Look | Abnormal Beauties | Look | Output

In a recent poll by Travel + Leisure that rated the cities with the most attractive citizens in America, my home city garnered a curious set of rankings. The residents of Portland, Oregon, were rated as the second most fit in the country (behind Denver), but they were thought to be only the seventeenth most attractive, behind the populations of cities that don’t exactly spring immediately to mind when one thinks of hotties. Despite our tight abs, firm thighs, and healthy glow, the nation considers Portlanders to be less attractive than people living in Kansas City or Minneapolis.

How can this be, given our national convictions that the first step to looking like Jennifer Aniston is to take up Ashtanga yoga, and that it’s impossible to be beautiful without triceps of steel? Travel + Leisure was equally perplexed. The magazine’s explanation: despite Portland’s mad devotion to 10Ks and bicycles, when it comes to our looks we simply don’t “conform to most visitors’ standards of ‘normal’ beauty.”

“Normal” beauty? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Doesn’t being beautiful always include an aspect of individuality, which is heightened and underscored by how we manage our appearance? Maybe the readers of Travel + Leisure were confusing our lack of beauty with our general lack of style. Setting aside our love of Gore-Tex, we’re a city where you can attend a black-tie function in dark-wash jeans and no one will bat an eye.

The redoubtable French designer Coco Chanel, whom I’ve just published a book about, spent a long lifetime manufacturing timeless quotes about the way appearance enhances beauty. “Dress shabbily, and they remember the dress,” she said. “Dress impeccably, and they remember the woman.” On a related note, she also sniffed that a woman who leaves the house without perfume has no future.

But the French also think Jerry Lewis is the greatest comedian who ever lived. Clearly, there are issues on which we disagree. Recently, I taught a writing workshop at a local high school; when I asked my students to make a list of things that made them angry, three kids listed variations on “ugly girls who try to look good.” It does seem that in the United States, among a certain class of people (mine) on certain coasts (the West and East), there’s an unspoken notion that unless you’re pretty, there’s really no reason to bother too much with your appearance. Wearing lipstick on an insufficiently sexy mouth is viewed as being sort of pathetic. We prefer total-body makeovers, dramatic diets, and bodies by Bowflex over simply buying a pair of better-fitting slacks and cutting our hair so it frames our imperfect faces. We sniff at women who wear padded bras but give a big “you go, girl!” to women who opt for implants. (Within reason: see below.)

This is probably as good a time as any to report that I’m not bad-looking. I inherited my Polish father’s head of unruly dark hair, his high cheekbones and paisley-shaped hazel eyes, evidence of a Tatar in some far-flung, windswept woodpile. But I grew up in Southern California during the late 1960s and ’70s, and unless you looked like Joni Mitchell on the cover of Ladies of the Canyon, you might as well have been the twin sister of Quasimodo.

My mother tried to console me for not being a Joni clone by telling me that beauty was only skin-deep. The point of this was to reassure me that even though I wasn’t gorgeous, I did possess many unseen virtues that resided deep in my internal organs. Their very invisibility was supposed to make them superior to silky, center-parted blonde hair. My mother’s wisdom formed the foundation of a handy system: every time some pretty, blue-eyed mean girl dissed me, she was unwittingly furthering my evolution, helping me become a better person inside, where it was supposed to count.

I found myself saying something similar to my own daughter not long ago, but the difference is that I secretly suspect for most of us, skin-deep is deep enough. Is there one among us who would choose saintly and stray-dog homely over bitchy and beautiful? Plus, you can pretend to be soulful and deep, but you can’t pretend to have Angelina Jolie’s bone structure. If you doubt me, consider this: for every eight hundred best-selling books written by interchangeable, bony-assed TV actresses telling us how to find God/happiness/balance, there are exactly none penned by ugly women about how to be hot.

Perhaps it’s because our nation was founded by Puritans (when in doubt, blame the Puritans), but we’re not completely enslaved by beauty. On some level we still feel the need to agree with my mother. There’s a famous picture of a sexy blonde in a bikini posing on a beautiful beach above a caption that says, “Somewhere, some guy is sick of her shit.” Ha ha! We laugh, because we’re relieved at the possibility that beauty eventually gets boring. Given how much we worship the beautiful, how could this be? Especially since putting up with a gorgeous woman’s shit is a badge of success for most guys; it’s the equivalent of owning a yacht or a racehorse.

It’s of note that the blonde on the poster could be, well, the poster girl for “normal” beauty. Normal beauty circa 2010 is celebrity beauty, blonde, pouty-lipped, DDD beauty. Whether you’re a red carpet–friendly starlet, an American Idol finalist, or a marquee-level athlete (hello, Serena Williams), all roads lead to the kingdom of peroxide, collagen, and implants. Even women whose glorious manes of other-colored hair helped catapult them into the limelight wind up ditching the very thing that made them singular (Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman, I’m talking to you) in favor of Stepford appeal.

The most impressive example of the quest for celebrity beauty is the recent plastic-surgery binge of Heidi Montag, a C-list celebrity—it doesn’t matter what she’s done—who was already a large-lipped, large-breasted fake blonde. People magazine and the somewhat tonier Huffington Post, fell all over themselves reporting on the ten procedures undergone by the twenty-three-year-old in a single, delirious, scalpel-filled day.

Both publications’ online comments sections bulged with moral outrage: Heidi Montag is a crazy narcissist! Heidi Montag is self-absorbed and vain beyond belief! Heidi Montag was prettier before; now she looks like an alien! Who is Heidi Montag, anyway?

The consensus seemed to be that someone who’s already so beautiful should be spending her time developing her inner beauty by building houses in Guatemala or enrolling at Yale or helping out in Haiti—something other than fine-tuning her own nearly perfect blonde celebrity appearance. But really, why should she worry about inner virtue? Beauty is far and away the most valuable coin in the realm. We’re furious because we don’t want to believe it. It turns out that few of us want to fail to conform to the standards of normal beauty.

The French—yes, them again—have a term for unconventional beauty: jolie-laide. The literal translation is “beautiful-ugly.” To be thought jolie-laide in France means to have a huge, unsightly nose or strange, fangish teeth or a receding hairline—physical traits that really are laide all by themselves but nevertheless manage to combine with a woman’s other traits to make her mysterious, erotic, and captivating. In the United States, of course, every woman who doesn’t own a flat-iron is jolie-laide.

Portland may be the exception. We are serious about our tattoos here. We like our earflap hats and frizzy curls. Our pale complexions are fashionable because of all the recent vampire hoo-ha, but everyone still and always looks better with a tan.

Maybe it’s because we bicycle so much and have thus become a city of slightly sweaty people with bike-helmet hair. Or because the weather forces us into bookstores, movie theaters, coffee shops, and microbreweries—all places that support the development of my mother’s much-vaunted inner virtues. I suspect it actually has more to do with the fact that Oregon has the highest number of atheists in the nation; we eschew dogma. We don’t like people telling us what we’re supposed to worship, and that includes what everyone else finds beautiful.

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Editorial Advisory Board: Tom Booth; Brian Doyle; Debra Gwartney; Julia Heydon; Guy Maynard; Win McCormack; Kathleen Dean Moore; Camela Raymond; Kate Sage; Rich Wandschneider; Dave Weich

Contributors

Eric Gold

Eric Gold is a freelance writer in Portland and regular contributor to Oregon Humanities.

Kristy Athens

Kristy Athens’ nonfiction and short fiction have been published in a number of magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, most recently High Desert Journal, Eclectic Flash, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and Five Fishes Journal.

Rich Wandschneider

Rich Wandschneider was the founding director of Fishtrap, a literary nonprofit in eastern Oregon, and is now building the Alvin Josephy Library of Western History and Culture at Fishtrap. He writes a regular newspaper column and has written for the Oregonian, High Desert Journal, High Country News, and others. He is on the editorial advisory board of this magazine and on the board of directors for Oregon Humanities.

Ellen Santasiero

Ellen Santasiero is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Northwest Review, The Sun, Marlboro Review, Oregon Humanities, and in a recent anthology from the University of Oklahoma Press. She is at work on a memoir.

Caroline Cummins

Caroline Cummins is the managing editor of Culinate.com.

Jedidiah Chavez

Jedidiah Chavez is a visual artist and writer based in Portland. His work has been showcased in a variety of venues nationally and in the Pacific Northwest. Chavez was awarded a 2010 project grant by the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

Kristin Kaye

Kristin Kaye is a Portland-based writer. Her book, Iron Maidens, was an Oregon Book Awards finalist. She has recently completed her novel To Catch What Falls.

Lucy Burningham

Lucy Burningham is an independent writer and journalist who lives in Portland. She holds a master’s degree in nonfiction writing from Portland State University.

Eric Gold

Eric Gold is a freelance writer in Portland and former communications assistant at Oregon Humanities.

Sarah Gilbert

Sarah Gilbert is writing a book about mothers looking for emotional healing in food. In February, she decided to begin homeschooling her eldest son.

Courtney S. Campbell

Courtney S. Campbell is the Hundere Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University. You can try friending him through his Facebook page.

Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson has written about the arts since 1978 when he started writing about dance for the now-defunct Seattle Sun. He has edited arts sections at Willamette Week and The Oregonian, where he recently finished a twenty-six-year stint. You can find his up-to-the-minute thoughts on the arts at http://artsdispatch.blogspot.com.

Dionisia Morales

Dionisia Morales is a freelance writer and teaches writing at Linn-Benton Community College. Her essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in CAYLX, Brevity, Cream City Review, and Silk Road.

Wendy Willis

Wendy Willis is a poet, Conversation Project leader, and the executive director of the Policy Consensus Initiative and the deputy director for Research and Development at the National Policy Consensus Center at Portland State University. Her book of poems, Blood Sisters of the Republic, is forthcoming from Press 53 in fall 2012.

Carl Abbott

Carl Abbott is professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. A specialist on the history of cities, his recent books include Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West and Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People.

Monica Drake

Monica Drake is the author of Clown Girl (Hawthorne Books),which was optioned for film by Kristen Wiig. Her next novel, The Stud Book, is forthcoming from Hogarth Press in February 2013.

Tara Rae Miner

Tara Rae Miner is a writer and freelance writer and editor, former managing editor of Orion magazine, and author of Your Green Abode: A Practical Guide to a Sustainable Home. She lives with her family in Portland.

John Holloran

John Holloran lives in Portland and teaches at Oregon Episcopal School. His last essay for Oregon Humanities was “After the Fall” (Spring 2011).

Rebecca Hartman

Rebecca Hartman is an associate professor of history at Eastern Oregon University. She received her PhD in history from Rutgers University in 2004. Her current research is focused on twentieth-century U.S. rural history.

Dmae Roberts

Dmae Roberts is an award-winning independent radio producer and writer based in Portland.

Jennifer Ruth

Jennifer Ruth is a professor of English literature at Portland State University and the author of Novel Professions, a book of literary criticism.

Richard J. Ellis

Richard J. Ellis is the Mark O. Hatfield Professor of Politics at Willamette University. In 2008 he was named Oregon Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and in 2007 he was chosen as Oregon Scientist of the Year by
the Oregon Academy of Science. His book The Development of the American Presidency is forthcoming from Routledge in January 2012.

Leigh van der Werff

After ten years in Oregon, Leigh van der Werff now lives in central California, where she runs a record store with her husband and their dog, Edgar. When she’s not at the shop, she’s writing essays and music criticism.

Joanne Mulcahy

Joanne Mulcahy teaches creative nonfiction and humanities classes at the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, where she is codirector of the Documentary Studies Certificate Program. Her writing combines memoir and personal essay with ethnographic exploration. Her book Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz was published by Trinity University Press in 2010.

Marion Goldman

Marion Goldman has passed through the social worlds of Rajneeshees, Jesus People, and Nevada prostitutes. In her latest book, The American Soul Rush (forthcoming in December 2011), she describes how a small group of 1960s seekers at California’s Esalen Institute cultivated and spread spiritual alternatives ranging from transpersonal psychology to yoga to Zen golf. She is professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oregon.

Guy Maynard

Oregon Humanities editorial advisory board member Guy Maynard is the editor of Oregon Quarterly, the magazine of the University of Oregon, and the author of The Risk of Being Ridiculous, a historical novel of love and revolution set in Boston in the the late 1960s, into which he managed to slip several Red Sox references. He lives in Eugene.

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri is an associate professor of religion and humanities at Reed College in Portland. He is the author of A History of Islam in America (from which this selection is excerpted) and Competing Visions of Islam in the United States. He was also a faculty member at the Oregon Humanities Teacher Institute in July 2011.

Tim DuRoche

Tim DuRoche is a writer, jazz musician, artist, and cultural advocate. He works as the director of programs for the World Affairs Council of Oregon. Tim hosts the The New Thing, a weekly jazz program on KMHD-89.1 FM in Portland, is currently developing a program on jazz and community values for Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project, and is the author of the recently published collection of essays, Occasional Jazz Conjectures.

Walidah Imarisha

Walidah Imarisha is a founding editor of AWOL, a national political hip hop magazine and has toured nationally and internationally as part of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista. She has taught in Portland State University’s Black studies department and leads three Conversation Project programs for Oregon Humanities on hip hop, the history of race in Oregon, and reenvisioning the prison system.

Kim Stafford

Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College and author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Elegant Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft. This essay is a section from his book-in-progress, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do.

Debra Gwartney

Debra Gwartney is the author of the 2009 memoir Live Through This, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Oregon Book Award, and the PNBA award. She is currently working on a memoir about growing up in the West and the heritage of Narcissa Whitman, a project for which she received a research grant from the American Antiquarian Society. Debra lives on the McKenzie River with her husband, Barry Lopez, and is on the nonfiction faculty at Pacific University.

Susan Meyers

After growing up selling corndogs and cotton candy at carnivals up and down the West Coast, Susan Meyers extended her gypsy lifestyle by spending several years in Latin American before coming home to the Pacific Northwest. Her work has recently appeared in CALYX, Dogwood, Terra Incognita, and The Minnesota Review, and it has been the recipient of several awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship. She teaches writing at Oregon State University.

Matthew Stadler

Matthew Stadler is a writer and editor in Portland. He writes about cities and urbanism for journals including Volume, Netherlands Architecture Bulletin, Domus, and Camerawork. His book about urbanism, Deventer, is forthcoming from 010 Uitgevrij, in Rotterdam. In 2009 he cofounded Publication Studio (http://www.publicationstudio.biz) in Portland.

Amanda Waldroupe

Amanda Waldroupe is a freelance journalist living in Portland. Whenever she fails, she buckles down and tries, tries again.

John Holloran

John Holloran lives in Portland and teaches at Oregon Episcopal School, where he is the chair of the history department. His last essay for Oregon Humanities was “Under a Spell” (Summer 2009).

Todd Schwartz

Todd Schwartz is in reality a very serious and reserved person who divides his time between being a Calvinist minister and a funeral home director. Wait…wait! A funeral home director and a Calvinist minister walk into a bar…

Scott Nadelson

Scott Nadelson’s most recent book is The Cantor’s Daughter. A new collection of his short fiction, Aftermath, is forthcoming from Hawthorne Books in Fall 2011. He teachers creative writing at Willamette University. His latest essay for Oregon Humanities was “Go Ahead and Look” (Spring 2010)

Courtenay Hameister

Courtenay Hameister is the host and head writer of LiveWire Radio, the co-creator of “Road House: The Play!,” a screenwriter and filmmaker. In her spare time, she likes to imagine what it would be like to have more spare time.

Ariel Gore

Ariel Gore is the author of seven books including Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), from which this selection is excerpted. She is also the founding editor of Hip Mama, and editor of the Lambda-award-winning anthology Portland Queer. She teaches creating writing online at the University of New Mexico and The Attic in Portland.

Jamie Passaro

Jamie Passaro lives in Eugene, where she is a freelance writer and an editor for Northwest Book Lovers, a blog produced by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Her last essay for Oregon Humanities was “Driving Mrs. Spacely” (Summer 2008).

Andrew Guest

Andrew Guest is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Portland. When not watching, playing, coaching or writing about soccer, he does research on youth developmental and educational experiences through sports, arts, and service activities.

David Bragdon

David Bragdon served on the Portland regional Metro Council for nearly twelve years and was elected president in 2002. The major accomplishment of his service was an expansion of the regional parks and natural areas network known as the Intertwine. He resigned from the Metro Council in September 2010 in order to accept New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s appointment as director of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability.

M. Allen Cunningham

M. Allen Cunningham is the author of Lost Son, a novel about the life of Rainer Maria Rilke. His first novel, The Green Age of Asher Witherow was a #1 Booksense Pick and was shortlisted for the Booksense Book of the Year. He’s the recipient of an artist fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission and a Yaddo residency. His third novel, set partly in the Pacific Northwest, is forthcoming.

Bette Lynch Husted

Bette Lynch Husted lives and writes in Pendleton. She is the author of Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land (OSU Press, 2004) and At This Distance: Poems (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2010). Lessons from the Borderlands, her collection of memoir essays about teaching, class, gender, and race, is forthcoming from Plain View Press. She is a 2004 Oregon Book Award and WILLA finalist and was awarded a 2007 Oregon Arts Commission fellowship.

Bob Bussel

Bob Bussel is associate professor of history and director of the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon. He has published numerous articles on labor history and contemporary labor issues, including a history of the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. He is currently working on a book about working-class citizens.

Dave Weich

Dave Weich is the president of Sheepscot Creative. The Portland-based company fosters engaging and profitable communication among businesses, consumers, colleagues, and fans. Weich is on the editorial advisory board of Oregon Humanities magazine.

Camela Raymond

Camela Raymond is a Portland-based writer whose work has appeared in Modern Painters, Plazm, the Oregonian, and elsewhere. She was previously an editor at Portland Monthly magazine and the founding editor/publisher of the Organ. She serves on the editorial advisory board of Oregon Humanities magazine.

Scott Nadelson

Scott Nadelson’s most recent book is The Cantor’s Daughter. He teaches creative writing at Willamette University.

Karen Karbo

Karen Karbo‘s three novels, as well as her Oregon Book Award–winning memoir, The Stuff of Life, have all been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her most recent book is The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman.

Lisa Radon

Lisa Radon has written about art and design for Portland Spaces (as associate editor), Portland Monthly, Surface Design Journal, SHIFT (Japan), FLAUNT, Hyperallergic, and ultra (ultrapdx.com). She’s written a handful of catalog essays and is working on her first book.

R. Gregory Nokes

R. Gregory Nokes has worked as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press and the Oregonian. His reporting about this incident has resulted in a formal designation of the massacre site as Chinese Massacre Cove. He lives in West Linn.

Christine Dupres

Christine Dupres is the former director of the Office of Sustainability and Community Engagement at the Native American Youth and Family Center in Portland. She is a freelance writer and an Oregon Humanities board member.

Apricot Irving

Apricot Irving is a writer and radio producer whose most recent project, Boise Voices Neighborhood Oral History Project , brought together elders and youth in Northeast Portland. She has lived in Haiti, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom, but currently calls Portland home.

Lucy Burningham

Lucy Burningham is an independent writer and journalist who lives in Portland. During the past decade, she has traveled on assignment for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and Lonely Planet guidebooks. She holds a master’s in nonfiction writing from Portland State University.

Vicente Martinez

Vicente Martinez lives in Portland and works at a fast food restaurant.

Susan W. Hardwick

Susan W. Hardwick is a professor of geography at the University of Oregon. Her research and teaching focus on the geography of immigration, identity, and place in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author or co-author of nine books, including Russian Refuge: Religion, Migration, and Settlement on the North American Pacific Rim (University of Chicago Press, 1993). This article is adapted from Hardwick’s Commonplace Lecture that she delivered for Oregon Humanities in 2007.

Sarah Gilbert

Sarah Gilbert is a writer and photographer who lives in Portland with her husband and three little boys. She writes about food and finance for several web sites, including DailyFinance, WalletPop and Culinate, is cofounder of the Portland parenting resource urbanMamas.com, and keeps a blog, cafemama.com.

Kevin Nute

Kevin Nute is a professor of architecture at the University of Oregon. He is the author of the American Institute of Architects award-winning monograph, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (1993) and Place, Time and Being in Japanese Architecture (2004).

Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author most recently of Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices, from One Day Hill Press in Melbourne, Australia.

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Abnormal Beauties

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