Lately I've been thinking about the superficial mindset of the current culture, and myself. It was only fitting that I should blog in response to Robert Hass' A Story About the Body. The first things I noticed about this work were the most blatant: "[He]...had watched her for a week...and he thought he was in love with her." The author talks about how this man seemed to love the way this Japanese artist moved her body, her artwork, and how she "looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions." When he learns that she has had a double mastectomy and is no longer anatomically "normal", "The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity -- like music -- withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, 'I'm sorry, I don't think I could.'" How very sad, I thought. This woman obviously endured something horrific in needing this procedure to be done -- cancer, perhaps -- and this man is rejecting her for something she cannot change, and probably something that she had to do to keep from dying. As a young woman, I was about to have a "hay day", ranting about superficial men, and that, "This is one of the highest forms of degradation!" It certainly is, but before I could go further, I thought about my own culture. By "culture", I don't mean the culture of the world and the mass media (which is obviously corrupt), but the culture that surrounds me at school. I'm offended at the man in this story, but how many times do I not say anything when girls talk about the physical stature of young men in a degrading way? It seems terrible for a man not to be with a woman because she has lost both of her breasts, but not so bad for young women to reject young men because they are too thin, too short, too pale.
How important is physical attraction in romantic love? This is a very complicated question, and not one that I am mature enough to answer in full. I don't think appearance should be at the top of our priority list in evaluating a man or woman, and when I think about it, it seems quite superficial to hold any sort of physical malady against them at all. What if you marry a goregeous person, and later they acquire permanent burns and scarring in some sort of accident? Would you leave them because they have lost their allure? Would it not be wiser to think about character when you're deciding whether to jump into love? (I don't think you fall.) Not only would this produce a bond that is stronger and much more "real", but I think when you get to know someone's character, you eventually see them as you percieve them to be. I have known people who I didn't think were particularly striking when we met, but when I knew them better, I noticed "small" things about them that eventually made them seem very beautiful to me.
Although the behavior of this man seems, and is, very wrong, I daresay this kind of mindset is perfectly normal for both genders, especially my age. We seek the handsome, beautiful people who will make us feel "radiant" and get butterflies, and not necessarily the ones we will love, or the ones who will love us. We seek rose petals, but when we dig deeper, we often find it wasn't what it appeared to be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1trE3ms3AGo
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