One of Aesop’s more flawed fables is that of the Fox and the Leopard. In it, the haughty Leopard tries to convince the Fox that he is clearly the more beautiful creature considering the luxuriousness of his mane and the magnificent embellishment of spots within it. The Fox in turn tells the Leopard that the cunningness, wiliness and guile within his spirit are more magnificent than any embellishment any animal could simply display within their fur, thus his inner beauty (as well as all creatures’ inner beauty) carries more resonance than any physical attribute ever could. The Leopard subsequently sulks away in defeat. The flaw, of course, is that while inner beauty is much more valuable than physical beauty, bragging about either attribute… kind of makes you a dick. If anything what I get from the fable is the idea of humility; of not being a Fox when you meet a Leopard. But a defense mechanism is a defense mechanism, and sometimes all a guy has… is his dick.
Being a Fox of a certain amount of girth, poverty and intellect I can tell you that I have run into my fair share of Leopards living in Los Angeles. From business associates, friends, roommates, and lovers alike, there is no denying the power that a muscular frame or smooth skin or straight teeth or mesmerizing eyes can have while negotiating even the slightest of decisions. I have always likened myself to being an anarchist in the eternal rat race this city sells as extravagant normality; thinning things that are naturally thick, whitening things that are naturally dark, all in the name of portraying yourself as an avatar that doesn’t exist in nature. But as mighty and as just as my fight has been to side step the whole preoccupation of beauty and its prejudices, I have to admit that my inner yearning to sit at the cool kid’s table has reared its ugly head on more occasions than I would care to mention. I have agreed to do things, offer assistance, enter into business agreements that in hindsight I clearly would not have made if the other party naturally looked like Michael Jackson post-surgery or maybe Biz Markie’s less attractive older brother. I scoff at men who make decisions based on the attractiveness of the women in the vicinity of the deal when all along I do the same thing, just with men.
I recall this when I encounter the support certain factions receive when they take clear and distinct platforms of insensitivity, derision and callousness. From lowly bloggers who proclaim that the utter annihilation of the overweight, the HIV+ and Christians would bring about a more just world to mega super pop stars who release albums filled with references to spilling and swallowing semen while their spouses compare their dominance in the relationship to that of concussion inducing domestic violence, I wonder how easily audiences would accept their actions if they were to originate from bodies that were short and/or pudgy and/or acne ridden and/or scarred?
I pondered this while watching an episode of the old sitcom "Taxi" where the main antagonist of the show, Louie De Palma, was played by the stoutly Danny Devito. The threats that piped out from his five foot tall, five foot wide body rivaled the intensity and heft of any villain imaginable, which only added to the comedy and complexity of his character and the show itself. But this was 1978. This was pre-Ronald Reagan and the curious metamorphosis of the “Me” generation prioritizing conservative political and cultural pursuits, highlighting money, youth and beauty (over the “Now” generation’s pillars of service, culture and civil justice). And by 1982, Reagan had his foot firmly planted in the White House, Taxi was cancelled and a slew of shows began to infiltrate the airwaves whose villains were just as De Palma evil, but in much prettier shapes. From Joan Collin’s turn as Alexis Carrington on Dynasty to Jane Wyman’s turn as Angela Channing on Falcon Crest, American audiences swooned at the juxtaposition of malevolence played through the pretty. That legacy continues on today in reality shows where the physically appealing Omarosa Manigault of “The Apprentice” fame was voted as one of the nastiest villains of all time by TV Guide. And while no one could deny the absolute beauty of former Ms. USA Kenya Moore, you would be equally as hard pressed to deny her less than amiable demeanor on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta”.
And all of these pretty villains maintain healthy fan bases. While there is a curious deliciousness to creatively delivered malevolence, I can’t help but wonder how palatable these actions would be if they were carried out by people who didn’t just so happen to coincide with societal beauty norms? The proposition that the beautiful receive preferential treatment is not a novel idea, what I ponder is… when does that glow where off? You have to question the boundaries of this beauty bubble when Rolling Stone puts the Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its cover and would that decision h