I feel Rob Lowe's pain. To you, his remarks to The New York Times about the "unbelievable bias" against good-looking people – that "they can't be in pain or they can't have rough lives or be deep or interesting" – might sound like the vacant whining of a man so unbearably in thrall to his own preening reflection that he's lost all sense of perspective. But I can empathise, because I also encounter this prejudice on a daily basis.
If you're as beautiful as me – or, to a lesser extent, Rob Lowe – your exquisite face quickly becomes your prison cell. You're constantly tormented as a second-class citizen, albeit one with expressive eyes as deep and blue as the ocean. I wouldn't expect you to understand, but it's exactly like racism. Except worse, because it's happening to me.
I've long since stopped attempting to be deep or interesting, because there's simply no point to it. Whenever I start talking about red wine or French jazz, I can see you glaze over. You've tuned out. You're imagining me glistening in the sun as I ride an alabaster stallion topless up and down the beach while I lick my lips and kiss my own biceps, aren't you? It's OK, you can admit it. It happens a lot.
And being funny? Forget it. As Lowe so bravely put it: "There's a historical bias that good-looking people are not funny." I know from experience that whenever I try to crack a joke in an article, you automatically glance up at my five-year-old byline photo, see my miraculous-looking visage pouting back at you and feel an uncontrollable surge of rage and despair. "He can't have it all!" you think, jealously. "He can't get paid to make weak gags in a newspaper and look like the world's most ostentatiously perfect pig foetus! I must destroy him!"
I don't blame you. Society has conditioned you to mistreat us this way. But at least Rob Lowe has the guts to speak up for us long-suffering beauties. Truly, he is our Martin Luther King.
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