Pretty Is As Pretty Does

Seems strange in these enlightened times, but I've heard it three times in the last week so it prompted me to write. How much crap will we put up with from someone else simply because of the way they look?

It started with a remark a male acquaintance made last week when I asked him about his dating pet peeves (my original topic, to be covered in the coming weeks). Since he has been married for years, he said he would ask his single friend. So the e-mails started pouring in - apparently this friend of his had many gripes about women when it came to dating (too many, I thought). One of them, "I never get thanked for anything nice I do for her, ever." Ever? Really? At first, I felt sorry for him, then just bewildered. Why on earth was he still dating this woman if she seemed so ungrateful?

I wrote my friend back, stating the obvious (or so I thought). "Then he is dating the wrong person." Period. I thought that closed the discussion. My friend's reply made me see stars: "No he isn't. All the guys in the office are envious because she is (and this is a quote) one of the finest girls here." Wow, well in that case, he should just stop his complaining feel grateful she is even wasting her time dating him, right?

Wrong. From a young age, I (like most people) noticed that the "cuter" you are, the more you got by with. Pretty girls got out of tickets, got better jobs, were asked out more even if their personalities were for shit. Their plainer sisters had to make up for this lack of conventional attractiveness by being nice, or wickedly funny, smart, successful or a combination of the above. And then we grew up.

Or so I thought.

This was a 40-something man I was having this conversation with - someone I deemed reasonably intelligent. Why on earth should the way the woman in question looked have anything to do with whether or not she was a downright bitch for being so inconsiderate? And why did some of the women I know now STILL put up with less-than-decent behavior from men, all because of their looks?

Then it happened again last night. I rarely watch television but I was exhausted and I was bored and I wanted an excuse to get out of doing the laundry. Absolutely nothing I wanted to see was on any movie channel, and I didn't feel like schlepping myself up to the video store. So I tuned into "The Truth About Cats and Dogs", a movie I saw years ago in the theatre. It's the classic Cyrano de Bergerac spin-off with a modern-day 'smart funny woman who cannot possibly be attractive becoming friends with the pretty thin woman without a brain'. The movie's entire premise pissed me off, and since I sometimes enjoy being pissed off (and since I needed to write this column), I kept watching. Two different scenes clenched it for me.

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