Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Dividing line

It's pretty common for humans, men for sure, to divide other people's physicality into face and body. Given the strange condition called prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, it's likely that it is a specialized brain function. In casual conversation about men, it's common to say that someone is both handsome and well-built. They are separable items.

My ex T had a name for guys with great body/not-great face, "accountant face". You'd run into guys whose work at the gym had developed their genetics quite impressively, but whose mugs were bland.

Take the guy in the previous post. A really fine physique. But, IMHO, his face (which I cropped, for privacy reasons*) does not match. It looks like it really ought to belong to someone else. He has a kind of gooey-eyed simpery quality, like Fox News anchor Shepard Smith**:




And of course there are guys who quite handsome, but who could use a bit of time at the gym.

For me, part of beauty is integrity. Not moral integrity, but a congruence of face and frame...and behavior.  Although I have the male capacity to objectify and to focus on a part rather than a whole, the really pleasing men are the ones who are all of one piece.

 _____________________

* Poor fella got dumped by his male partner after twenty-three years together. For a woman.

**Like Anderson Cooper, Smith is widely considered to be gay. The fact that he works for Fox sometimes provokes the tired rants of liberal queers. The mere existence of a media outlet, and a terrifically successful one at that, which does not parrot the usual MSM line outrages these free-thinking lovers of inclusivity and diversity. I do not like Smith. I dislike his face and his accent --the way he says "nyuuz" all the time, and that stupid "Around the World" jingle he does-- and his clothes, and he hardly strikes me as a conservative guy in his news presentation.

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