Beauty be damned. It’s hip to be wonky. Look at how we mock the physically perfect Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie. Look at how we revere Ugly Betty and super-chubby Beth Ditto, singer with ultracred lesbo-punkers The Gossip. Look at the ad campaigns for Dove and SlimFast that feature “real” women. And ask yourself this: What do me, Beth, Betty, the Dove and SlimFast models and rough-as-a-burglar’s dog porn star Ron Jeremy all have in common? We’re all excellent conversationalists and absolutely amazing in bed. Why? Because we have to be.
Pretty people are, almost without exception, crap actors, boring conversationalists and—in my experience—shit in bed. Sometimes, as with Jennifer Lopez, they’re so pretty the crap acting hardly matters. Other times they’re so crap, no amount of prettiness can compensate—Keanu Reeves has pretty much ruined every movie he’s been in. Except Bill and Ted. In which he played a moron.
Pretty people pretty much suck at pretty much everything because they don’t try. The rest of us will shower them with sex and money anyway, so why bother? Why do you think Brangelina spend so much time saving the world? Because they’re boring each other shitless. After decades of everybody hanging on their every banal word, can you imagine how atrophied their conversational skills must be? I bet the sex sucks too. Unless they ship in some ugly fatties to spice things up. But I digress.
Michael Stipe is reputed to have said that nobody need be celibate—all you have to do is keep lowering your standards. What he didn’t say is that as you lower your standards, the sex actually gets better: You have sex with people who’ve had to become smarter and more skilled in the arts du boudoir because—in a society obsessed with physical beauty—how else do you get partners coming back?
In my 20s I rutted like a shortsighted, gap-toothed, crudely tattooed and slightly overweight punk stallion. This jolly shagfest was facilitated by my job as an English music journalist, frequent trips to the U.S. and the fact that Americans are suckers for a cute British accent.
Did I exhibit the famous British stiff upper lip and refrain from diving head-first into a continent-sized pit of eagerly trembling American flesh? No. I pigged out. And I did not discriminate against those who failed to measure up to the ridiculous and completely arbitrary social construct that is “beauty.”
It was a pretty mixed bag. There were good shags, bad shags, mediocre shags and downright disasters. But, generally speaking, the wonky folk were more fun in bed and massively more fun to talk to before and after. Bottom line: Puglies make better lovers.
I suspect George Clooney—easily the superficially sexiest human being ever—might be the exception to this rule. One day I will shag him and find out. But until then, America, why hold out for the occasional glass of Cristal when you can get blasted every night on perfectly acceptable house red? Aim low and be happy.