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Whenever I have the grace and good fortune to call a woman beautiful, she derails the whole thing by calling me biased: \u201c<\/span>You<\/span><\/i> think I\u2019m beautiful,\u201d she\u2019ll say. This means, of course, \u201cThanks, you\u2019re nice, and I\u2019m tickled by your attention, but don\u2019t forget, there\u2019s a whole world out there, one that ain\u2019t so familiar with my flat nose and vacant expression. While you might find my giraffe-shaped mole endearing (riddled with affection as you are) they might find it (and me) quite otherwise.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWell, they\u2019re bastards, then.\u201d I used to say, but I\u2019ve since Gone To College. Now I\u2019ll say a bit more.<\/span><\/p>\n In every other field of knowing, familiarity and affection are seen as Rather Good Things. The marine biologist with an undying passion for plankton, the physicist who spends twenty years investigating a single theoretical particle \u2014 these are the people we trust to say true things about the objects given to their attention. Why is it, then, that when the object is one\u2019s neighbor, and the proposition is \u201cyou are beautiful,\u201d familiarity and affection are suddenly considered <\/span>detriments<\/span><\/i> to true insight? If a man spends several years gazing with fascination at a particular combination of pores and creases and comes to the conclusion that they make up a beautiful face, why is he checked by the possible-opinion of plebeians without the wherewithal to enter into such a study? <\/span><\/p>\n The assumption that love distorts our view of the truth of things assumes that the loveless begin with 20\/20 vision. <\/span>Au contraire<\/span><\/i>, I say there is no gaze as susceptible to the cataracts of bias, prejudice, idiocy and bigotry as the general gaze of a public unfamiliar and loveless towards their object. This gaze made the sexless, air-brushed, photo-shopped, unsmiling, pre-pubescent super-model into a profitable standard of beauty. This general gaze has elevated the sneer of disgust into the supreme symbol of sexual attractiveness. This gaze sails the waves of fashion \u2014 first praising the plump, now boosting the bony; now powdering the skin, now the toasting it tan \u2014 all of it driven by the winds of novelty and corporate suggestion. Why do we trust this \u201creal world\u201d with greater accuracy than those who actually see our faces \u2014 our mothers, fathers, friends and lovers?<\/span><\/p>\n That a mother thinks her child\u2019s squishy face is beautiful may not be a bias, but the <\/span>destruction<\/span><\/i> of a cultural bias for thin faces. That a man thinks his wife\u2019s small breasts are beautiful does not make him small-minded \u2014 he may well be of larger mind than a culture prejudiced in favor of large breasts. It is not a prejudice of affection that has a wife\u00a0think her husband handsome through weight gain, weight loss, wrinkling and all the rest. Rather, affection frees\u00a0her from the idiotic prejudice that beauty is an attribute plastered to a single, youthful stage of life \u2014 her familiarity with her object lifts her from a cultural crust of unthought preferences and unchecked beliefs. Love pierces through store-bought ideals\u00a0and reveals us in all our particular, unrepeatable value. Only a blind generation could call it blind. <\/span><\/p>\n We do, of course, for it is commonly thought that the \u201cobjective\u201d man is the man most detached from the object that he studies. This cannot be true. If it were, the most objective man in the universe would be the man so detached from the object of his study that he had never even heard of it. The ideal qualification for a position at a research department would be \u201cneither knowing nor giving a damn\u201d about the objects researched. Against this view, I assert a truism no longer considered true: To be <\/span>object<\/span><\/i>ive is to be concerned with an <\/span>object<\/span><\/i>. There is no absurdity waiting at the end of this line of thought. If it is true, then the most objective man in the universe would be the man so fascinated, so in love with the object of his study, that he pursues the truth of its being with devotion, refusing to allow any prejudice or bias to hide its true nature from sight. It is not a peak of detachment that makes a man objective, but a peak of interest.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> a kind of love that hampers objective knowledge, but it is not a love for the thing known. It is a perverse self-love on the part of the knower. A familiarity and affection for asteroid belts does not disqualify an astronomer from predicting their whereabouts \u2014 an affection for glamorous publications may. So too, it is not love for another human being that should cast suspicion on our compliments, but self-love. When \u201cyou are beautiful\u201d really means \u201cI feel tingly when I look at you,\u201d then the complimented woman has every right to check my report against the larger body politic: \u201cSure, <\/span>you<\/span><\/i> say I\u2019m beautiful, and you\u2019re getting a lot out of the fact. But what about those who don\u2019t feel quite so warm in the chest when they note the rise and fall of my eyebrows?\u201d \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But love cannot bear to be a mere subjective status update. Love is oriented towards the object that it loves. If it did otherwise \u2014 tending towards my own feelings, some other object or some falsified shadow of the real thing \u2014 then, whatever it is, it\u00a0ain\u2019t\u00a0love. Love demands that we strip ourselves of false-notions and self-interests and allow the object of our love to \u201cbe itself.\u201d Love is the primordial science, the original ecstatic motion (from ex-stasis, \u201coutside oneself\u201d), the \u201cletting-be\u201d of the other that allows us to speak the truth about her.<\/span><\/p>\n All of which is to say that to shuffle off the compliment of \u201cbeauty\u201d from a familiar and affectionate friend by calling it \u201cone man\u2019s opinion\u201d seems silly. By what criteria could you ever know that you <\/span>are<\/span><\/i> beautiful, if not by the testimony of an outward observer with an affection and familiarity for his object, freed by the power of love from his cultural biases, and overflowing with the inner conviction of the truth of the proposition? A sociological study? An online survey? No, only love can see, for love is sight \u2014 clearheaded sight in a muddle-headed world. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whenever I have the grace and good fortune to call a woman beautiful, she derails the whole thing by calling me biased: \u201cYou think I\u2019m beautiful,\u201d she\u2019ll say. This means, of course, \u201cThanks, you\u2019re nice, and I\u2019m tickled by your attention, but don\u2019t forget, there\u2019s a whole world out there, one that ain\u2019t so familiar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-erotic-phenomenon"],"yoast_head":"\n