Beauty Is As Beauty Does
There was a man who came to me several times over a period of years who wanted, as he put it, to uglify himself. He was not joking.
He was a genuinely beautiful man—the kind of physically striking person whose presence in a room changed the room’s temperature before he had spoken or done anything—and he was tired of it. Not of the beauty itself, which was not something he could address. He was tired of what the beauty produced in other people, and what those productions then required of him.
He had, in addition to the kind of face and body that stopped conversations, an anatomy that had acquired its own reputation in the circles he moved in. He was substantially larger than average in a way that had preceded him into rooms, that had been discussed before he arrived, that generated its own set of responses before he had made any decision about the encounter. Men knew about it. And knowing about it, they arrived at him carrying expectations he had no particular wish to meet, combined with a frequent inability to accommodate the reality of what they had asked for.
What he told me was that he did not enjoy the worship aspect. He simply wanted pleasurable sex. That sentence, as I heard it and as I still hear it in memory, contains more than its immediate content. He was not complaining about his body. He was not complaining about the interest other people took in it. He was describing the specific texture of what happened when a body ceases to be experienced as belonging to a person and begins to be experienced as a fact in itself—a feature, a quantity, a thing to be responded to before the person carrying it has been met.
What I notice about his situation is that it breaks the narrative that most discussions of body image begin from, which is the narrative of deficiency. The man who fears he will not be desired, who arrives bracing for the door to close, who has absorbed the anticipation of rejection so thoroughly that it operates even in rooms where no rejection is forthcoming—that man, and the experience of working with him, I have written about elsewhere. His difficulty is legible within a familiar framework. He wants to be seen as enough. He fears he will be found wanting.
The man who wanted to uglify himself was not that man. He was not afraid of being found wanting. He was suffering, if suffering is the right word, from a different problem: he had been found so decisively, so completely, so without remainder, that the finding had consumed the person being found. He had become an object of desire in a way that left very little room for him to be anything else. The worship that preceded and surrounded him was a form of attention, but it was not attention to him. It was attention to the attributes that had constructed a narrative about him before he arrived.
I wonder, in thinking about him, whether idealisation and rejection are more similar than they appear. Both are forms of reduction. Both place the body in the position of evidence—evidence of desirability in one case, evidence of deficiency in the other—and both remove the person from the calculation. The man who is rejected for his body is told: your body is not enough.
The man who is idealised for his is told, implicitly but effectively: your body is everything. The man who fears rejection at least retains the theoretical possibility of more—the fantasy that if the body were different, the self beneath it would finally be legible. The man who is idealised has had that fantasy fulfilled and discovered that the fulfilment does not deliver what he wanted, which was to be met as an ordinary person having an ordinary pleasurable encounter.
He wanted pleasurable sex. Not worship. Not the experience of being a body that other people had decided was extraordinary. Just the thing itself: warmth, attention, reciprocity, the ordinary transaction of two people being physically present with each other.
What I find in that wanting is something I recognised in other men who came to me, though usually from the opposite direction. The man who had been shaped by the narrowing visual vocabulary of the past few decades, who calibrated himself against a standard he could not meet, also wanted to be in the room without the evaluation preceding him. Both men wanted the same thing from opposite positions. One was trying to become enough. The other was trying to stop being too much. What they shared was the experience of having the body’s meaning decided before they arrived.
This is what I mean when I say the body is always interpreted. The thin man carries a narrative before he speaks. The overweight man carries one. The muscular man, the ageing man, the man with the surgical scar—each of them arrives preceded by a set of meanings that other people have generated and that the man himself did not choose and may not endorse. The narrative is constructed from whatever the culture has decided these particular physical features imply about the person who has them. And then the person is required to live inside the narrative, to negotiate with it, to confirm or disappoint the expectations it generates, whether or not those expectations bear any relationship to who he actually is.
My work, as I have described it elsewhere, involved trying not to impose another one. The man who arrived was the man I worked with. Not the story suggested by his physique, not the narrative his body invited, not the comparison with other bodies I had worked with or with any image of what a male body was supposed to be. The man on the table. That man, specifically, with that body, at that time.
This was not a philosophical position I adopted. It was simply what the work required, in the same way that the physiotherapist must work with the knee that arrives rather than the knee they might prefer to work with. The narrative the body seemed to invite was not useful information for what I was doing. What was useful was observation—what this body was actually doing, how this person actually inhabited it, what the muscle and breath and quality of presence revealed about the person I was working with.
For the beautiful man who wanted to uglify himself, that quality of observation—being attended to rather than worshipped, met rather than consumed—seemed to be part of what he came for. The room was one in which his anatomy was not a subject of reverence or of practical difficulty. It was simply a body, with specific properties, that I would work with in the same way I worked with any other. The expectations his appearance and anatomy generated in other people did not operate in that room, not because I was pretending to be without response but because response was not the instrument. The instrument was attention to what was actually in front of me.
What I have been circling in all of these essays, I think, is a version of this. The suffering I most consistently observed in the men who came to me was not primarily about the body they had. It was about the meanings that had been attached to the body—by other people, by the culture, by the images that surrounded them, and eventually by themselves. The body that had been told it was not enough came to believe it. The body that had been told it was extraordinary came to resent the extraordinariness. The body that had been assessed, evaluated, compared, found wanting or found more than enough—all of these were bodies living inside a story that someone else had written about them.
What I could offer was an hour in which the story was suspended. Not resolved, not replaced by a better story. Simply suspended, for the duration of the work, while the body on the table was attended to as itself.
Beauty is as beauty does. I find this formulation more useful the longer I sit with it. It shifts beauty from an attribute of the body—something fixed, something possessed, something that generates its own responses regardless of what the person does—to an attribute of conduct, of presence, of the quality of attention a man brings to what is in front of him. The beautiful man who treats his appearance as sufficient, who expects his face or his body or his proportions to do all the work and offers nothing beyond them, is not, in the experience of spending time with him, particularly beautiful. The man whose body the culture might overlook, who arrives with warmth and attention and a quality of genuine interest in the person they are with, is. This is not sentimental. It is something I observed, repeatedly, in the full range of bodies that came through my door over thirty years.
What the man who wanted to uglify himself was trying to escape was not his body. He was trying to escape the narrative that had fastened itself to his body and that he had been unable to detach from himself. He wanted to be, as I have put it in other contexts, ordinary. To enter the room without being anticipated. To want something simple and find it simply available.
I could not uglify him. But for an hour at a time, in a room where his anatomy was just his anatomy and not a story about what he must be or must want or must be capable of, he was more ordinary than he was anywhere else he told me about.
Whether that was enough I cannot say. He came back, for a while. And then, as many men did for their own reasons, he stopped. I do not know what he found afterwards, or whether he found it.
The narrative the body generates continues regardless of what we prefer. What I notice is that it is never the body that generates it. The body is just the body. The narrative comes from elsewhere, and lands on the body, and the body then has to carry it.
That seems to me the thing. The body carries the narrative until, occasionally, the narrative slips and the body is simply allowed to be the body again.
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