Analysis Of The Ugly Truth About Beauty By Dave Barry

In Dave Barry’s piece “The Ugly Truth About Beauty,” he claims that most men tend to “think of themselves as average-looking.” One can see Barry’s point because it is not often that a man fusses over the way his hair falls or the highness of his cheekbones. Men are not as caught up in society’s idea of how one should look, something that women are often consumed by. This unattainable standard is one that plagues women from adolescence, all the way into adulthood. Young men, as Barry says, often form an opinion of their looks at a young age and stick with it forever. So what is it about the teenage years that plummets the self-esteem of females but leaves the males unaffected? The common belief is that the media plays an enormous role in this destruction of the idea of beauty. Leggy blondes with slim waists cloud the minds of the world’s youth. This is eye candy to the little boys and an impossible goal for the girls.

For centuries women have been disguising their faces with makeup and anti-aging solutions to make them more attractive, or maintain the looks that they already possess.

The majority of women are painted up to hide their imperfections and blemishes but it is rare that one sees a guy trying to mask their flaws with cosmetics. A zit is not going to be the end of the world for a guy but you might as well call it World War “Z” for a chick because she is going to be as dramatic and hostile about it as possible. In “Hope-and History-in a Jar” Kathy Peiss rips apart the beauty industry for making women vain and limiting their potential, saying, “And the act of beautifying,...is really compulsory work, so narcissistic, time-consuming,and absorbing as to limit women’s achievements (Peiss, 61-64).” Perhaps this is why men are not known to typically wear makeup, but the more likely reason is to avoid ridicule for this unusual behavior, or simply just not caring what they look

like.
Across the globe cosmetic surgeries are gaining popularity amongst men and women who seek to fix their imperfections. Christine Rosen discusses this phenomenon in her piece “The Democratization of Beauty.” With the right amount of money one can fix anything that they do not like about themselves and that is why the procedures are becoming so popular. Rosen says, “Despite the risks, demand grows-and continues to trickle down the social scale (Rosen, 119-120).” Women of course dominate in regards to number of surgeries and they take advantage of procedures ranging from the crowd-pleasing tummy tuck, to a calf augmentation. (Only God knows what could be so wrong with one’s calf to evoke surgery, but in 2013, 253 women went under the knife for this.) Overall, women accounted for 87% of the total cosmetic surgical procedures, leaving men with a mere 13%. It makes sense because someone who would describe themselves as average looking, most likely would not be getting surgery to enhance their appearance. Women, who are notorious for having lower opinions of themselves, of course are going to astronomical numbers of procedures.
When administering fifty surveys to men of all ages and ethnicities, I found results reflective of Barry’s idea. The survey read: “Based on attractiveness, rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 5. (5 being the most attractive and 1 being the least attractive),” and then provided numbers one through five to be circled by the subjects. Thirty-four out of the fifty ranked themselves as a three on the scale, meaning that 68% of the men found themselves to be average-looking. Only 14% of the men described themselves as being below average in the looks department, and therefor only 18% of men considered themselves as above average. This proves that the majority of guys see themselves as average, of course this data is not representative of the whole male population because the sample was so small, but it gives an idea of what the results would look like with a larger sample.