I Was Complimented On My Looks. Now I Feel Gross.
“Can I just say that I love your smile?” She said to me over DM. It’s the kind of compliment I never receive. I have a checkered relationship with my smile, in general, and by “checkered,” I mean I actually don’t like it at all. I look like a ten year-old at a family gathering being forced to smile big because one day I’ll look back on these days and want to remember how happy I was. “I love your smile.” Welp. That makes one of us.
Now, of course, that alone would explain why I’d feel a little uneasy. How we react to new information is obviously more indicative of ourselves than of the other party dispensing said data. However, it’s not that simple. (Is anything?)
I am a 36 year-old white guy who yo-yos between rail-thin and festively doughy. (My friends call me “skinny fat.”) I’ve previously referred to my looks as “a blank canvas upon which you could paint another, more attractive human.” It’s true — I’m kinda short, kinda slight, kinda fat, olive complexion, not very symmetrical, the opposite of stylish. I’m a solid 5-out-of-10, and I’m not breaking any necks when I walk by. Hell, if I didn’t make it a point to crack jokes at a party, I would blend into the wallpaper. I’m the C-SPAN of people, physically. I don’t think I’m ugly, I just think I’m visual white noise.
I don’t flaunt my looks, either. I don’t take selfies. I only dress up when I’m instructed to. I don’t ever, ever take my shirt off. (Someone should think of the children.) For as long as I can recall, I’ve been confident about a lot of things — my singing, my writing, my problem-solving skills, my listening abilities, and my ability to academically and intellectually run circles around pretty much anyone in the room with me, no matter the size of the room — yet my looks are not one of those things.
I tell you that to tell you this: I do not get complimented on my looks. Ever. Occasionally, someone will say, “I like that shirt.” Or, “that’s a good color on you.” It’s been several months since I’ve heard either of those two things, which means I’m due in just a couple more months to hear one of them again.
So when I got that unsolicited compliment, I sure was surprised. At least at first. And then I felt something akin to finding a dead cockroach in the kitchen sink. And that gave me pause.
I have spent most of my life envious of people who are conventionally attractive. Partly because I spent most of my life (really, the first 35 years of it) incredibly insecure, bitter and spiteful, but also because “appearance” just felt like a fucking weird thing to take credit for. Like, there’s a certain degree of genetic dice-rolling that needs to happen for the stone-cold-stunner stars to align. I didn’t come up snake-eyes, but I sure didn’t hit sevens.
Additionally, studying the “halo effect” (our psychological and sociological predisposition toward assigning attractive people other positive qualities like leadership, trustworthiness, moral clarity, intelligence, etc.) in school further exasperated me. I couldn’t un-see it once I saw it for the first time. I took solace in knowing if someone thought highly of any of my non-physical qualities that they genuinely did so based on my own merits.
And so for humans to constantly fawn over, reward, upvote, like, heart, gift, lust after, elevate and lionize attractiveness feels so goddamned misguided. It feels unearned. It’s like telling someone, “Hey, congratulations on breathing.” Yes, it’s their breath, but it’s not like they had a say as to whether or not they wanted to continue.
But, of course, none of this actually matters, because there’s a contingent of you reading this wondering “when will he say it?” And so let’s not bury the lead any longer:
This is exactly what women experience every hour of every day, in every space they try to take up.
Women get unsolicited compliments on their looks all the time. From people they don’t know. Now, in a vacuum, that doesn’t sound so bad. Who doesn’t want to be randomly told they’re beautiful? Or hot? Or cute?
But it’s never just a compliment, is it? No, if it was, it wouldn’t make women feel threatened and afraid to walk around at night without brandishing their keys like brass knuckles.
No. An unsolicited compliment is never just a compliment. It’s a door opener. It’s a statement of purpose and intent. It’s an “I have my eye on you.” It might be a long stretch to go from “I think you’re pretty” to “Fuck me or else,” but that it’s still a reachable stretch is what makes it problematic.
Unless, of course, it is just a compliment, and yet no one can really tell, and when the entirety of the “men complimenting women on their looks” sub-genre is a jar of cookies, and some of the cookies contain razor blades, it makes sense to swear off cookies altogether.
This leads to a tangential point of whether or not kindness exists for the sake of kindness itself, or if there’s always a motive beyond just general altruism. Are humans always guided by selfish motives? On a subconscious level? On a sub-subconscious level? I investigate my own motives. And, candidly, I can’t seem to extricate altruism from egoism unless my compliments are reflexive, and directed at no human in particular. I’ll give an example.
Let’s say I’m at a Solange concert. Hypothetically. (I’ve been to two already, so in case you’re doing mental back-flips trying to imagine this, go ahead and stop.) Let’s say she kills it. (She does. She’s the greatest live musical artist I’ve ever seen — all apologies to The National, Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monae, The Hold Steady, LCD Soundsystem, Anderson Paak and Sigur Ros.) Let’s say I say, “this is the greatest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.” That’s a compliment, but it’s a reflexive one directed at no one in particular. If I comment on her IG or @ her on Twitter and say “your concert was the greatest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” am I complimenting her out of genuine appreciation? Or am I trying to get her attention? I don’t have an answer, and I suspect there’s a little of Column A and Column B.
So when a stranger randomly comments on your looks, there’s no real way to delineate between genuine appreciation and attention-grabbing. There’s no real way to delineate between the cookie and the razor-blade cookie. Especially on the Internet. Pure altruism likely does not exist without a touch of egoism, in much the same way that all CBD products contain a microscopic amount of THC, and so in California and Colorado, all CBD products list THC as an ingredient, even though the percentage is comically infinitesimal. That’s what makes kindness so hard to accept on its face, and that skepticism gets ratcheted up to infinity when the genders are reversed and men are complimenting women on their hair or eyes or dress.
“John, why don’t you just shut the fuck up and learn to take a compliment?” Okay, okay. Listen. Maybe you can compartmentalize and appreciate something like “I love your smile,” yet we’re all different. Everything that happens to us assimilates into a data repository known as our life experience. Here is where we house our beliefs, culture, knowledge, history, traumas, perceptions, idiosyncrasies, pathology, essence, relationships, upbringing, socioeconomic status, and so on. No two people are exactly alike! (Wow, John, another super deep insight, what are you a Children’s Book writer? [Author: Why, yes. Yes, I am.])
I can’t hear “I love your smile” without thinking about how charged my history with smiling is, my singular ambivalence about my appearance, my objectively average looks, the “halo effect,” the gendered triggering of drive-by compliments, the creepiness of DM slides, and my inability to suss out whether or not it’s possible to just be kind without some trace of selfish prompting.
That’s me. That’s how my mind operates. Maybe you think it’s deliriously eccentric. Maybe you’d be right. But if you’d like to compliment me on it … well … I’d feel pretty great about that.
I Was Complimented On My Looks. Now I Feel Gross.
Research & References of I Was Complimented On My Looks. Now I Feel Gross.|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source
0 Comments