Beautiful people have advantages over the rest of us. They get more dates, are more likely to be hired, and sometimes birds land on their shoulders and sing. But this idea ignores all the pressures sexy people endure.
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For example, they are surrounded by envy, and that is somehow unpleasant. Moreover, they constantly have to look at comparatively ugly people, which hurts their eyes. And let’s also look at the specific humiliations that beautiful people like … experience.
The handsome men banned from Saudi Arabia
The government of Saudi Arabia has an agency called the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. It is clearly a terrible agency, if only because its name is too long. Tellingly, the agency’s Wikipedia page asks if you are actually looking for a terrorist offshoot of the Taliban that goes by roughly the same name.
In 2013, CPVPV officers were patrolling a cultural festival outside Riyadh. They noticed a crowd forming around a group of three men, one of whom was model Omar Borkan Al Gala. Some visitors recognised the men from their modelling careers, others came in to see what other people were looking at and this set off alarm bells for the officers (the CPVPVABs). Here is a picture of Al Gala, although we were told he was wearing clothes at the festival:
The CPVPV asked the three men to leave the festival. Then UAE media reported that the country had expelled them out of fear that women would not be able to resist them. Saudi officials and Al Gala later said that part did not happen and that the world was wrong.
No, it turned out that while the world was fascinated by the story that Saudi Arabia had banished these men because of their beauty, the real story was that the CPVPV had gone to greater lengths to create a beautiful Woman:
Emirates around the clock
This singer named Aryam had also come to visit from the United Arab Emirates and entered the Emirates pavilion, which made the CPVPV worried that she would start singing. The CPVPV stormed the pavilion to arrest her, and then the festival’s individual national guards fought with the CPVPV and forced her to leave the pavilion. The reason the Al Gala incident made more headlines than this one is because it was Saudi Arabia, and oppression of women is considered routine there.
Australian Jesus
We should not, however, think that this is something that only happens in conservative Arab kingdoms. We are talking about the practice of expelling festival-goers who have done nothing more than attract attention. Just look at the 2012 World Darts Championship in London. Spectators noticed that a guy in the crowd, Nathan Grindal, reminded them of Jesus Christ. “Je-sus!” they began to chant. “Je-sus!”
Fox Sports
In amateur darts competitions, the appropriate response to violent behavior is to throw a bottle on the bar and shout, “Everyone be quiet now!” Since this was a professional darts competition, the organizers decided that the correct course of action was to eject Grindal. Not the other people who were chanting, but Grindal.
The real injustice came the following year when Grindal returned and the tournament banned him altogether, fearing a repeat of the previous year’s spectacle. We’re pretty sure even Jesus was never persecuted like that, but we haven’t finished the book yet, so don’t tell us anything.
A woman on LinkedIn was kicked off the platform because she didn’t look like an engineer
When you see an ad, the person pictured may not be an actual user of the product. Today, they may not be a person at all, but are generated by an AI. But in the past (2013), they may have just been a model. So when LinkedIn users saw the following ad…
…some of them reported the ad for an unrepresentative picture. “The ad is looking for engineers,” said these complainers, “but that’s clearly a meaningless photo of a woman that you inserted to seduce us! I don’t go to LinkedIn to get aroused. I come here to read inspiring, absolutely true anecdotes about the importance of grinding.”
TopTal
LinkedIn deactivated the ad. When the recruitment company (TopTal) objected to this action, LinkedIn closed the entire account. While LinkedIn said the ads were flawed because the company should use images that were “related to the product being advertised,” the engineer pictured was a real engineer, Florencia Antara, and not a model they hired or a stock photo they bought.
But would it have been so wrong if they had used a model or a stock photo? The people in the ads are usually just actors. TopTal didn’t claim to send you the woman pictured. They just illustrated the general concept of “engineer.” How bitter must those LinkedIn users have been to take the time to report this ad as too hot?
The man who died from the looks
And now to a completely different topic: Let us take a look at China in the third century.
During the Jin Dynasty, there was a court official named Wei Jei who was famous for his great beauty. We don’t have any photos of him, of course, not even contemporary paintings, but here is a drawing someone made of him based on the description that “this guy was really handsome”:
mafengwo.cn
According to one story, “he was recognized as handsome as early as age five, when his grandfather said he was sorry he wouldn’t be able to see Wei as an adult,” which sounds like a strange misinterpretation of a comment any grandfather might make about his grandchild. But then when he grew up, people said Wei looked like a jade statue.
He then fled court to avoid invasion and found himself in a new city where he was a huge celebrity. Every day he was surrounded by crowds of people. He couldn’t stand the stress and died at the age of 27. There was no name for the disease that killed him, so they said he died from being stared at. And centuries later, when people talked about the dark side of being famous, they had a phrase they could use: “Killing Wei Jie with a look.”
Brad Pitt
In 2002, Pitt made a commercial for Toyota in Malaysia that was shown on television and in the press. The posters were hung on public walls and people liked them so much that they tore them down and hung them in their own bedrooms.
Toyota
Then the government ordered the ads to be withdrawn. Watching them could “cause a feeling of inferiority among Asians,” the government said. Why couldn’t Malaysians see ads featuring Asians instead of whites, they asked? Of course, if someone felt inferior after watching these ads, it was not because the ads featured a white person, but because Brad Pitt was featured.
Aside from this specific incident, it’s also possible that his good looks ruined Brad Pitt’s life by making him an A-list actor. Pitt is great when he plays weirdos and lunatics – the kind of roles usually given to what we call “character actors” – but his looks have landed him a number of high-profile roles as a leading man. These can’t be nearly as interesting to him. They certainly aren’t as interesting to us, as it’s more fun to see him as a mental patient than in any standard hero role he’s World War Z.
Universal Images
Pitt is now in his 60s, and you’d think that would be a good excuse for him to give leading roles to younger actors and take on more unusual roles. But he’s currently working on a $300 million Formula 1 film in which he’s starring, so he’s not having that luck at the moment.
Oh, and one last thing: Pitt suffers from face blindness. He has trouble telling faces apart, and we can only assume it’s because he doesn’t find almost everyone around him attractive enough to remember. But take heart from that. The next time you have trouble recognizing someone you’ve met before, it’s probably because you’re so much more attractive that your brain has tried to block them out as irrelevant.
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