Sometime ago, a Chinese woman, raising her child, said to me that in her nation there is a saying.
“There are no ugly women, only lazy ones”.
She accepted that remaining stylish and beautiful was something worthwhile, and something that took effort. It was an art, and like all arts, chased an ephemeral perfection that may not truly exist. For her, beauty was akin to a musician trying to play Bach. The notes may be perfect, but your performance will never be.
Plato tried to talk about this when he discussed forms. In a platonic universe, there is a perfect type of a table, a chair, of this style, that we all try to make. But in reality, it wears, and even the best craftsman makes errors. But the form one is seeking remains. This fits into his answers of the three questions in classical philosophy: What is Truth? What is Good? and the final: What is Beauty? The examination of premises was always based on an acceptance that what was true was obvious, what was good was difficult at time to discern but was agreed, and what is beautiful was agreed.
Ugly people are twice as likely to be liberals. That’s not my opinion, it’s peer reviewed science. #FeministsAreUgly pic.twitter.com/anQQEMuX69
— AdolfJoeBiden™ (@Bidenshairplugs) August 7, 2014
But now the elite do not accept the true, or the good. And as a result we despise beauty. We do not build beautiful things.
John C. Wright has written a good deal on why liberalism eschews beauty. This is an excellent example. Post-modernism in general is a campaign against beauty, feminism even more so. The root of it is that it’s a rejection of God which leads to the rejection of objective truth and the rejection of beauty.
The three graces have been seen as examples of femininity, grace and (yes) beauty until this day. But now, that has to be subverted. This is taken from a feminist museum in Brooklyn. Let the reader judge. And let the reader not compete to find more in the same ilk.
And beauty is related, for humans, to which sex you are. And here I will quote an expert.
The feminine behaviors are prized in women because they don’t reflect women’s behavior in the natural state. These are things we’ve adopted to please the men around us, which reflects the fact that we’re unusually perceptive and forward-thinking for women. Things like nobility, selflessness, submission, grace; these are all things most women don’t have in large quantities without cultivating them. Women today have very little incentive to cultivate these things, as they are prized primarily as sexual objects, so that we do so reflects the fact that we value them in our own right and that we’re future-oriented enough to notice that men do value those things eventually — when choosing a wife.
I can hear the mutterings. There is a large trope at the moment called #Allfeministsareugly — and the offended are either posting selfies to show they are not a cross between an orc and a gorilla or complaining of lookism and other offenses to their theology.But these women forget a couple of things. The first is that — once you are out of that sheltered workshop called the university — people care about truth. They care are about the good. And they care about beauty. They want to preserve it: they admire it: from Victorian villas to restoration of the art of previous generations, we care.
And we ignore those who call this search for beauty by the insults they devise, be they lookist, sexist, or whatever. The offendi will be offended. Let them.
But we do not need to live such an impoverished life. Let us instead honour those who seek beauty, be it all so fleeting, in their craft, and in their life. When you embrace ugliness, something precious is broken.
