Wednesday, January 21, 1998
Hooking beauty, brains not always fine fishing
BEAUTY Intelligence, good looks have snags beyond your
dreams
How do you attract that certain someone? With beauty, or
brains?
It’s paper or plastic – you can’t double-bag. Choose one or the
other.
Unless you’re from Neptune or Iowa, you’ve thought about the
question or heard someone bring it up in a conversation, so I know
you have an answer. But, let’s take a closer look.
First off, studies suggest that people who are better looking
are more popular, make more money and are promoted faster in the
workplace, so maybe you should choose to become beautiful and live
the dreams of the thousands of people who spend their hard-earned
dollars to make themselves just a little more attractive.
So, just for argument’s sake, let’s transform you into an
exquisite beauty that even the ancient Greeks would have worshiped.
You are perfect, but you’re not very smart.
Maybe modeling is the best path to utilize your newfound good
looks. After all, models are people just like you (or that’s at
least what the flyers say, right?).
Where do you start? Well, because you aren’t very smart, you
pick up the Daily Bruin (that’s not the dumb part) and answer one
of the personal ads in the classified section (this is the dumb
part). You go in to have your head shots taken, and they charge $60
for them because you "need" them. Then, they tell you that you
really need to "package" yourself, market your beauty for the large
casting and modeling agencies. You’re not very smart, so you shell
out the $430 you need to make the special artist’s proofs. It
doesn’t stop there. More pictures are needed. You shell out another
$430 to this talent agency, and you’re left with nearly $1,000 in
pictures and no modeling job, but you’re still optimistic. You wait
and you wait … no job. What happened? You’ve been scammed.
Maybe if you had been smarter you wouldn’t have taken that route
of trying to get rich quick off your newfound beauty.
OK, so maybe beauty isn’t the best way to join the pantheon of
successful people – because you’ll just make stupid decisions.
Do you want to reconsider? Would you rather be Brad Pitt (whose
first acting job was spent inside a chicken suit while acting in a
fast-food commercial) or UCLA biochemist and Nobel Prize winner
Paul Boyer?
And – before you answer – you can’t give the cliche answer and
say, "We should each search for the inner beauty within and work to
improve our minds through hard work." That’s ridiculous. You know
and I know that when you’re walking down Bruin Walk and you see a
good-looking person (as the case may be) walking toward you, you do
not say, "I really would like to get to know his or her inner
person; I’m sure she has a wonderful personality." You focus on
beauty.
It’s perfectly natural, but there’s the first strike against you
if you choose brains: Good-bye to romance.
Still, there is a point in favor of those of you who have chosen
brains. Take the standard plot line for any action-thriller that
you would see in the movies.
The beautiful people are always the easiest to pick off with a
bullet. They die early.
The smart people, on the other hand, are treated differently. No
cunning, diabolical mastermind would ever kill the brilliant
scientist (the one with the brains), who holds the key to unlocking
the mysteries of the universe. They are captured and ransomed for
millions of tax dollars to the scientist’s native nation. Smart
people live.
But, if the scientist’s home country is slow to agree to the
terms of the agreement, then the mastermind (who, incidentally,
isn’t smart or very good looking) decides to torture the
scientist.
So now we’re left with two scenarios: get killed early, or live
through the end of the movie and be tortured to death when the
president decides it’s close to election time and needs to prove to
"his" people that he is a man with a moral backbone and will not be
bullied around. So what will it be, a bullet to the back or bamboo
shoots up your fingernails?
It’s a tough decision, isn’t it?
Still, we need an answer. How should someone attract their
Prince Charming (or Princess Charming)? How can someone make the
right decisions to turn his or her life into a fairy-tale romance?
Beauty or brains?
I’m sure that many people have dreamed of waking up one day in
Cinderella’s shoes – or in glass slippers – with their soul mate
knocking at the door (but not too early – I sleep in till 10).
I’m sure that any pop psychologist would say that we each want
to believe that there is some handsome prince (or princess)
searching for us.
But how should we react when our soul mates finally find us in
our lowly cottages? (Remember this fairy-tale, dream date is
looking for a woman who wears a glass slipper.)
I, after meeting this beautiful woman, would be a little
disillusioned. Maybe you’re asking, "Spencer, what are you talking
about? You’ve just found the girl of your dreams. What’s wrong with
you?"
Well, there are a few problems that you didn’t take into
account.
How did this beauty find you? As the story goes, you go to the
ball, right? She is beautiful. He is beautiful. You fall in love.
And you have the most wonderful night of your life, right? But, at
the stroke of midnight, your true identity is revealed, and you
rush away in embarrassment and leave your glass slipper behind (I’m
a size 14, but I’m sure men can wear glass loafers). And, your soul
mate has secretly vowed to find you. But wait – I have questions.
There are hundreds and hundreds of beautiful people at the ball,
and you win the heart of this beauty, right? While you turn into a
pumpkin, your soul mate, who bears the likeness of Kathy Ireland
(or JFK Jr.), is schmoozing with many just-as-beautiful suitors,
right? He doesn’t remember your face or ask for your name. But,
he’s happy looking at your feet and those beautiful glass
slippers.
Do you see a problem here? I do.
Your so-called soul mate has a foot fetish. Yes, you heard me –
a foot fetish. This is a little sick, don’t you think? In fact, now
that I think about it, your soul mate has more than a little
problem. A little problem is asking you to take off your shoes or
suggesting that you should wear sandals more often just to get a
peek; your soul mate has an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Your soul mate is scouring the countryside looking for you with
only a glass slipper to go on. Your temporary good looks have cast
a spell on your star-crossed lover, who was, at 10 before midnight,
the greatest person you’ve ever danced with, but now your soul mate
is nothing more than a psychotic, feet-first, fatal attraction. All
I have to say is, lock your door at night and make sure you know
what you’re getting into when you decide to change yourself into
someone beautiful.
What is it going to be? Beauty or brains? The question will
probably go unanswered, joining the ranks of questions like: Who
first invented sliced bread? Why do you drive in a parkway and park
in a driveway? But then again, I think you already know the
answer.
Hill is a third-year communication studies student.