“We all judge people on their looks. Some of us are just more honest about it.” When Andy Bodle puts a woman on a pedestal for her beauty, the results are predictable.
“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless—peacocks and lilies, for instance.”—John Ruskin
“Come on then, spill. Tits out—or tits up?”
” … Let’s be honest, if she was an oil painting, she was a Picasso.” I tutted. “I try not to judge people on their looks.”
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It was a grey, blustery Sunday afternoon and Guy and I had decided to mark the occasion by firing plastic guns at the television.
I looked askance at him to signal my protest, then pointed my two forefingers out in front of my chest and slowly turned them skywards.
Guy took out fifteen cartoon bluebirds in as many shots. “Never mind. Let’s be honest, if she was an oil painting, she was a Picasso.”
I tutted. “I try not to judge people on their looks.”
“We all judge people on their looks. Some of us are just more honest about it.”
I blasted away at the screen for a few seconds and racked up a creditable 78%. “That’s as may be. But appearance should not be our defining quality.”
Guy took a long, deep breath to collect himself for the next salvo. “Has a girl ever said to you, ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t feel that spark?’ Or ‘I’m not sure the chemistry is right between us?’” He lowered his weapon. Ninety-six per cent.
I suddenly found something fascinating to examine by my feet. “Maybe.”
“Well, it’s code for ‘I don’t fancy you,’ and it cuts both ways. You can’t tell your brain what it should and shouldn’t fancy. The penis cannot be reasoned with.” He snorted at my score of 54% and tossed a freshly picked toenail into his mouth.
“We’re not cavemen any more, you know.”
“It would be easier if we were. When we were on the savannah, we were exposed to maybe a hundred people in our lifetimes. So if your bird was ugly, she probably wasn’t that much uglier than the best-looking bird in the tribe—you didn’t feel too hard done by.” He paused to steady his aim. “Now we’re constantly exposed to millions of billboard ads saying, ‘Hello boys’, to-die-for weathergirls, airbrushed hotties staring out from the covers of every magazine, and on the internet, gorgeous blonde 18-year-olds sticking improbably large things in each other’s bottoms.”
“Not all of us are constantly exposed to the latter.”
“Nonetheless. Your standards, my friend, have been irrevocably raised. You can’t lower them again any more than you can lengthen your cock. Once you’ve spilt your load over Reese Witherspoon, you’re never going to get it up for Rhys Ifans.”
With that, he blew on the muzzle of his gun, twirled and mock-holstered it, and the word “PERFECT!” flashed up in huge letters on the TV.
♦◊♦
In the early days of Google, the Guardian’s R&I department (formerly the Research & Information Unit) was beginning to lose some of its relevance.
While it still ostensibly carried out the same function, and had the same number of staff – the swingeing cuts would not begin until the following year—the greater quantity, accessibility and reliability of information on the internet meant that the number of journos who deigned to consult the experts was dwindling by the week. It had been moved to a more cramped and isolated location on the first floor, next door to the scanning department. But it still received its full annual complement of trainees.
One slow October afternoon, I glanced up from my screen and noticed one of the new-bloods, a taller than average woman in her mid-20s, reaching up to fetch something from a high shelf.
She was exactly the sort of woman I’d spent my life fantasising about. With model’s poise and an Olympic diver’s body, she made me all gooey outside.
The trainee found what she was after all too quickly, and as she turned, her eyes swung straight past me. I resolved there and then that this woman was going to play a major part in my dreams.
A week later, fate threw me a curve ball.
I was making my way to the second-floor toilets when I saw Adam coming the other way. I smiled; he smiled back. But I left the corners of my mouth up a fraction too long after he passed and found myself accidentally smiling at the person behind him—the sexy trainee. And she smiled back too.
This incident in itself was not enough to give me ideas above my station. But it was enough to ensure that the next time we met—in the smoking area on the stairwell, two weeks later—we made small talk. She was Rachel, 25, from the Midlands, and she was even more debilitatingly gorgeous up close.
As the weeks went by, our fag breaks became more and more synchronised, until, by the time her contract expired nine months later, we were almost what you could call close. Close enough, at any rate, that she wasn’t overly offended when I proposed a farewell lunch.
After paying the bill, I gave her a Zippo and a card containing the following poem:
For the first couple of months, we did the things lovers do—I massaged her, read to her from great works of literature—with one notable exception. Rachel, you see, had been chased her whole life. She was no saint; she simply believed she was something special, and not to be entered into lightly.
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The summer is over before it’s begun;
I’ve almost forgotten the shape of the sun.
But your smile could brighten up darkest Peru.
Why can’t the summertime be more like you?
I’m not a big fan of those blokes in white vans;
They speed and shout out and make signs with their hands.
Whereas you are kind-hearted in all that you do.
Why can’t white van drivers be more like you?
My journey this morning was plagued by delay.
My half-an-hour tube almost took half a day.
Yet I set my watch by your fags near the loo.
Why can’t the Underground be more like you?
A lifetime ago, I was friends with a dame
Susie Carmichael, I think, was her name.
All day she would chase me round town on her cycle.
Why can’t you be more like Susie Carmichael?
We promised to keep in touch. I was as good as my word, and so was Rachel, to begin with; she replied to roughly every third email. But as is the way when you haven’t discovered any real common ground with someone, the messages, especially from her end, became shorter, more irregular, and eventually dried up altogether.
Then one day, I woke up with a rare burst of optimism. I was, I resolved, going to give this one last big shot. So I sent an email:
“Dear R,
Choose from the following:
a) Your computer is not working, or you have otherwise been prevented from checking your emails for a while.
b) You’ve got yourself a bloke, and you’re too embarrassed to reply because you know I like you.
c) You have decided that I am scum.
d) You’re worried about competing with my terrifying intellect and razor-sharp wit (as if).
e) Something horrible has happened to you.
If a), you won’t see this either, so this is the proverbial tree falling in the woods.
If b)-d), please reply. If only to reassure me that it’s not e).
A x”
To my surprise, my inbox was glowing within minutes. “Sorry, f) been really busy! How are you?”
I played it cool and waited a full minute before replying. As it so happened, about a week later I was due to turn 32, and had organised a small gathering to mark the occasion. Would she like to come?
So the following Friday, Rachel, along with a female friend, arrived at Ask Pizza on Islington Green. It wasn’t quite the party to end all parties, but 30 or so passably cool, attractive and/or intelligent people came, gave me presents and said nice things to me, and I was, I recall, on reasonable form. Which is presumably why, when I called Rachel a week later to ask if she wanted to go to the pictures, she said yes.
The film she chose to see was The Royal Tenenbaums, or some such self-consciously quirky indie-by-numbers. But as luck would have it, it put Rachel in a sufficiently good mood that as we sat waiting for the bus home afterwards, she kissed me.
Three months, four lunches, three dinners, two hand-tied bouquets, two witty poems, one canal-boat trip, one moonlit riverside stroll and one royal box at a West End musical later, we were an item. Sort of.
For the first couple of months, we did the things lovers do—I massaged her, read to her from great works of literature—with one notable exception. Rachel, you see, had been chased her whole life. She was no saint; she simply believed she was something special, and not to be entered into lightly.
To begin with, this didn’t bother me. I’d never been one to rush into the physical side of things, and while some men would be champing at the bit to sleep with a goddess, I found the prospect of following a string of six-packed, improbably endowed studs quite daunting.
So twice a week, we’d do something nice together, then go back to hers, kiss and cuddle for a bit, and Rachel would pack me off home.
But after a while, the novelty of having a girlfriend without benefits began to pall. Sex, after all, is the raison d’etre of human relationships, a precious union of souls, the ultimate symbolic expression of your commitment to each other. And isn’t it preferable to find out whether you’re sexually compatible sooner rather than later?
Mindful of Aesop’s fable of the wind and the sun, instead of howling at her, I turned up the heat. I upgraded my wardrobe, bought her nicer things, took her on ever more lavish dates. And at long last, at the end of a cripplingly expensive weekend break in north Devon, Rachel took off her coat.
I thought it was rather nice. Rachel delivered her verdict in the middle of a game of knockout whist on the train home: “That was a crap shag.”
The time soon came for our social circles to converge. Rachel didn’t have much of one; for my part, I thought I’d start with my classiest friends. So it was that one Thursday evening in June, we arrived at a fashionable Brazilian eatery in west London for dinner with Neil and Yasmin.
It was a convivial evening, with a slight carnival atmosphere thanks to Brazil’s recent victory over Turkey in the World Cup semifinal. Towards the end, when the bill came and Rachel popped to the loo, I pointedly raised my eyebrows at the couple.
Yaz leaned forward conspiratorially and whispered, with a little too much zeal: “Well … she’s certainly very attractive.”
Our sex life improved somewhat after the crap shag, but we were in no imminent danger of a visit from environmental health. This was partly due to my terror of doing anything wrong, and partly due to Rachel’s habit of approaching the procedure as if it were a household chore.
When I finally succeeded in raising the subject with her, and gently suggested that we try something more than massage plus missionary, she sniffed and said: “Well, I’m no stranger to buggery.”
To my regret, we did not act on this information immediately. But one night, a week or so later, Rachel became uncharacteristically frisky after a few glasses of wine and said, “I think we should go upstairs.”
Now, opportunities for conjugal activity had become so scarce that I’d got out of the habit of bringing condoms with me, so I begged her to contain herself for a few minutes while I popped to the corner shop.
At the 1977 Liden Silver Jubilee Sports Day, Matthew Jones beat me by a whisker in the 100 metres final. That night in 2002, the squirt would have eaten my dust.
My exertions, however, were for nothing. I was sure I’d seen some Mates behind the counter on my previous visit, but the assistant rather disgustedly denied all knowledge of them. There were no other shops open for miles. I arrived back, dejected, and not a little scared, and communicated my failure.
Rachel, though, was not to be denied. “I suppose we could try it the other way,” she said.
The “other way” proved to be the way forward. From that day forth, whenever Rachel was in the mood—which, suddenly, seemed to be a lot more often—I would ask, “Where do you want me?”, and she would reply, “Where do you think?”
But while things were hotting up in the sack, the temperature outside was plummeting. At certain times, under certain conditions, Rachel could be charming. But right from the start, she was constantly criticising my hair, my room, my choice of attire, my sexual technique. With increasing frequency, she would become disproportionately venomous over the tiniest thing.
To begin with, I dismissed these episodes as uncharacteristic lapses, blaming stress, hormones, myself. Deep down, I knew the brutal truth was that my girlfriend was not a very nice person; but my penis kept tricking me into giving her one last chance.
I was disgusted with myself. Was I really so shallow? Could I really not bring myself to split up with someone just because she was drop-dead gorgeous?
The relationship became more one-sided with every passing day. I started keeping a tally. Massages: Andy 51, Rachel 0. Oral sex: Andy 42, Rachel 1. Presents; Andy 29, Rachel 0. Meals: Andy 19, Rachel 0. Compliments: Andy 397 (approx), Rachel 1 (“I like it when you read to me”).
Then one evening, on arriving at her flat, I popped my head into the lounge to say hi to her flatmate, who was watching TV with his boyfriend. When I returned to the kitchen, Rachel was incandescent. She screamed at the top of her lungs, called me all manner of vile names, and very nearly threw a mug at me—because, she said, I had disturbed her flatmates. That was when I knew I had to be a man and break up with her.
In the event, I was anything but manly about it. I arranged to meet her at a quiet coffee house near her place. Within five minutes of sitting down, Rachel was reeling off another endless list of my failings.
I meekly awaited my turn, but after about half an hour, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to get one, I typed out a text message comprising the tally, plus all the reasons why I couldn’t stand to spend another minute in her company, pressed “send”, and then, with Rachel still in full flow, got up and left.
♦◊♦
A 2011 University of Edinburgh study on facial symmetry and social status concluded: “As people with symmetrical faces tend to be healthier and more attractive, they are also more self-sufficient and have less of an incentive to cooperate and seek help from others.”
And in their 2009 paper, Formidability And The Logic Of Human Anger, Sell, Tooby and Cosmides interviewed 156 female students to find out how they handled conflict. They reported that women who believed they were good-looking were more likely to respond angrily in disputes than those who rated themselves as less attractive. Attractive women also had higher expectations of what they deserved.
A companion piece to this story will appear next week on The Good Life.
Read more of Andy Bodle’s Womanology studies on The Good Life.
Image credit: Cåsbr/Flickr
Our sex life improved somewhat after the crap shag, but we were in no imminent danger of a visit from environmental health. This was partly due to my terror of doing anything wrong, and partly due to Rachel’s habit of approaching the procedure as if it were a household chore. When I finally succeeded in raising the subject with her, and gently suggested that we try something more than massage plus missionary, she sniffed and said: “Well, I’m no stranger to buggery.” lolol, that part made me roar with laughter. rachel sounded a real nasty piece of work, slowly marinating… Read more »
Ok, I understand that looks are important to men in a relationship. I fully respect the fact that “the penis wants what the penis wants, shucks! I can’t help myself” BUT what i DONT understand about men and male behavior is WHY men criticize, insult, bully, harass and endlessly demean women who are less than perfect looking. Its like, men think if a woman doesn’t give them a boner she has no right to live, no right to exist. Her existence is some how criminal. Someone please explain this phenomenon to me. I have wondered this my whole life why… Read more »
I don’t know. You’ll have to ask those men who think that way. I’m not sure I ever thought about women that way, and I doubt any of the men I know very well think that way, as far as I know. You’re right, it does sound very odd. Any guys out there in internetland who hate women they aren’t attracted to?
(By that, I mean any men who are meaner to unattractive women than women are to unattractive women….. Is this a particularly male trait, or is it more a larger social issue?)
Men who objectify women for their beauty (and I see this as a morality tale for same) don’t have any use for women who don’t turn them on. You can see the reverse in effect when women who objectify men hate the men in their lives when they see them as useless to them, like men without good paying jobs or who won’t clean gutters, or put on a nice shirt to meet the neighbors. I see an awful lot of resentment between people, not just men and women, who regard one another as essentially functional objects. There’s a dark… Read more »
@Justin: You know man I think you are on to something, however, I think that the disposability factor affecting men is probably over done in this context. The more I learn about history of the US and of the world, which of course are connected events, i have come to realize that neither the common man or woman has ever had any real power. Most decisions that effect people living in large urban communities were and are made at the elite level with very little actual input from common folk. Common people, men and women, have always struggled to make… Read more »
We are society, absolutely! We’re all products of our culture, and we perpetuate it. Did you ever hear of the behavioral science experiment where they would electrocute a monkey when it climbed a ladder to reach a banana, until eventually, the monkeys would just warn one another by pulling each other down off the ladder if one of them attempted it. They then started replacing the monkeys in the group, one by one, until it was a whole new group of monkeys, none of whom had been electrocuted, ever, for scaling the ladder, and yet they all upheld that law.… Read more »
Amelia,
I’m just curious how perceptive I am. Please allow me to take a guess here. You don’t have to answer, of course, and it’s probably rude of me to ask. If I am way off, I will profusely apologize.
When you talk about “your whole life,” I’m guessing that’s somewhere between 20 and 22 years. Did I come close?
BUT what i DONT understand about men and male behavior is WHY men criticize, insult, bully, harass and endlessly demean women who are less than perfect looking. Its like, men think if a woman doesn’t give them a boner she has no right to live, no right to exist. It comes from the very same place as any other objectifying thought comes from. The thought that that group of people exists only for their use and pleasure. Same with women that do similar to men that don’t live up to the monetary standards they want. Or for another possible answer…..A… Read more »
I sincerely hope that not all men criticise, bully etc less than physically perfect women. My post next week, which deals with the opposite scenario, might give a little more cause for optimism (then again, it might not).
Well Amelia, the behaviour exist, but its not unique to men. In my experience women tend to demonize other women even more than guys do, and its not only a internal affairs between women, because the people who act in way they reserve the same treatment also to guys. IMO its not a gendered phenomena, but more a classist. If you are smart, good looking, cool etc you are welcome, otherwise, go home frodo/frodine…
@Brodie: “…man enough to break up.” Hmm..perhaps one could add to this, being conscious enough to know that having a beautiful woman ups one’s status-which is ego driven.
Separated by a common language, indeed. I would like to import and popularize some of these expressions into American slang, because they are my new favorites:
“the crap shag”
“tits out or tits up”
“no stranger to buggery” [I see the title of a boarding school memoir in there somewhere….]
In exchange, we Americans will no longer use and no longer refer to anything called a “fanny pack.”
Me and all. It were good. If you don’t like it, or you get all doolally, then oi, do one.
Just don’t get “bob’s your uncle” mixed up with how’s-your-father. Or maybe I’m thinking of Canada. I don’t know. All you anglos look alike to me.