A Facebook friend, who's something of a butterball himself, shared this meme on Facebook, with the caption "No es brujería, el problema es que ustedes viven del físico." (It's not witchcraft / sorcery, the problem is that you all live on the physical plane.)
I think the photo is sweet, though it would have made its point better if the young woman were also overweight. (The younger working-class Mexican men I know seem to be happy to date women who not only are heavier than they are, but taller as well. Autre pays, autre moeurs.) I've pointed out before that when people complain that everybody nowadays is obsessed with looks and won't look at the inner person, they generally exempt themselves: it's only other people who must look for inner beauty, they are entitled to the attention of supermodels, beauty queens, and porn stars. Anyone who looks at this photo and congratulates (or envies) the gordito for having scored such a hot girlfriend still vive del físico.
But that misses the point, because it still assumes that sexual attractiveness consists solely of a certain look, and if you miss the mark but manage to get laid anyway, it's because someone saw your inner beauty and decided to overlook your outer ugliness for some reason. Or you bewitched them somehow. I don't believe that, if only because so many people express attraction to a wider range of people than the official commercial model accommodates. And there's considerable social pressure against it, which I don't put down to media brainwashing but to ordinary human narrow-mindedness and stupidity. I've always pushed back against it, even when I was young: if I wasn't going to give in to pressure to be heterosexual, I damn sure wasn't going to give in to pressure from other gay people trying to police my attractions.
I don't know what goes on in people's minds when they select sexual or romantic partners. Maybe some do ignore looks for the inner person, though from what I observe they often don't do any better on that basis than if they went by the physical exterior. If we could see the inner person, would we judge any better than we do the outer? I suspect that if they claim to be looking at the inner beauty, they're deceiving themselves. I sometimes have thought that my tastes in men were wider than most other people's, but getting onto Grindr disabused me of that notion: I was surprised to find that I was only interested in a small minority, though most of the rest were sure they were hot. Well, fine, to each his own.
Myself, I'd be happy to smooch the gordito in the picture my friend posted. Not because I'm free of the physical, but because his physicality appeals to me. I don't know what his girlfriend thinks about his looks; the looks of heterosexual men notoriously are said not to matter to women, but there's ample reason to doubt that. I'm attracted to the men I'm attracted to, not because I live on the spiritual plane, but because I like their looks. Sometimes an attractive man turns out to be a jerk, in which case he becomes less attractive. (Similarly, if a cute guy I'm admiring takes out a cigarette and lights up, he becomes less attractive. But some people fetishize smokers and smoking. Go know.)
It's good to encourage people to recognize the beauty of people who aren't movie stars, but I don't think it's good to put it in terms of inner/outer beauty. It's a false dichotomy anyway, but I think we need to encourage them to recognize the desires they already have. From what I see around me, it's not really that much of a stretch in practice; I just want to improve the quality of the discourse.
