Am I Pretty or Ugly?

Jane Garvey (my favorite) presented a piece on Women's Hour, today, about the trend of girls posting videos on YouTube asking, "Am I pretty or ugly?" You can listen here (7 min).

She interviewed artist/performer Louise Orwin who has recently done her own version of these videos, while playing different characters, as a kind of experiment. They were downcast at the idea of young girls asking the internet whether they're pretty or not.

I'm writing this post to say that I disagree with Jane's sad head-shaking, and I never disagree with her, hardly.

I watched some of the videos for myself. Lots of the girls are wearing heavy make-up, and on some you can tell they're making the videos late at night on their family's desktop. The worst ones are where you can overhear family members talking. They're in the same room with the girl and just letting her ask high-charge questions to the internet! Come on people.

While I wouldn't recommend watching these videos - it feels pretty creepy - I don't fault people for making them. They're being sensible.

Here's how I break down the Ugly/Pretty YouTube trend:

1. Attractiveness is a social currency.

For girls it is the social currency. Every little girl, by the time she gets to high school, knows that inner beauty is the Weimar Mark to outer beauty's dollar.

2. Social currency is important.

Because it gets you laid. (Plus other things - like people just generally being kinder to you and all those studies about attractive people making more money and living longer and being uniformed of the gross hardship that is suffering of any kind! But mostly it gets you laid.)

3. Attractiveness isn't objective. But it is, kind of.

Those "she don't know she's beautiful" songs absolutely lie. If a woman is getting a top 40 song written about her, bitch* knows she's beautiful. No question.

Otherwise, there's a lot of grey area - 50 shades of it - wah wah. A lot of average-y looking girls who are wondering if they're going to be allowed to participate in any grand adventures, if they're going to be anybody's princess, if crowds of people will love or remember them. It's important in mapping out expectations for her life, for a girl to know whether or not she's pretty.

It's like all these girls are given so many drachmas of beauty and shoved into a strange country. These YouTube videos are just queries to find out what the exchange rate is.

*Am I allowed to say "bitch" on here? Do I believe in that? Oh well, if I wake up in the night feeling remorseful about it (happens), I can alter it.
--

I remember thinking in college that if I just knew exactly where I was in the spectrum of pretty, then I could budget for the social-currency equivalent of some Pringles.

Economic metaphors aside, so much of life is an assessment of risk. Should I talk to that guy? Should I crack a joke? If I get up in front of these people, will they be mean to me? Having an objective-ish idea of her attractiveness is an important element when a girl evaluates risk. So why the shock and dismay when she consults the internet about it?

It's like Old Gregg says, "Make an assessment."

one where I tell you what to do

I'm gripping my pencil too tight, like I'm afraid the little fucker's going to get away. My drawing teacher wants us to pick the line we want and make it, no sketching allowed. She's got a tricycle for us up front with some croquet mallets and balls for extra complication. And I'm making indents on my drawing pad, digging my B pencil into its guts, trying to make the right line.

She keeps telling the class, "Draw what you see not what you know." She explains it this way:

if you give a small child a can to draw, he will draw something like this:

He starts with the body of the can, the rectangle, and then he knows that the can has a circular top and bottom. He can't see those circles from his vantage point, but he knows they are there. Drawing shapes and their relationships as they actually appear is what makes a drawing look realistic and three dimensional. But it's difficult because our brains ignore much of what we see so that we don't get overloaded. For the sake of efficiency we know can as two circles and a rectangle.


A step further. What we know, often times, is something we've never seen. We think in some generalities, symbols, stereotypes even if we've never encountered a particular to match. For example, this is how most people would draw a house:

I've never seen a two-story structure with a huge door, one window, and an isosceles triangle for a roof. But I know this as "house" because it is my symbol for house.

People are very good at picking out small differences in faces. As a painter, getting an expression right is beyond my skill -- this portrait turned out to be of a mild half-wit who's just sat in a puddle, okay -- because every stinking millimeter of line can change it in a profound way. But the viewer sees it instantly, we are very attuned to those details.

And still, I submit that we have a hard time seeing people. I want to talk about the way women see other women, especially. (There's a Picasso painting at the Chicago Art Institute in which the nude woman's breasts, crotch and ass are all visible while she reclines on the sofa. It seemed telling. The way men see women is terrifying and I try not to think about it.)

The symbol for beauty's most important aspect is large eyes accented by larger eyelashes. As important is that the eyes are hedged in on all sides by a dark solid line. The nose doesn't draw any attention to itself; it's best, actually, if only nostrils are present. This is the image by which I will judge every woman and myself.

The first time I think I really saw a person was one of the times I was looking through my book of National Geographic portraits. The photos were lovely in themselves because of color and form and did not depend upon the beauty of the people in them. When I came to a black-and-white picture of a woman, dark skin, heavy and topless (saggy boobs), decorated in a costume of dead silver fish. She had hold of a little boy's hand and she was scowling like nothing I had ever seen. She didn't look anything like my symbol of beauty, and yet I looked at her for a long time. She was interesting. It looked like she had a story and life and emotion.

I decided she was thrilling to look at -- and that, I figured, made her beautiful -- once I actually saw her instead of making quick notes about how closely she matched the women on the magazine racks.

And I'm wondering, folks, if you even know what you look like. Or if billions of dollars are spent, expectations for the future arranged, and standards set for friends and boyfriends based on how closely you can get your face to look like my silly drawing. Go look in the mirror and try to tell what it is that lets your friends know you from strangers. See genetics and your parents and your acne scars. And the real shape of your eyes and the lines by your mouth and maybe a booger that you should take care of.

Draw what you see, not what you know.