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Beauty and the Best
"America, shame on you!" said Justin Goode, spokesperson for the National Association for the Advancement of the Pulchritudinally Challenged (NAAPC) yesterday as thousands of less than 5s on the Bo Derek scaled massed in Hollywood in a demonstration called "Occupy Sunset Boulevard."
"Evolutionary biologists have shown," said Goode, "that evolution in our culture is biased in favor of persons who embody the Classic ideal of beauty: the height-weight proportionate, the symmetrically-featured, the wide-eyed, the high-cheekboned, the big-chested, the strong-jawed, the full-maned, the balanced, the unblemished, the Venuses, the Adonises. Evolution unfairly selects for attractiveness, which shows itself in the statistical facts that handsome men earn 17% more over their careers than their homelier brothers and pretty women make 12% more than their plainer but otherwise just as capable sisters. Evolution has the biased notion that beauty equates with health and vitality, that a beautiful person will have a greater chance to meet and mate and propagate and send its beautiful genes off into the future. Evolution's preference for pulchritude is criminal and must be resisted by a democratic society. Getting evolution under control is what government is all about. Down with lookism!" Goode declaimed. "Up with the beauty-bereft! George Clooney and Julia Roberts, your 'Reign of Fairer' is over. Never again will Americans have to ask plaintively, 'Do my genes make me look fat?' We are going to boycott all movies featuring pretty-boys and glam-gals. We are going to watch only movies about monsters and zombies and elephant men. We are going to boycott everything on TV except reality shows. No more picture-perfect anchor persons, weathercasters, or advertising models for us. And we demand that Congress pass an affirmative action bill to right centuries of wrong. All employers must be required to ask themselves, 'Do we have enough uglies? Is our public face ugly enough?' We must democratize evolution by changing its mechanism from survival of the wowsers to survival of the bowsers."
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The Skin Game
"Kelly Clarkson Is a Pop Star Comfortable in Her Own Skin," claims a NY Times headline. "My name is Kirk Herbstreit, and I am definitely comfortable in my own skin," boasts an ESPN college football analyst doing a commercial for Dove deoderant.
Will we soon be hearing Ecurb Snave, septuagenarian dermatoglyphicist, utter a similar sentiment? Not hardly. No matter how frequently he lays on the Dove and the wrinkle cream, Ecurb remains thin-skinned about his thin skin, which not only splits and spurts blood when even slightly grazed by a knife, razor, tweezers, pruning saw, screwdriver, or nail but peels or shreds at a blow to the shin from a tennis opponent's volley or a clumsy collision between a knee and the corner of a table. Even the friction produced by bumping arms with a basketball opponent or kneeling on a torso rotation machine will tear tissue and send him running for band-aids. His skin has no elasticity, no resiliency, no resistance. A while back, a fall on a treadmill peeled eight inches of epidermis off his lower leg, leading to an infection and six weeks of bandaging. One particularly bad day, a sharp look from his wife drew blood.
But to Ecurb, his skin's appearance is even worse than its frequent failure to keep blood in and bacteria out. His corrugated face is a hard-boiled egg cracked and ready for peeling, his wattled neck jiggles like a turkey's, his arm flesh is creased and puckered like the topographic map of a landscape in drought. The skin on his butt sags loosely in folds, like an elephant's. The skin on his legs is seer-suckered. From head to toe he is plastered with bruises like purple birthmarks and dotted with white basal-cell growths, scaly beige squamous-cell cancers, and a variety of non-melanomic black moles.
Ecurb knows that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is why he shuns mirrors. When Justin Goode of the National Association for the Advancement of the Pulchritudinally Challenged called yesterday to ask him to be a contestant on "Who Most Resembles the Portrait of Dorian Gray?", a new reality show being developed by the NAAPC, Ecurb's pebbly skin crawled. "No way. I have too much self-respect to respect myself the way I am. I refuse to be one your shameless bowsers," Ecurb barked.
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Death by Television
Responding to a study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine claiming that, for people over the age of 25, every hour spent watching television shortens their life expectancy by 22 minutes, dermatoglyphicist Ecurb Snave, now almost 72 and the possessor of five TVs and three Netflix-and-HBO-enabled computers, said, "What have I done? I could've lived to be 400."
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