Beauty and Honesty

I was talking the other night with a woman friend about the difficulty of communication between the sexes. I sometimes forget how hard it is from the other side--how women don't know who they can trust. Or, as she put it, "But women have to be so effing vigilant because dudes try to manipulate you like it's their full time job." And I know it's true, but I seem to always unconsciously have this expectation that they should just know that I'm not like that--like they should just look at me and say, "Finally! An honest man." Yeah, I know it doesn't make any sense; I said "unconsciously" didn't I?

It's strange, really, how ideas appear to you in clusters. The same night I had that conversation just happened to be a night when I was in a hotel, which is pretty much the only time I ever watch TV. And I spent most of it thinking about how much I hate the way women are displayed and their beauty exploited. My intentional segregation from popular culture means that I'm not constantly bombarded with such images, and so when I do see them, it's almost as if from the perspective of an outsider. The idea that kept going through my mind as I sat through the soul-destroying banality, was that I never thought I'd hear myself say this, feeling as I do about feminism, but that this objectification of women was sickening. And what's even more sickening is their own self-objectification. Every second ad is about "beauty"--but no one seems to know what beauty is. The kind of "beauty" being sold by these pimps of self-esteem is to real beauty what twinkies and doritos are to real food.

Beauty is not just a woman's physical appearance. It is something she is and something she does. A woman makes the whole world around her more beautiful.

This is beauty.

I started to put a "this is not" image here, but I don't even want that ugliness on my blog. You know what it looks like: you see it every day.

So we live in a world where men don't know what honesty is, and women don't know what beauty is. Is there a correspondence? The ancients used to speak, before feminism, of corresponding male and female virtues. I think it was Spencer, for instance, who said that the chief masculine virtue was courage and the chief feminine one chastity. And I know it was Shakespeare who said "Can beauty have better commerce than with honesty?" Could it be that when men fail in one of their virtues, that women will fail in the one which corresponds to it? Courage and chastity, honesty and beauty, chivalry and modesty, protection and nurture. I wonder if there's a list by some ancient philosopher.

None of this is to say, of course that any of these virtues is exclusive--that men should not practice chastity, or that women cannot have courage. Just that those aren't their defining qualities.