Tone Up and Strip Down, for This Sunny Oasis Is Essentially Bod Sod
My friend Janet goes through stages where she cancels social plans at the last minute. Her excuses vary and are always complex. She talks to my answering machine, never to me.
The former local beauty pageant contestant is obsessed with numbers; the ones on a scale, her age, her dress size. She buys designer clothes, but they are cut bigger so she can boast that she wears a size 4.
Janet, 36, is convinced that an extra 15 pounds separates her from finding love and happiness. She has lost those same 15 pounds over and over in the last five years, and each time she does she looks gaunt.
Weight is not her only obsession. “Do you think I should have my eyes done?” she asked me.
Her “saddlebag thighs” were liposuctioned a year ago, and before that, she had her nose straightened. She is about six sutures away from becoming a plastic surgery junkie.
“Men expect women to look like they do in Playboy,” Janet said. Really? Should we all look airbrushed?
My friend Buzz--who lives in New York--believes that Californians are obsessed with looks. “People here don’t have the preoccupation with beauty that Californians do,” he said.
Our conversation caused me to wonder whether people in other parts of the country judge looks differently, and that maybe New York--compared with California--is not such a jungle after all.
My friend Colleen is sure we are obsessed. She has lived all over the United States, most recently in Chicago. “I never, ever heard the expression ‘hard bodies’ until I came back to Orange County after 14 years in Chicago,” she grumbled.
“And here, when people talk about hard bodies, you don’t know whether they’re referring to a physique or Ferrari. Both, I suppose.”
If you don’t have one, you better have the other, she said with a laugh: “Here, if you’re five pounds overweight, the fat police issue a warning citation.”
“I hate it that women feel driven to strive for this kind of superficial perfection,” said John, a 30-year-old bachelor with looks that compare to Tom Selleck’s. “People here are skin deep.”
The Laguna Beach contractor said he has dated women from other parts of the country and has noticed some differences: “Women back East are far more intellectual and more sincere. You can even discuss politics with them. You can’t find a woman in Orange County who will talk politics; even the men here aren’t well versed politically.”
He said women from the South and Midwest are more down to earth: “They don’t shun you if you don’t happen to drive the right car or have a body like Stallone.”
But some, he said, try too hard to be glamorous. “I’ve noticed that women from other parts of the country, especially the South and Midwest, get ideas about what they should look like based on watching TV or going to the movies. But they always seem to be about a year behind the times.”
Charles, who moved here from Missouri 12 years ago, believes that the reason so many people are obsessed with physical beauty in California is related to climate and the outdoor life-style.
“Remember too,” he said, “that Los Angeles is the entertainment capital of the world; it attracts a lot of young, beautiful and ambitious people.”
He suspects that as they age (not always gracefully), the pressure to compete in a youth-oriented culture results in insecurity, paranoia--and more wealth for plastic surgeons.
It seems unarguably true that men are judged by different standards than women. Take Buzz, for example. He is handsome, sexy, erudite. He is also an accomplished writer. He took the big five-oh if not in stride, at least in earnest; he began lifting weights and running.
And now Buzz is buff. His grayish hair is beginning to thin? No matter. He’s still sexy. And those crinkled lines in his face? They serve to heighten his smoldering masculinity. Mom was right: Life is not fair.
Sean Connery was recently voted “Sexiest Man Alive” by a People magazine reader’s poll. He is as bald as a billiard ball, sixty-something, and he admitted twice on national TV that if a woman behaves poorly it’s not such a bad idea to give her a whack now and then. Gee, what a guy.
When was the last time a 60ish woman was voted anything, much less sexy?
John Goodman, Roseanne Barr’s hefty TV sidekick, was voted “Sexiest Big Guy” in the same poll. Where was the “Sexiest Big Gal” category? The fat jokes are reserved for women such as Barr.
Society is not one-sided. Women can be as hypercritical as men when selecting a date. Tiffany, a 23-year-old beach beauty, tossed her flaxen mane in that special California way and proudly proclaimed: “A guy I date has to take me out to nice places, be a sharp dresser and give me a lot of attention. He can’t smoke, and he has to have great hair.”
Let us hope that in 25 years we don’t find Tiffany going steady with some guy she found lying face down in the gene pool.
But Brenda, a recent Boston transplant, said: “Maybe it’s true that single people here hold each other up to a higher physical standard; maybe they feel entitled. I’ve traveled all over the world, and everywhere you go people say that Southern Californians are the healthiest and most attractive of all.
“Everybody wants to come here to be with all the pretty people.”
Maybe she’s right. After all, the Beach Boys did not sing “I wish they all could be North Dakotan.”
