The Burden of Being a Beautiful Child

First, to any readers who have paid this space enough attention to notice I have been on hiatus, I owe you an explanation. If you don’t know me, or if you know me but are one of the handful of people I have not told this, I am going to grad school this fall, to Columbia University, where I will while away my days thinking and writing, much the same  as I’ve done on this blog, but working towards a tangible goal: an M.F.A. in Fiction. Beyond that are, yes, more intangible goals.

The past few months I have spent preparing for this transition. I’ve given notice at my job and am working on wrapping up my three years there by the end of July; I’ve found an apartment uptown, closer to school; and I’ve put my nose to the stone, working intently on my creative work, which, I’m happy to report, has borne fruit in the form of acceptances from two literary journals. Going back to school means that I will probably not have much time to blog, and this infrequency of late may well be the norm going forward. Or, this blog may die altogether. If that’s the case, it’s been a nice ride that I hope you’ve enjoyed, or at least not felt that whatever time you’ve devoted to reading me has been wasted.

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To the issue at hand. Last week I got pretty wrapped up in the drama around Olivia Munn. She was recently hired by The Daily Show as an on-air correspondent, making her the first woman to win such a position in seven years (the other is Samantha Bee). A couple of weeks ago, Jezebel posted an article questioning the decision, given that she does not have very much comedy experience, but is a bonafide frat-boy sex symbol, having posed half-naked on the covers of Playboy and Maxim.

Jezebel was the first to comment on in this situation, and their post sparked a lot of blog back and forth, and in particular this interview with Munn on Salon. I found the Jezebel article completely called for, and even needed. It’s really a typical workplace problem: someone with a weak resume, but possessing some other outside advantage is hired or promoted. There is naturally going to be questioning or even some outrage. If you’ve been on the spurned side of this type of event, you know that it’s your full right to question that person’s qualifications. Really, it’s all that you can do; all of us will find ourselves losing to people who are favored for one reason or another–attractive people, rich people, people with family connections–at some point in life, and you can’t fight every single one of these battles.

But Munn doesn’t do herself any favors in the interview and comes off as defensive and kind of full of herself:

I’m easy to hate. I get it. When I first came to L.A., I would go to these commercial auditions for Target. I’m 110 pounds now, but I used to be 135. And I would go to these auditions and these girls would be, like, in that effortless L.A. look: T-shirt, jeans and flats. So thin they’d just walk with a shuffle. I know what it’s like to not think it’s fair for someone to look a certain way and also get the dream job. But it’s ridiculous to say that a woman can’t be funny and also be sexy.

Also, in a few of the blog comments I read, there was contention around these lines that followed: “‘Oh, I’m the pretty girl who came in?’ That means that Nancy Carell isn’t gorgeous? Like all these other women who have been there aren’t beautiful women?”

People: this is not the way you respond to allegations of preferential treatment! In this situation, do not deny. Denying, first, is impossible to back up. A few months from now we could be hearing tapes from Jon Stewart’s closed-door meetings, full of the sounds of high-fives and betting on who can score with her first.

Second, most importantly, denying means denying others a right to their own feelings. Think of that workplace situation. Imagine confronting the person in question, and having them tell you about how they lost jobs to people even prettier than they were in the past? It makes you feel like you don’t deserve to feel angry in this situation, which–fucking yes you do! What actions you take in response to the incident–whether you sue or threaten to quit, or refuse to make eye contact with that person when you pass them in the hallway–that is what determines whether you will be judged as having handled the situation well or poorly, but you certainly, 100% always, are entitled to your own private feelings.

Munn’s performance in this interview brought to mind a recent article by another woman known very much for her beauty–Elizabeth Wurtzel. I wrote on her piece already, and promised that there would be a coda in the future.

Though the two women have pretty different personalities–Munn comes off as more fragile (which may have to do with how close the interview came to the Jezebel article), and Wurtzel is famously nuts. But in both cases, both women fail to admit, plainly, the advantages they’ve been granted compared to other women because of their beauty. Wurtzel is more aware of how such discussions of beauty turn people off, but is powerless to make herself stop. Munn is either lying, which I really doubt, or there is some part of her that believes  her experiences at all resemble those of Nancy Carell or Samantha Bee. Amy Benfer put it very succinctly in her response on Slate’s Broadsheet: “Beauty is a thing to be observed from the outside, not commented on from the inside.”

But, in revisiting Wurtzel’s article I latched onto her description of the beautiful child, and I have been thinking since about the experience of being consistently told you are beautiful for most of your life:

I was a remarkably adorable child, the kind with such rosily expressive cheeks that grown-ups couldn’t resist pinching them. So when I became a teenager and then an adult, I was what you would call a hot number or something like that [...] I was cute all along—it’s not like I blossomed into honeysuckle after adolescence

It struck me because, more or less, this was my experience. I was a beautiful child. In my whole life, I have been called ugly exactly once, in middle school, naturally, by a very angry girl who in the same sentence called Uma Thurman ugly. So, yes, for as long as I have been around, it has been there, as plain and as constant a factor in my development as my race or my upbringing.

Beauty also dovetails with those two factors: specifically, my race and environment growing up determined how attractively I was perceived, and, more generally, all three have effected my development in similar ways. It is really natural, given that I write mainly on those other two things that I should include the third, lately I have felt so estranged on the internet being reduced to a shapeless avatar (though there is a reason for the one I chose–people did used to tell me that I would look like Sade when I grew up).

So here is the thing: when you are told, consistently, that you are beautiful from a young age, before you have a chance to develop your own sense of what you look like, your beauty becomes separate from who you think you are. It’s someone eles’s invention: a phantom that exists between the space of your mind and the looks of others. To some extent this is always true, but it’s harder when it’s introduced to you so early. And when you learn about sex, when you get what those weird looks actually mean, you become even more of an object for other people’s desires.

I’m not trying to pass off this experience as entirely bad; I have more respect for your intelligence. Duh. When people think you are beautiful, they are usually nicer to you. It’s not all bad, but it’s complicated.

Another plus, when you’re attractive from a young age, you learn earlier about beauty’s myths. I know, by witnessing its failures and disappointments–its broken promises, that beauty comes with no guarantees, which, actually, is a prize. This is something Wurtzel clearly has battled with:

I was given to believe that love would be easy, men would be elementary, and I would have my way. I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess. It was all supposed to be to the tune of some glorious Crystals song from the early ’60s, when everything was still innocent, and my life would be a wall of sound from “Then He Kissed Me.” Love would be simpler than tying a string bikini, the kind I wore a lot while waiting on the beach for my ship to come in.

More of the bad: I am deeply uncomfortable with male attention. I always question what is behind it, I think always about the part of me that they are not getting. This has proven to be a useful defense mechanism, especially in New York, but it makes attraction the sticking point of my relationships, something that most people figure out right off the bat.

And let’s bring up those other two ghosts. In my town, but even in my own family, I was exotic from the vantage of every group. My grandmother, my aunt, and my father and brother are the one small branch of my family with Asian features. Obviously, these features, along with my complexion, do sometimes determine why some people think I am attractive. I’m not as resistant to it as I think many women are. Attraction is by nature individual, veiled and complex, determined by any number of factors that you can’t really ever hope to isolate.

But I can observe the comments I receive, and the way people treat me in relation to others. It does honestly bother me to think that I may be treated differently than even darker-skinned members of my own family, just because my great-grandmother (God bless her), decided to get it on with a Chinese guy.

So where do you go from being a beautiful child? You can, like Wurtzel, cling to it desperately, or, like Munn, not think you ever had it in the first place (or at least to the extent that other people think you do). I like to think I’ve beaten something of a retreat, in favor of a more internal life, partly because I’ve fallen a little from my glory days (see below), but also because being around it so long, I don’t trust beauty. I trust friends, love, words. I trust my feelings; my family.

Anyway, if you think I’m a little grubby, there’s why. Damn I was cute.

I am second from left looking like a lady, unfortunately not like a badass cop.

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