Beauty and the beastBY DAVE BARRY
(This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Feb. 1, 1998.)If you're a man, at some point a woman will ask you how she looks."How do I look?" she'll ask.You must be careful how you answer this question. The best techniqueis to form an honest yet sensitive opinion, then collapse on the floorwith some kind of fatal seizure. Trust me, this is the easiest wayout. Because you will never come up with the right answer.
The problem is that women generally do not think of their looks in thesame way that men do. Most men form an opinion of how they look inseventh grade, and they stick to it for the rest of their lives. Somemen form the opinion that they are irresistible stud muffins, and theydo not change this opinion even when their faces sag and their nosesbloat to the size of eggplants and their eyebrows grow together toform what appears to be a giant forehead-dwelling tropicalcaterpillar.
Most men, I believe, think of themselves as average-looking. Men willthink this even if their faces cause heart failure in cattle at arange of 300 yards. Being average does not bother them; average isfine, for men. This is why men never ask anybody how they look. Theirprimary form of beauty care is to shave themselves, which isessentially the same form of beauty care that they give to theirlawns.
If, at the end of his four-minute daily beauty regimen, a man hasmanaged to wipe most of the shaving cream out of his hair and is notbleeding too badly, he feels that he has done all he can, so he stopsthinking about his appearance and devotes his mind to more criticalissues, such as the Super Bowl.
Women do not look at themselves this way. If I had to express, inthree words, what I believe most women think about their appearance,those words would be: "not good enough." No matter how attractive awoman may appear to be to others, when she looks at herself in themirror, she thinks: woof.
She thinks that at any moment a municipal animal-control officer isgoing to throw a net over her and haul her off to the shelter.
Why do women have such low self-esteem? There are many complexpsychological and societal reasons, by which I mean Barbie. Girls growup playing with a doll proportioned such that, if it were a human, itwould be seven feet tall and weigh 81 pounds, of which 53 pounds wouldbe bosoms.
This is a difficult appearance standard to live up to, especially whenyou contrast it with the standard set for little boys by their dolls... excuse me, by their action figures. Most of the action figuresthat my son played with when he was little were hideous-looking. Forexample, he was very fond of an action figure (part of the He-Manseries) called "Buzz-Off," who was part human, part flying insect.Buzz-Off was not a looker. But he was extremely self-confident. Youcould not imagine Buzz-Off saying to the other action figures: "Doyou think these wings make my hips look big?"
But women grow up thinking they need to look like Barbie, which formost women is impossible, although there is a multibillion-dollarbeauty industry devoted to convincing women that they must try. I oncesaw an Oprah show wherein supermodel Cindy Crawford dispensed makeuptips to the studio audience. Cindy had all these middle-aged womenapplying beauty products to their faces; she stressed how important itwas to apply them in a certain way, using the tips of their fingers.All the woman dutifully did this, even though it was obvious to anysane observer that, no matter how carefully they applied theseproducts, they would never look remotely like Cindy Crawford, who issome kind of genetic mutation.
I'm not saying that men are superior. I'm just saying that you're notgoing to get a group of middle-aged men to sit in a room and applycosmetics to themselves under the instruction of Brad Pitt, in hopesof looking more like him. Men would realize that this task waspointless and demeaning. They would find some way to bolster theirself-esteem that did not require looking like Brad Pitt. They wouldsay to Brad: "Oh YEAH? Well what do you know about LAWN CARE, prettyboy?"
Of course, many women will argue that the reason they become obsessedwith trying to look like Cindy Crawford is that men, being as shallowas a drop of spit, WANT women to look that way. To which I have tworesponses:
1. Hey, just because WE'RE idiots, that doesn't mean YOU have to be; and2. Men don't even notice 97 percent of the beauty efforts you makeanyway. Take fingernails. The average woman spends 5,000 hours peryear worrying about her fingernails; I have never once, in more than40 years of listening to men talk about women, heard a man say, "Shehas a nice set of fingernails!" Many men would not notice if a womanhad upward of four hands.
Anyway, to get back to my original point: If you're a man, and a womanasks you how she looks, you're in big trouble. Obviously, you can'tsay she looks bad. But you also can't say that she looks great,because she'll think you're lying, because she has spent countlesshours, with the help of the multibillion-dollar beauty industry,obsessing about the differences between herself and Cindy Crawford.Also, she suspects that you're not qualified to judge anybody'sappearance. This is because you have shaving cream in your hair.
