Pretending We Don’t Care About Beauty Doesn’t Help

The new issue of George magazine features an interview with a newly glamorous Linda Tripp. Asked why “people were so willing to forgive everybody else but you,” she blames a “visceral reaction” against her--based at least in part on her “hulking” looks.

Tripp is no longer alone.

This election season has certainly brought out catty comments about how people look.

When Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris appeared with heavy makeup, wags compared her to a drag queen, Vampira and Cruella De Vil. They drew on a centuries-old tradition that equates cosmetics with deception, decadence and even witchcraft. A woman who wears a lot of makeup, they suggested, is not to be trusted.

Vice President Al Gore got similar treatment after he wore thick orange makeup to cover a sunburn in his first debate with Gov. George W. Bush. Commentators compared him to Lurch from “The Addams Family,” “Herman Munster doing a bad Ronald Reagan impression” and “a big, orange, waxy, wickless candle.”

Even commentators who bemoaned the emphasis on appearance gleefully used the recent Harris controversy to air their own pent-up judgments. Warren Christopher, wrote one columnist, “looks like a deflated mix of shar-pei and beagle.” Another compared Christopher to a prune and Joseph I. Lieberman to an elf, mocked Strom Thurmond’s orange hair plugs and told House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert to go to Weight Watchers. She then righteously declared such slurs “too nasty, too vicious, too totally uncalled-for.”

Making fun of how people look isn’t respectable. But the embarrassing truth is that human beings not only make judgments about how others look, we enjoy doing so. We’re not going to stop just because it’s bad manners. And in an age in which we see more and more good-looking people, directly or through the media, we’re getting ever more judgmental.

The real problem isn’t that we care about how public figures look. It’s that we try to justify our interest by acting as though mere appearance has deep moral significance. We treat beauty as a sign of virtue and ugliness as a sign of vice.

If Gore and Harris wear the wrong makeup, they cannot be trusted. If Paula Jones has a crooked nose and Monica Lewinsky is fat, they cannot be telling the truth. Conversely, if Hillary Clinton has a bad health care plan, she cannot have a lovely face.

It would be better for our public discussions if we acknowledged that beauty has its own significance and does not need to be saddled with symbolism. Commentators could then opine on distracting makeup, crooked noses and broad hips without forcing their aesthetic judgments to take on inappropriate moral weight. They could be honestly catty without pretending to be deep. Respectable commentators could not get away with pretending that analyzing how people look can substitute for analyzing how they think or act.

Treating beauty as though it has moral significance is an anachronism. The idea that beauty is a value in and of itself--that looks are just looks, but we nonetheless care about them--is what the historian Arthur Marwick calls the “modern” idea of beauty. Traditional cultures assumed that good looks meant good character. Think of the ugly, evil stepsisters and beautiful, virtuous Cinderella.

Nowadays we see a fuller range of human looks--and of the human character that accompanies them--than people who lived before modern trade, travel and media. We can thus judge both looks and character more stringently and more carefully, and we can separate the two.

Talking honestly about how public figures look certainly has its negative side. We already have high standards, pushed ever higher by the beautiful faces we see in the media. It’s surely no accident that Gore, Bush and Bill Clinton are good looking. If video killed the radio star, it may also have done away with the homely politician.

But denial won’t work. Pretending we don’t care how people look doesn’t make us stop caring. It simply encourages us to equate good looks with other qualifications. Instead of treating beauty as one value among many, we come to treat it as the greatest value of all. It may not seem fair to treat looks as important. But it’s far more fair than treating appearance as something more.