The Downside of Hotness

Published September 2011

While I'll readily admit to a large number of personality flaws (character building flaws, I hasten to add), the one thing I am not is shallow. Even though I enjoy the companionship of relatively good looking individuals on a regular basis (lucky me), I've often believed that while visually great first impressions may be important, there'd better be a sound personality behind those looks.

Growing up looking the way that I did, it wasn't easy being fat as a toddler who then morphed into an awkward, gangly pre-teen. This spate of biological angst lasted a few more years until I discovered sports. Life was good as a jock for the most part and stayed with me for a large majority of my early to mid 20s. Admittedly I allowed myself to 'develop' in the girth area as I started hitting work and the bars harder and the gym less. I blame no one but myself. And my propensity towards happy hour.

I have long accepted that I will never be a ravishing beauty. My looks are passable at best. If pressed, some would describe me as 'cute', but they are the minority. I have skin that breaks out if you even look at it wrong, a ridiculous amount of body hair which I do battle with on a regular basis (I blame my ethnicity. And my dad's genes), deep set eyes which are so laden with baggage I look like a stoned raccoon and I have a nose. Not just any nose, I have a snout. You'd have to see it to believe it. But all things considered, I'd like to think that I've been able to use whatever few advantages I have to my benefit in a variety of ways. Having a disturbing sense of humour is a great way to get people to remember you. 

Drinking them under the table might be another too.

With all the less-than-desirable physical qualities I possess, one would imagine that I have a difficult time meeting people but it's not that hard. You just have to let your personality (if you actually do have one. You'd be surprised at how many people this applies to) do the talking for you. And I know it seems as though natural selection will always win out – superior physical attributes and genetics ensure a great head start in life. We've been inundated with images and findings that good looking people are treated better in life and end up making more money in the long run. Until recently I often believed that looks would get you far in life, and resigned myself to an adulthood spent in abject loneliness, with a bottle of soju for company.

This morning I came across an article that made me want to back the truck up. Everything I believed while staring depressingly into a mirror wasn't true after all.

Being gorgeous isn't always a good thing and I snorted with joy at the realization of this. A paper by University California, Santa Barbara in 2009 studied the mating patterns of fruit flies. True you may not necessarily be of the insect species but it might interest you to learn that male flies found certain female flies too attractive to mate with – hence, these winged hotties were at a biological disadvantage because of what the male flies perceived to be too attractive and this interfered with the female's ability to function biologically, normally.

The biologists at UC Santa Barbara are quoted as stating that “among fruit flies, too much male attention directed toward attractive females leads to smaller families and, ultimately, to a reduced rate of population-wide adaptive evolution.”

Even if we were to loosely apply this formulae to humans of the hot variety, this does make a little sense if you think about it. And I'm using my hundreds of hours spent being a barfly (the puns, the puns), observing people around me. Attractive women will almost always get more than their fair share of male attention. Whether or not it's attention that is wanted or required is a different matter altogether. The point is they'll get it. The second point to realize is that said attention may or may not always come from an ideal future mate. Actually, scratch that. 9 times out of 10 it never comes from an ideal mate. The UCSB paper further explains that the female flies are “disproportionately courted and harassed by males attempting to obtain matings”. Sounds like a typical night out at almost every club I can think of, complete with drunken suitors bursting at the seams with what can only be described as male bravado messily paired with Dutch courage. It's never a pretty sight as they zero in on the hotties, convinced of their stellar moves and lightning smooth abilities.

While this is all highly entertaining for me, most times I'm not sure if I should sit back and enjoy the show, or pity the poor fools. And with the onslaught of wannabe Alphas, the nice guys – the ones that would probably make for the best mates – have a harder time even coming within earshot of the hotties, sometimes due to intimidation at someone's physical attractiveness, most times due to the fact that the object of affection is probably already surrounded by more aggressive suitors.

So what is my summation apart from the fact that good looking women get taken down a little peg in an almost pointless study? Hotties have problems just like the rest of us after all. The flipside here is that life might be the teensiest bit fair after all. In the meantime I'll just sit and wait for my lunch to be served, observing the sexual stereotype of the overweight, balding, rich old dude at the table next to me fawning over a pretty young thing coquettishly playing with her food. Perhaps some things don't change after all.