Monday, November 15, 2010
On men who look real
I have always appreciated men. I appreciate their minds, strenghts, talents and ideals, when good. I have always been a visual person as well... passionate and intensely visual. This being said, it might come as something of a surprise to my paucity of readers that my romantic ideal, that made me swoon as a twelve-year old, was the Beast from the French fairy tale. I loved his humility and generosity and even his furry hugeness and stumblings of speed had an irresistable charm to me. When I was fifteen, my romantic ideal was Edmond Rostand's creation; Cyrano De Bergerac. I LOVED his chivarly, his rapier-sharp wit, his valor, his humor, his skill, his poetry, his honesty and his white plumb of freedom. Yes, I also loved his nose. My adoration of the character was so complete that when an unaware passerby, ignorant of the text, peered over my shoulder and said, "Who's the guy with the big, ugly nose?" I gasped and cried, "HIS NOSE IS BEAUTIFUL!" Indeed, most of my most beloved characters from books as well as the majority of my real life male friends are not what this current age would consider "classically handsome". It is a good thing that they are not, too! For the elder I grow, the more I am convinced, that what the fashion world presents for us as handsome, is something that very few men can or should achieve. I love men. I think they are marvelous to look at. They are fearfully and wonderfully crafter by God. But particularly when I visit my friends in California, I am accosted left and right from remarks by people appraising this man as "hot" and this man as "not" for the most silly reasons imaginable, mostly by women and sometimes even by the men themselves. When I point out a man as attractive, it is frequently rebutted by somebody who has grown too sophisticated to percieve anything as beautiful anymore. Not even the human eye, which is more wondrous than the ocean, or the human hand, so expressive and so marvellously designed. So I ask the person, "Well, what does a man have to look like in order to be deemed attractive?" There are many possible responses but I will name a few of the replies. "I wish I couls marry a man who looks like Brad Pitt." "Orlando Bloom" "Robert Pattinson" "Taylor Lautner" "Johnny Depp" "George Clooney" "Robert Downey Jr." "Joe Jonas". It makes me sad to encounter attitudes like that because I love men who look real. I do not want to marry a man who looks like any of those people (because what the blazes would a person like that have to do with me? What would somebody that toned, starved, painted, airbrushed, body-doubled, digitally edited and universally admired see in a beauty as humble and genuine as mine? Besides, he would cheat!) They don't look real because they are not. I like men who look real. Real men wear glasses. Real men are not often toned and built up. Real men often wear ugly and ill-matched clothes. Real men have receding hairlines. Real men are more "rotund". Real men are "scrawny". real men are short. Real men have dry patches of skin, blemishes, unshaved faces, scars, broken noses, uneven features, graying hair, or thin hair, wrinkles around their foreheads. Real men do not wear designer clothing. Real men do not drive a ferrari. Real men do not have the incomes to afford your prada bags, gucci shoes and plastic surgeries. Real men are Beautiful. They are all beautiful. Their hands are strong and manly from their work and generous deeds. Their eyes glisten with a vision to see what is just and desire it. Their mouths are beautiful from speaking the truth. Their ears are glorious because they listen and hear.
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My objection to people wanting to marry someone who looks like Someone Else is the obvious danger of unconscious (or, Heavens Forefend, deliberate) substitution-in-thought. Anyways, there isn't anyone who really looks like Carrol Channing except Carrol Channing herself; and I don't want to marry Carrol Channing. Whomever she may be (should she indeed be), I will thoroughly expect of her that she look as much like herself as cyclostyle ink is inky.
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