and sexy more often now than I ever have in my life—a triumph. But still: with every pound I gain and every year I age, I feel myself, inchwise, disappear.
“Well, okay, maybe for some dudes,” he says. “But you’re not looking for the kind of guy who wants to pick up a 24-year-old, right?”
I remind him of the girl he told me about just minutes ago, spotted a week or two back when he was alone at the airport—a girl to whom he’d considered slipping his own quickly scribbled phone number. He’d estimated her age, at my request: 25, maybe 24.
He smiles in spite of himself, grows sheepish.
I really didn’t want to write more about the much-written-about Barbie movie, but I am thinking, now, about the one scene that made me cry in spite of myself.
A fuchsia-clad, cowboy-hatted Margot Robbie—Barbie—sits on a city bench across from a white-haired old woman. The elder’s age spots and wrinkles make manifest her time in this world—the real world, so foreign to Barbie with all its imperfections. Barbie stares at the old woman, her face moving through a swift spectrum of emotions that resolves in realization.
“You’re so beautiful,” she declares, finally.
“I know it,” says the old woman. The pair both begin to laugh.
I am thinking, too, of the time this ex-boyfriend and I dropped acid and walked to the park. It was April, just a few months after we’d started dating, and I reclined in my oversized sweatpants on the damp ground, grinning. The leaves of the tree above me swirled with sacred geometry I recognized, absurdly, from T-shirts and posters. It was the first time I’d ever done LSD.
I was flush-faced and fed, unconcerned about the way my stomach roll showed under my shirt. I was thrumming.
I turned to him. He’d been staring at me. He looked dumb-founded.
“You’re it,” he said. “You’re the girl in the vision. Rolling around in the flowers.”
But I am also thinking of the 24-year-old airport girl, and the way he called us both girls, not women. And of the 24-year-old I was—the fruits of my own body’s physical, ephemeral beauty, even now, after a decade of devolution. About the time this beautiful man, before he was my ex, walked behind me on a beach just shy of Canada, and called over my shoulder, “Your ass is legion.” How he asked in the beginning, incredulously, if I were some kind of Russian spy.
About how important his physical beauty was to me, too, in spite of myself—though perhaps not as important as his attention to mine. How, in the absence of the ubiquitous, sometimes-scary recognition that followed me through my thinness, his fascination with my body became all the sweeter; became something to ask after, anxiously, once it started to disappear. About how this is not the first time in my relationship history this dynamic has appeared. A few years ago, a woman I was dating said, sharply—nominally of her ex-wife, but we both knew—“It’s like if no one’s paying attention to her, she thinks she’ll stop existing.” My stomach dropped. You have a type, my dear, I thought. And then: but isn’t that everybody?
I don’t have an easy answer for how it all fits together, a convenient close to the essay. If I did, I probably wouldn’t write around this topic at all. And I do, again and again. I can’t stop coming back to it, the problem of beauty: how important, yet wholly unimportant it is. How much I still care about it, despite my makeup-free face and hairy underarms and whatever’s-around wardrobe. How many hours of my life I have sunk in its service.
For now, the best I can probably do is to reconfigure those hours, if not to forego them: to focus on my body’s power, not its shape, when I lift weights and climb mountains; to feed myself the foods that make me feel sated and sane. To recognize that sometimes, those requisites include freshly made pasta or dark chocolate truffles. To feel my bounce and heft while I’m running or spinning or dancing; to run and spin and dance anyway.
And (ugh, I guess): to learn to rely less on external validation, despite its alluring passivity and ease. To follow the internal logic of authenticity and let that light shine up and out. To build the stability of a beautiful life rather than to cast the temporary magic spell of a beautiful body—which is, after all, only the vehicle; is, as some things are, guaranteed its end from the start.
*Yes, that Tim, who’s contributed twice to this newsletter.
I'm crying. This was amazing, Jamitha.