Social Order in Gender and Beauty… ;-)

I got this quiz from Efflorescent’s diary.

http://www.yournewromance.com/kindgirlquiz.html

You are a New Age Girl!

You’re bright, opinionated, and dedicated to changing the world.
Even if it’s one hybrid car at a time, you do you part to make things better.
In fact, you may be so busy with your causes that you have little time for love.
Take an extra yoga class or two, and you just might meet New Age Guy!

I’m not really a New Age Girl I don’t think, they just didn’t have appropriate choices for Christian women, so it came out looking “New Age,” (and I’ve ALREADY met my “New Age” – Christian/Jewish – Guy LOL).

Anyway, I was thinking this morning about the social order of gender and beauty. When I was growing up, in the fairy tales and stories I read and had read to me, the heroines were often beautiful. They were usually persecuted by ugly villains. The Highwayman sort of came to mind. The lovely Bess, the Landlord’s daughter, whose life was ruined when her lover was betrayed by Tim, the ostler, with his white peaked face and his hair like mouldy hay. Heck, back when I was a fake blond, there were days when I could have been described like that.

In most stories the good guys were lovely, the bad guys were ugly and/or fat and that was just the way it was. Same with the movies and television. Now, upon occasion, the female would be lovely and good and a male might be plain and good. The lovely female would see the good in the Unlovely male and they’d get together in the end (a la Beauty and the Beast). A dismal offshoot of that is the Marilyn Monroe – How to Marry a Millionaire scenario with the gorgeous girl on the arm of the not-so-hot or not-so-young rich guy.

The other plot line you might find would be two plain or ugly folks of good character who would fall in love with the inner beauty of the other and end up happily in love and together forever. A great example of that is an old movie called The Enchanted Cottage with Robert Young and Dorothy Malone.

But one plot line I don’t think I’ve ever seen or read is that of a non-wealthy plain or ugly woman and a handsome man falling in love, wed, and living happily ever after. Nor do I think I’ve ever seen it in real life. I’ve seen the combinations listed above…
1. handsome guy, handsome girl walking into the sunset
2. good hearted ugly guy, gorgeous girl walking into the sunset
3. good hearted plain guy, good hearted plain girl walking into the sunset
4. rich ugly or old guy, gorgeous girl strutting into the sunset
But never the plain woman and handsome guy hand and hand into the sunset… Why is that?

The closest I’ve seen… and it’s pretty close… is a movie called Tim, starring Mel Gibson and Piper Laurie (who is not exactly plain, but she WAS considerably older in this movie). The twist was, however, that she was wealthy and he was semi-retarded, so I don’t know if it counts. (He was extremely hot, though… nevertheless, he had the mental capacity of a 12 year old which definitely dimmed the sexual appeal as far as I was concerned). The other exception I noted was that Alan Alda’s wife was sort of plain compared to him in his hey day, and his marriage has seemed to be very tight.

Anyway, that was just my pondering for the day.

Hmmm… abrupt subject change… I made a very onion-y garlic-y meatloaf last night and put the leftovers away in a foil covered pan. My son just opened the refrigerator to get a drink out of there and I can smell it all the way into the living room. That’s not good . Maybe I need a big box of baking soda or something in there. I hope it doesn’t permeate everything in the fridge!

Last, and certainly least, it’s my ex-husband’s birthday today. I don’t really think about him much. I haven’t seen him since… let me think… probably 1982 I would guess, although I saw a picture of him taken about 5 years ago (and I may say in a true petty ex-wife way that I have aged more gracefully than he). I’m not sure how old he is, maybe 55. He was a deadbeat dad. My husband raised the girls, both emotionally and financially and now reaps the rewards of that huge responsibility. When I first renewed my relationship with Christ, it was hard to release my hatred of my ex-husband after all he put me through. He had kidnapped my girls but I got them back within a few weeks, and he had done it because he felt it would be less expensive for him to raise the girls than to send me child support… ultimately he ended up NOT sending the child support anyway which, of course, was the lease expensive option over all. Because he lived in a different state and the laws and system weren’t well organized back then, I never could get any money through the system. Eventually he left the army and went to work for his second wife’s parents as a tobacco stripper. He got paid in cash so he wouldn’t have to show any income. When she died, he used the insurance money to buy himself a farm and I guess that’s where he lives with his new girlfriend now (according to my oldest daughter who saw him twice, the second time being a disaster and she said she wouldn’t bother going back). Other than that one visit by my oldest daughter, neither daughter has seen him since ’82. Do I wish him a happy birthday? Well, my new spirit man does. My old spirit man is coming around… still sort of bitter but TRYING to become the kind of person God is calling me to be.