I was watching Jimmy Pardo's Running Your Trap, a game show where three celebrity guests all claim a story and the contestants try to guess which one is telling the truth.  In one round the story was, "I talked my way out of getting arrested for shoplifiting."

Now the guests were 2 men and one woman, Janet Varney.  You can Google her if you like or you can just take my word for it:  Janet is pretty.  The guys were average-looking and I hope if they hear this they'll forgive me for saying so.

So who do you think was the one?  If you were there, I think you would have guessed the same as I did, the same as both contestants.  We all thought it was the pretty woman. And of course we were all correct.  Regular people don't talk their way out of getting arrested very often .  It's a classic scene: the pretty woman flirting her way out of a traffic ticket.  Beautiful people get away with stuff.

They get better treatment. More smiles.  Better looking lovers.  Just for being pretty.

What drives us?  We want to be loved and we want to have sex with beautiful people.  That's not all of it, but it's a big part.  And beautiful people get both a lot more easily.

And that's the danger of it. Why go to medical school? Why do anything?   There comes a time in the lives of the beautiful people who go this way, all the little Paris Hiltons and Fabios, they're sitting in a classroom and they get an answer completely wrong and notice, “Hey... everyone’s still smiling....”

And that's about the last thought they ever have.

I know what you're thinking:

"Dan, can’t you hear how bitter you sound?  Isn’t all this just a hostility you feel towards all attractive women, a preemptive strategy intended to negate their obvious power over you, thereby preventing a rejection that you, full of self-loathing, see as inevitable?”

I know I sound cruel, but most of you should get on board.  There are a lot more of us than them.  This is like when Democrats say we're only going to raise taxes on the very wealthy.  I am trying to do a redistribution of self-esteem here.  The gorgeous can spare a little for the rest of us.

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For all my criticism of the shallowness of our culture, it doesn't oppress me.  Not directly. There's no getting around it: Beauty hits women harder. But that's ultimately a criticism of men.  If men are less likely to rest on their laurels, it's because women are less shallow.  Men are satisfied with mere beauty so beautiful women don't have to be accomplished.  Beautiful men aren't as prized.  Women want more.

Think of all the accomplished men - writers, directors, musicians - who marry models.  Can you name one accomplished woman who married a male model?  I can't.

Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe, but can you think of one great female writer who settled down with a merely beautiful man?  So if beautiful women are worse, it's only because men generally are worse.  and if I seem to embody any misogyny it's really rooted in man-hating!

Or as Farrah Fawcett Majors said, "The reason the all-American boy prefers beauty over brains is that the all-American boy can see better than he can think."

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Okay, I'm convinced: in looking at how people turn out, beauty is much less important than just how you're raised.

But we're not just raised by our families.  We're also raised by our computers and our TVs.  Advertisers  know no stronger tool than beauty to get us looking their way.  And as they use it to sell us shampoo and cars and soda, they inadvertently sell us on beauty itself.  And then we care about it even more.  Which makes them use it more.  And our other ideals start to get crowded out.

So being vapid doesn't come just from an unhappy childhood.  A lot of us lead empty lives largely because we're part of a culture that promotes it. And a lot of people are devoted parents and still raise their kids badly just because they have crappy values, that they lovingly pass on.

We're, too many of us, looking for shortcuts to esteem, not wanting to figure out what matters, and what we're supposed to do.  I picked on Paris Hilton at the beginning, but the fact that she's famous is an indictment of us.

But yes, there's clearly something wrong with me, and it's something I have to think about, that I can take one of the best things in life and spend a whole show complaining about it.

Meanwhile, I'm going to continue falling in love with two or three complete strangers every time I go out in the world.

November, 2010