The natural order of things for parents expecting their second kid is to hope, openly or otherwise, for whatever you didn’t get the first time—or so I heard it remarked the other day. Everyone wants one of each. The goal is to collect the complete set.
The logic of this statement seems incontestable and I can only, on behalf of second sons everywhere, offer a retrospective “oops” and “I’m sorry” to all of our fathers who smiled as they held us for the first time and thought to themselves “ Hot damn, this is unfortunate.”
Worse luck still, I was born a pretty boy.
Actually, check that.
I was not a pretty baby.
If you answered yes, shame on you for lying.
By the age of five my face was starting to look way too cute for a boy in the Canadian ‘70s. Especially a boy whose parents had newly become born-again evangelical Christians—but I’m getting ahead of the story there. This was the era when my non-Christian relatives started dressing me up as Little Bo-Beep and aunts thought it was clever to remark that I had more luxurious eyelashes than they did.
The gist of Jorge Luis Borges oeuvre is that reality is whatever it is constructed to be. Perception occurs to suit what is known or believed about the manner of all things. Absent the taxonomy, absent the reality. If you were born into a society in which all external phenomena were divided into the following eternal and immutable categories: 1) four-legged creatures (great and small) 2) spoons, 3) the colour yellow, and 4) hydrology, chances are that nothing about the arrangement would strike you as anything other than the natural and uncontestable order of things.
At least not to begin with. Hopefully, doubt would set in as the accumulated diversity of sensory phenomena caused an inner voice to rebel against the things you’d been taught. At some point, you’d look up at the sky and think to yourself, whoa now wait a second that flying thing is not yellow, it doesn’t live in water, those flapping legs don’t look like any legs I’ve seen, oh my god I’ve been living a lie. Compared to the comic vastness of the cosmos and the almost unmeasurable puniness of our knowledge of any of it, it seems to me that anyone who doesn’t experience doubt about any belief system that they’ve chosen is a psychopath. In this sense, nature itself seems to exist as a primary rebuke to the simple-mindedness of any explanatory system developed by humanity, and a cautionary tale against attempting to force reality to adhere to categories that are not really anything except human invention and calculated best guess.
Western society believed for much of the 20th century that men could not fully be men without persistent, preferably brutal, manifestations of physical strength, while women were never really women until they had become Daisy Duke-hawt to the heteronormative eye. Now we know better. Gender is not binary. It exists on a spectrum. There is no right or wrong way to be.
Unquestionably, this is progress.
Yet, some biases never die: they just appear in new form.
Quick question: is pretty boy generally used in a complimentary or derogatory sense?
I’ll try answering that using this imaginary scenario:
When meeting their only daughter’s new boyfriend for the first time, do fathers commonly remark to their wives after the young couple have left, “I like that Lawrence guy. Real pretty boy, wasn’t he? One of the prettiest I’ve seen. Drop. Dead. Gorgeous. Thank god she chose so wisely.”
Millions of boys with angular Gen-X cheekbones suffered in silence. How else to suffer when your natural characteristics made you a target—a legitimate one, socially-sanctioned, participated in by all: there was/is no danger of being stigmatized as a “prettyboyist” –one who discriminates against pretty boys. You can make jokes at the expense of pretty boys, you can be cruel towards pretty boys, and no one will question your virtue. Even today, in an era when bigotry towards all sorts is strictly forbidden, picking on pretty boys is still pretty much ok. Even The Guardian does it.
For reasons having to do with the contemporary social devaluation of masculinity in general, there persists a nearly universal cognitive dissonance: that being born pretty and a man could not, cannot, ever ben considered a natural physical disadvantage causing a range of chronic psychological conditions.
Morton Harket, former lead singer of a-ha—one of prettiest boys pop music ever produced—made the same complaint about growing up being considered effeminate and pretty in 2016 interview with The Guardian.
Have you ever cursed your good looks?
No. I look the way I look. It would be disrespectful to do that, quite honestly.Haven’t they been a barrier, in a way?
A barrier, yeah. But I’ve never cursed them. I accept them. It is what it is. A lot of things would have been easier if I’d looked different. People assume a ton of things.There were some excruciating TV interviews with you back in the 1980s where they made a lot of assumptions …
Yeah, most of the time they do. It’s like, a woman with slightly larger breasts than she should have, they will get in the way; whatever room she has to go into, they will enter before her. It will always influence – heavily – whatever it is she does. I get frustrated because you sit there on the couch and people watch and you could have done something interesting. Anything can be interesting as long as you access it from the right angle. [my emphasis]
In a 2019 interview with the same newspaper, here the Guardian journalist expresses incredulity when the man being interview—Don Johnson, famous pastel pretty boy from Miami Vice—made the exact same point Harket had made three years earlier:
Why do you think you did make it as an actor?
I always felt confident about my skills and my ability. I had to overcome some physical attributes that, on the surface, you would think would be an asset, because I happened to be a very attractive young man. But I was sort of androgynous at a time when androgynous was not necessarily the thing. I was young, skinny as a rail and had long hair and my features… I was kind of a pretty boy. That’s not the way I felt about myself, but it was the thing I had to overcome to be taken seriously. [my emphasis]You don’t hear many people, especially men, talk about the pitfalls of being too good looking. [ Actually, yeah you do. In your own newspaper in fact. Few years earlier. You asshat. – Ed.]
Yeah, it was a detriment in a lot of ways. In other ways, it was very helpful. Because when it did work for me, then it worked in a big way.
Being born a second son might have been manageable if I had been born with a different face. As it was, being born a boy with too many supposedly feminine facial features estranged me from father who treated me as something defective only repeated doses of masculinity could fix. I was always getting taught to hunt and shoot and fish and hike and sharpen knives.
What I really wanted to do was shop. I needed a new wardrobe for the new climates I’d be entering. My dad did not seem to believe that Christian fathers should shop for clothes with their sons. Tasks like this he delegated. To Ron.
Ron (not his real name) was the son of a prominent Alliance district superintendent and he went overseas the same year that my family did. He was the only single male missionary in my family’s cohort studying the Spanish language for a year in San Jose, Costa Rica. He was young. He had a small mustache. He dressed with flair and style. He took me to a mall. In a lot of the pictures of me in my early years in the dorm in Quito, I’m wearing sweet shades of blue on polo shirts that Ron helped me pick out. He gave me my first unique fashion aesthetic.
As bad as it ever got for me—as a second son pretty boy—I can’t help but thinking that for Ron it must have been much worse. Being gay and brought up in a theology that taught universal love and that gay did not exist as a category that allowed entrance into heaven—under any conditions or circumstances. Volunteering to go overseas as a celibate man preaching the love of the very God in whose name, he, and other perverts like him, were damned to eternal hell. The inner turmoil must have been tsunamic.
I didn’t know Ron was gay, of course. I was a twelve-year old Christian. I didn’t know what that was.
I never saw Ron again after Costa Rica. The next thing I heard about him wasn’t until a few years later. Ron, us missionary kids were told, had been beaten up in his apartment in Quito. Beaten up badly and left for dead. A group of young men—apparently some of whom were in his congregation or were otherwise part of his ministry—were visiting Ron. They burgled him. When caught, they claimed that Ron was a homosexual who had been making grossly inappropriate advances. As men, they had a natural right to defend themselves against perverted predators intent on buggery—especially when they were foreigners allowed in the country on special religious visas.
I wasn’t there and I don’t know what happened. But I do know that in places where homosexuals are considered deviant in law and/or by cultural tradition, gay guys get beat up over and over again all the time by groups of straight men who say they were provoked. Where anti-gay tropes are prevalent most authorities believe homosexuals simply cannot help themselves from trying to seduce an entire gang of straight hoodlums, all at the same time. I don’t remember if charges were brought and, if so, against Ron or his assailants. No one was sympathetic to Ron.
Especially not the Alliance. The Alliance blamed Ron for what happened. We learned about it in the context of a morality tale: God hates f***, the consequences of sin are real. I don’t know if Ron got shipped back to Canada before or after he convalesced. I never heard his name spoken again. That’s the thing I remember most about Ron. He didn’t die from the beating. But he died anyway in the eyes and estimation of all his peers. After that it was like he’d never existed.
In a world-organizing system that doesn’t contain a category for Gay Christians or Bullied Pretty Boys, you have two choices when confronted with a contradictory reality: acknowledge it, even if it troubles and disturbs your belief system. Or don’t. Remain a courageous bigot for your Great Big Idea.
Gore Vidal often quipped that the United States would have lost both world wars were it not for gays in the military, especially the marines. I would suggest that the heathen world of the 19th and 20th century would never have been so effectively Christianized were it nor for all the closeted gays and lesbians working as evangelical missionaries and teachers. One out of ten, right?
You can hate the one in ten if you want. You can even refuse to believe the one-in-ten statistic. Likewise, you can hate boys with pretty faces based on no good theology at all, just a visceral disgust in your gut. You can make up all sorts of stereotypes about them and punish them for being born outside of God’s grace. But nothing can stop reality from continuing to go on despite the ugly hysteria of moral panics. Boys are going to get born with pretty faces. Some boys—pretty or not—are going to get born wanting to get with other boys. Any thought system that condones, albeit tacitly, bigotry against self-evidently naturally occurring phenomena, is probably not actually all that righteous at all.