(This article assumes that I’m tolerably clever and tolerably good-looking. You don’t have to agree with either. In that case, please, imagine someone else in my place, who fulfils both criteria.)
It all started when I was thinking about what to wear for a night out with a friend, when my conscience woke up and said: Oh, come on, isn’t this beneath you? I was just about to reply that yeah, sure, whatever, and start thinking about Hypatia or something, when I stopped and said to myself: wait, but why?
Why should I actually want my friends to like me rather for my brains that for my looks? Why should it be more right for them to? Both are my merit to about the same extent, which is to say, not at all. There might be some credit in what I know, however little that is, since it does require some strength of will to actually study, but seeing that most of the job is done by my good memory, love for reading and interest in things which, again, are not my merit at all, overly, that isn’t much to be proud of either. The only thing I could actually say is something for which people should like me are my possible moral virtues, and that’s not what I originally had in mind (and besides, I wouldn’t have many friends left if it was all about that).
There’s one situation in which my friends should like me for my brains: when they say they do. That is to say, if someone asked me to a pub on the pretext of wanting to talk to me, and hear my opinions on things, but really what he was after would be just staring into my cleavage, then I think I’d have every right to feel cheated. Just as girl who met a guy in a bar and got asked into his apartment would if it turned out he mainly wanted to talk about world politics.
(But I do appreciate this is not easy. Imagine, again, a person in a bar. A potential partner sits next to them and starts working on them. The person starts talking about world politics. What gives the potential partner bigger chances of having sex, listening patiently, nodding and pretending to be interested, or saying “let’s not talk about that, I want to kiss you”? Well if they’re really attractive, nr. 2 might work, too, but most people would still bet on nr. 1. And for a reason, too. Many people like being lied to. But it still is a lie).
But this is clearly not the case I was considering at the beginning, since if I dress to impress, I obviously do count on people liking me for my looks, at least as one of the reasons. It was rather the question of this not being right. Why, then, should my friends like me for my brains? Or let’s turn the question around: why should I like my friends? (I mean to say, “what is the right reason”, not “why the hell should I do a thing like that”.) I don’t attempt to deny that brains are one of the main reasons for being friends with someone. I usually want to talk to my friends, talk about interesting things, and for that, brains are necessary. But there isn’t anything praiseworthy about that. It’s simply a better amusement for me when my friends are clever. True, I don’t recall any friends I would have just for the sake of their good looks. The thing is, I don’t know anybody from my acquaintance who would be handsome enough for this to be worth the trouble (sorry, guys). But you can bet that if I had a Monica Bellucci doppelganger among my acquaintance, I would be capable of spending hours with her (just *looking* at her. Don’t get any ideas), and she wouldn’t have to be clever at all, although it would be a nice bonus, of course. Why should aesthetical pleasure be inferior to the intellectual one?
And of course, cleverness and looks are not the only aspect. You might want to hang around with a person because, on the “spirit” side, you like their sense of humour or they are good listeners, or on the “matter” side, you like the way they dress, their manners, and so on.
But all this isn’t really friendship, is it? It’s all about deriving some sort of pleasure from the contact. Not that friendship should be some kind of torment, but if this was all, friendship would be a pretty selfish thing. So what is the point?
Well the way I see it, the real friendship part starts when it’s not mainly about the intellectual or aesthetical pleasure, or fun, or anything of the sorts, but about the other person as such. Of course all the aforementioned things are still a part of the package, but the main focus is the person. I think it always starts with some form of pleasure – we can hardly pick a person at random and decide that this is going to be our friend, there has to be some kind of stimulus, a reason behind it – but if it’s friendship, the interest in person as such should follow.
From this perspective, it doesn’t really matter at all whether the friend in question likes me for my looks of for my brains. I hope he likes me simply for myself, which includes both and somehow transcends it (well, I hope so), but if he doesn’t – yet – then it’s perfectly indifferent whether he’s concentrating at the body or at the mind. Only maybe some would say that it’s easier to go to liking the person from liking the mind. It might well be, body in general is probably prone to objectification. But on the other hand, I try as hard as I can to project my personality on the outside things, on my body, so maybe it isn’t that bad after all.
Kantian post scriptum: It seems that the person stuff is just a repetition of the good old “treat others never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end“, but I do think there’s a difference. As much as I don’t see shopkeepers just as machines doing their work, nevertheless I don’t interact with them mainly because of them personally, but because I want to get some profit out of it, that is to say, buy something.
Gender post scriptum: I don’t deny that taking into account somebody’s looks when applying for a manager position would be a discrimination and sexism and just plain wrong. But exactly in the same way, it would be wrong to take into account somebody’s brains when casting for a model. Not that every model has to be stupid.
