The Beautiful And The Ugly - How Physical Unattractiveness Became The Ethos Of The Left

There are some attractive progressive women, no doubt.  There is a bell curve for everything. Yet it certainly seems that wiry haired, sodden, and misshapen women are the progressive norm; and that blonde, blue-eyed. sensuous, and alluring women are the conservative standard.

Yes, yes, of course there is bias in the mix.  One's political leaning has a tendency to color the opposition grey, drab, dumpy, and virtually unappealing; yet the White House does look different these days, more attractive, more lively, and more, well American.  

The new President has gotten rid of the 'morally obese' - the term his aides and confidants use to describe those whose physical ungainliness mirror their flaccid political principles. 

LaShonda Bevins, a transgender black woman - a high-shelved, tarted up, sequined queen from the inner city, recruited by the Biden team to complement his diverse coalition - was a good example.  LaShonda, formerly Pharoah, strutted into the Oval Office one February morning with her patron and handler who introduced her to the President.  

'She'll do', he said. 'Find her a place', and Miss Bevins became the Chief of Inner City Liaison, a position she used as a bully pulpit to champion the pimps, ho's, and 'entrepreneurs' of the street, the New Age Americans. 

Now, LaShonda had mucked up her transition - this was not an attractive transformation.  Her bulk, stature, attitude, and stance all shouted 'male', and no matter how much she tried to soften her voice, it still came out rough cut, gravelly, and gross.

'We need to do something', one of Biden's chief aides had suggested.  'Add a a bit of sweetness and light to the mix, something for Middle America', but the President was adamant.  He wanted nothing to do with those bobble-headed Barbies.

'The real America looks like us', he said, waving his hand around the room at the sorry collection of social misfits that he was trying to foist on the American public.  There was not one bright light among them, not one single looker, not one woman that would turn a man's head. 

But that was the point, the President's inner circle confirmed.  'Our people' (the progressive Left) have never been tempted by superficiality or outward appearance.  The fancies of allure and sexual appeal are all chimeras, grease paint, blush and eyeliner.  We are inside people, deep people, serious people'. 

Quite true ever since the hippy Sixties when the counterculture rejected the settled, smug, bourgeois attitudes of the previous generation and went deep ugly to make a point. Ugliness was not just a point of honor but a badge of courage and a banner of justice.  Who would you rather have as your political caretaker?  Some blonde, air-headed chippie in frills and costume jewelry; or one of us, dedicated only to what matters?

Bob Muzelle, longtime progressive, sit-in champion, Freedom Rider, marcher arm in arm with Martin and Ralph, looked into the  full-length mirror at his doughy, pasty face, overhanging gut, and general bulbous features.  He had made his reputation in the Haight and Greenwich Village, devotedly anti-bourgeois, snarky, and militant.  The girls he was seen with were of the same ilk - wiry, straggly hair, greyish complexion, early sags, rolls, and wrinkles, all giving notice that they were serious interior people. 

Bob had envied his Yale classmates who were dating beauties from Holyoke and Vassar, peaches-and-cream complected, silken-haired, lithe, and sensual women from the best families; and who eventually married into that gorgeous milieu while he soldiered through the physical detritus.  Yes, he understood the point, the necessary completeness of the progressive vision (a beautiful woman sent the wrong message), but what he wouldn't give to spend one night with Muffy Cabot!

How he resented sitting next to Esther Pilchman, a skeletal harpy of a woman from Brooklyn, nodding off next to him on the freedom ride to Selma while his classmates were at that very moment squiring New England's finest, most desirable women on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.  He quickly shook the image from his mind and concentrated on the task ahead - the black man, his travails, oppression, and misfortune. 

Now many years later, looking out his K Street office window, watching the parade of gorgeous, Hollywood-ready blonde young things head to the White House and take up residence there, he felt the same resentment, jealousy, and frustration.  He could have been Berkeley Lodge, squire of Muffy Cabot and a hundred other lithesome, desirable women had he nipped his pudginess and physical unpleasantness in the bud.  He wasn't born ugly, after all.  It was part of the zeitgeist. 

The literature has shown that attractive people - men and women both - have a leg up in every aspect of social life.  They are hired more easily, are promoted more quickly, are sought after and included in social gatherings, attract the best and brightest of the opposite sex. The enduring standards of female beauty while valued as signifiers of health and well-being are even more indicative of an inherent male sexual preference.  Heads will turn and have turned for centuries for beautiful women, women whose facial symmetry, balance, and sexual suggestion are desirable regardless of status and class.  

Women today might be more self-aware, confident, ambitious, and powerful than ever before; but classic beauty has not lost either its appeal or place in popular culture. Study after study have shown that beauty has benefits far beyond the bedroom.  Attractive women and men are given preference in hiring.  While supervisors may not admit it, a candidate with all the professional qualifications plus beauty, is more likely to get the job.  Professor Shahani-Denning of Hofstra University has compiled the most important research on the subject.

The bias in favor of physically attractive people is robust, with attractive people being perceived as more sociable, happier and more successful than unattractive people.  Attractiveness biases have been demonstrated in such different areas as teacher judgments of students, voter preferences for political candidates, and jury judgments in simulated trials.

Recently other researchers have investigated the “beauty is goodness” stereotype in U.S. films and found that attractive characters were portrayed more favorably than unattractive characters on multiple dimensions across a random sample drawn from five decades of top grossing films.  The authors also found that participants watching a biased film (level of beauty and gender stereotyping) subsequently showed greater favoritism toward an attractive graduate school candidate than participants watching a less biased film.  In the area of employment decision making, attractiveness also influences interviewers’ judgments of job applicants.

Beauty is a fact.  It is a tradable commodity, a factor in natural selection, a variable in most social and commercial transactions, and the first and last thing we remember about people.  Men's physical appeal is no different - the tall, well-proportioned, handsome man will always have an advantage. 

So, Bob wondered, why did we - progressives - deny the obvious, the studied, and the proven and persist in claiming that ugliness was a higher virtue, that it signified inner beauty, higher value, and moral purpose? If we were a collective group of attractive men and women, we might win more over to our side. 

Four years of this adolescent Barbie fanfare, thought Bob.  A White House full of bobblehead dunces and pretty faces claiming that this is what America looked like.  Of course he ignored his own sad mooning over beauties like Taylor Swift and Margot Robbie and by extension the universal, nationwide desire for screen beauty and beauty in general.  He doggedly insisted that beauty was only skin deep and that the progressive canon when fully understood would be the guiding principle for right action. 

Wrong of course. Americans were delighted to see the Biden years disappear and along with them the diversity fol-de-rol, the deification of the black man, transgender heroics, and social giveaways.  Most of all they were delighted that the penitential ugliness of his administration was a thing of the past.  Even the homeless wanted a night with any one of the bright young things in the Trump White House. 

So, Bob turned away from the mirror and concluded he had to play the cards he was dealt; but not without a tinge of regret. His life might have been less meaningful, but certainly a lot happier in the company of beautiful, alluring, and seductive women.