Why is it OK to be mean to the ugly?

Is it OK to be mean to the ugly? 

Let me tell you an encounter. I went to NTUC recently and standing there was a young male adult with long flowing hair chatting up a young lady, with nice features, and shapely too. 

They seemed to be in the flow of things, with body language like tuning fork. Oh, the young man was supposed to ensure that patrons tap in with their TraceTogether app and record their temperature. 

Then, comes me; the dull looking, visibly hunch and bespectacled man of 51 years old - recently spotted with an unsightly tummy. I was there to buy newspapers. 

And as I approached the young man, I realised I didn’t bring my handphone and couldn’t tap in. So, I asked him for a favour. I asked him whether he could buy the papers for me. I said I can pass him the money as I wait outside. 

He took a quick glance at me and said, “no, no.” That was it. He then returned to the conversation with the lady. They were talking about why it is important to bring one’s TraceTogether app, reminding me to bring it the next time. I smiled and nodded, can’t argue with that. And they returned to other topics, chatting heartily. 

I decided to go to 7-11 to get my morning fix instead. I find the attendants there more to my age. And we click better. 

As I walked away, with their giggling behind me, I wonder, if I had been more attractive, less physically challenged, will I get the favour I wanted? 

I guess it is what it is. And, the lesson? 

Well, I should have brought my TraceTogether app...what was I thinking. That young man was just doing his job...and stop wondering Mike. If you were any uglier, with a TraceTogether app, he will still let you in, so you can get that darn morning paper, and walk out with your head held high. 

This brings me to the paper this morning, written by the effervescent David Brooks, titled “Why is it OK to be mean to the ugly?”

He wrote: “This is puzzling. We live in a society that abhors discrimination on the basis of many traits. And yet one of the major forms of discrimination is “lookism”, prejudice against the unattractive. And this gets almost no attention and sparks little outrage. Why?”

(I believe at this point, all the unattractive people reading that line, me included, are saying a good amen to that). 

Well, it is what it is, right? Who can resist taking a second and third look at something or someone beautiful? 

With a better informed and educated population, we can say that we are now less superficial, and going for natural beauty. But the ugly reality is that we spend a whole lot of unnatural effort and time sprucing up for that look of natural beauty. 

One model said that to achieve natural beauty, she has to spend about two hours and two hundred dollars. Alas, even going for that plain humble look costs a lot. 

So, what is beauty anyway? 

It’s commensurability. It’s proportionality. And if you have every body part that is correspondingly matching, with one side of the face symmetrical with the other side, and curves and muscles studiously congregating at the right places, with the right height to boot, you will be honoured or rewarded in our society with, as David Brooks puts it, likeability (esp. from jury and future employers), competency, intelligence, first-class treatment, employment at first glance (I mean, first interview), earn much more, and wildly adored with thousands of “Likes” (tell me, which member of BTS is ugly?).

And we all know about power play. One sure fire way to boost up your image is for a CEO or leader to be seen surrounded by high heeled attractive staff. That is what I call value adding, or value flogging. 

But, let me end with another encounter. It is in a book “Survival of the Prettiest” by Nancy Etcoff. It is about a famous author Mary Ann Evans. You know her by her pen name, George Eliot. A brilliant writer indeed, but she was called “hideous” and “ugly”. 

And of all the charming gentlemen in the world, she fell in love with Herbert Spencer, “a man who wrote tracts about the importance of physical beauty.” 

He refused to marry her because of her looks. Yet, George Eliot stayed with him till his death. Eventually, as an old woman, she married a handsome man twenty years younger than her. And it is undeniable that Eliot wrote “some of the most profound novels in the English Language.”

Henry James met her in her fifties and this is what he wrote about her to his father: -“She is magnificently ugly - deliciously hideous. She has a forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth, and a chin and jaw-bone quo n’en finnissent pas...Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her.”

He added: “”She conveyed an underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride, and power. She has a larger circumference than any woman I have ever seen.””

This is what Eliot said: “All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children - in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.”

Well, deep human sympathy it is. For the unattractive, there is always that depth we can develop, that resilience we nurture, and that shared humanity of brokenness, even the most beautiful amongst us cannot escape from. 

Yes, beauty is skin deep, ugliness may be bone-deep, but that shared broken humanity is soul deep. It will of course take time to cultivate within us, and to know another beyond his/her appearance. 

And maybe, if that NTUC attendant gets to know me, if we too share a dialogue together, he might just spare the time to do me that favour after all, and buy me that paper.