Should You Judge a Book by Its Cover? Looks or Personality?

Think about how much of our taste in appearance is learned. We pick up preferences for certain skin tones, hair textures, body shapes, and heights, and we're taught to treat the differences as meaningful. When I was small my mother struck me as beautiful, and my grandmothers, older and heavier than she was, were a sight for my sore eyes anyway. My best friend from first grade was never someone I sized up by her build; what mattered was how good a time we had together. I had a cousin my own age who was bigger than me, so her clothes came down to me as hand-me-downs, and that was just how it went. Seeing these distinctions as important is something somebody has to drill into you. What counts as beautiful or handsome shifts dramatically from one culture to the next, and if you flip through enough wedding photos you'll notice there really is a match for everyone.

A conversation with my daughter-in-law brought this home. An actress I'd written off as plain, she found genuinely attractive. Men and women also tend to zero in on different features when deciding whether a woman is beautiful or a man qualifies as a chick magnet. You've heard those debates about what pulls a man toward a woman: her chest, her backside, her legs, the color of her hair, take your pick.

There's that old line, men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses. Nobody seems to care anymore. Once upon a time what drew a woman to a man was his career or his power to keep her in the lifestyle she had or wanted. By middle age or later, some men go looking for a woman young enough to be their daughter. Then you've got the cougars chasing younger men. Sugar daddy, trophy wife: the vocabulary tells you plenty.

A certain cable news channel runs a lot in my house, and one of its regular experts struck me as so unpleasant to look at that I'd rather not watch him. He clearly knew his material, though, and had a solid record behind his reputation. Then one day while I was listening it hit me that he wasn't bad looking anymore. His face hadn't changed. My read on it had.

What I'd been doing, I realized, was shortchanging people by fixating on their looks instead of their character, what they knew, what they could do. And I was shortchanging myself in the bargain, dressing to impress in things I probably couldn't afford rather than picking something flattering and comfortable that let me just be me. None of this means appearance counts for nothing. You can swing so far the other way that it becomes a problem of its own.

I'd originally meant to write a post complaining that the same channel staffed its screen with impossibly beautiful women in distracting (if not scandalous) outfits, perilous heels, high-maintenance hair, and glamorous makeup that must have required showing up long before air to pull off, while the men holding equivalent jobs weren't always tall or athletic or young and got to wear comfortable, modest clothes. Then I caught myself doing the very thing I'd been criticizing, only in reverse, judging those women by their looks and running them down for it. They didn't earn that from me either. They'd poured time and money into how they appear, and tearing them down for the effort isn't fair.

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