Beautiful Isn't Enough

There are a lot of beautiful single girls in the world. There are a lot of beautiful girls, period. Yes, there are a lot of the opposite, but it doesn't take a whole lot to be considered pretty or even beautiful. Tack on a few genes from the fam and you're good even without make up.

I'm always a bit surprised at just how different men view beautiful versus how women see beautiful. I'm not talking about the chicks we all KNOW are pretty because the world says so (Halle Berry, any Victoria's Secret model, Zoe Saldena, Lauren London, etc), but the regular girls on the street, in the bank, at a club, riding through the car wash. Those are the women we all seem to be divided on.

A couple months ago, the wise guys at Very Smart Brothas did a little online experiment where they posted 5 photos of women and 5 photos of men. The instructions were to rank by looks and then rank how we thought the opposite sex would choose. It was interesting who came out on top from both perspectives. It can't just be that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; it has to be more. Maybe it's because women are much more emotional creatures and we don't just see asymmetrical features and nice hair, but her attitude, his "swag," the whole package, the person. Men, when told to judge a female's looks, do JUST that. Judge her looks, which is also directly tied into whether or not he'd beat.

So I wasn't all that shocked, just took note of a situation I came across yesterday. I was over my boy's house when I remembered I wanted to hook him up with a friend of mine. He swore he'd met or boned most of my friends at some point in his 28 years, but I informed him this was a relatively new friend and he didn't know her from Eve. I grabbed his laptop and signed into Facebook, all the while chomping off at the bit about how cute she was, how she was funny, how she was just his type. I went right to her profile pictures and tilted the screen so he could concur.

"Yeah, she's pretty, but I told you I wasn't really trying to date anyone right now," he said as he clicked through a few other pictures. "She's beautiful, for real, though."

Huh? If she was so beautiful, why wasn't he interested in buying her a slice and popping a squat in the park? This must've meant he didn't really find her attractive and didn't want to hurt my matchmaker feelings. I said this to him.

"No, she's really pretty. I don't know what else to say, though. That's it." He kept clicking and then stopped on a picture of me, said friend, and another friend he'd met once. "Now SHE'S bad! She could bring me outta hiding." Suddenly he was amped as he shoved his finger at my other friend's picture asking what she was up to these days. It should be said that the other friend is just as pretty, maybe more so, but in a different, island-exotic way. Nothing major separates the two honestly, but again, these are my eyes talking. Not his.

"She has a boyfriend," I replied and snapped the computer shut. We moved onto other topics, played a couple rounds of that weird Def Jam game where the label rappers fight each other, but I kept thinking about how being pretty wasn't enough anymore, which perhaps solves the whole "single pretty girl" debacle. So the next time you're feeling all fancy and everyone's telling you how pretty you are, don't even get excited, cause apparently it ain't enough.

That bitch stole my line,

Xoxo
Blackie Collins
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