Beauty is only skin deep.

I avoid seeing really hot girls. Maybe this is why I don’t watch TV- the overabundance of glamour and beauty really makes me depressed. Whenever I see a model or a celebrity, I try really hard to peel her skin off with my mind; I try to strip away the ideological and the conceptual layer of her being and deal with her in the pre-lingual/biological abstract. I try to think of her as a bundle of neurons, sweat glands, bone marrow and hair. I visualize her DNA and gastric acid; I analyze the inner workings of her organs and the way she defecates. I focus on her various odors, the plaque between her teeth, and the colonies of bacteria on her skin.

Human beings are only skin deep, and underneath the most beautiful super model, there lays a monster comprised of wet clumps of organs, tubes, hunks of bloody meat, lifeless electric impulses, and other repulsive and disgusting dead matter. Despite how we might look on the outside, most of our physical properties and composition are not very attractive. If God made man in the image of himself, did he also make our INSIDES in the image of Him? One comfortable notion that comes out of this concept and image is that the unattractive and repulsive insides that we all share make us more alike, more heterogeneous, and equal than we otherwise would. If you flip both my below average-looking ex-girlfriend and Britney Spears inside out and place them next to each other, I doubt you would be able to tell the difference between the two. When you consider what most parts of our physical bodies look and feel like, there is a sense of serenity and comfort inknowing that we really are not that much different from each other. Unfortunately, this sense of reassurance is embedded within the hideous and revolting side of our very own nature.

Indeed, our skin is the only organ that holds us together, just barely and scarcely preventing the hideous monsters that reside within us from breaking out of their thin shells. Compare the thickness and overall breadth of our skin to the rest of our bodies that lies underneath. The skin is thin and miniature in comparison. To me, there is a sense of insecurity in knowing that immediately beneath this feeble layer of tissues and cells, there lays wet muscle, distorted arteries and other disgusting organs that make up the majority of who we are as physical beings. Even our thoughts, seemingly so divine, abstract, beautiful and creative are governed by electric impulses and grey matter – simply wet and slimy meat. So when a girl loves me, is she merely in love with my skin and meat? Is that it?

Whenever I date a girl, I’m always be fearful of two things. First, I would be afraid that my skin would fail on me, break down, and the monster that it barely holds would come out and devour, both physically and psychologically, the girl who I am desperately trying to look good for and impress. Secondly, whenever I find a girl attractive, I usually fall for her mind, but the mind is nothing more than the brain. If I am so in love with the beautiful and lovely words she utters the eloquent poems and letters that she composes, should I also be in love with the ultimate source of such beauty and eloquence?

Our beauty is literally only skin deep. But, in perspective, the sense of beauty and satisfaction that we derive from our outside is only illusionary. If you look at the skin under a microscope, you will be shocked at how unaesthetic and repugnant it is. I apologize for taking away your last hope for beauty. Indeed, even the only barrier concealing the hideous monster within us is itself a source of discomfort and disgust when examined upon closer inspection.

If you still don’t find human beings disgusting, let me try to convince you of our monstrosity by mentioning our origins. Remember how Frankenstein was created? His body was sewn up from pieces of flesh and skin of other dead bodies. But was the way he was created any different from the way we were created? Frankenstein is a magnification of our bodies and minds, in a metaphorical sense that point to our very own nature and who we really are. Think of how WE were created and you would come to the conclusion that we are also made up of dead stuff.

The notion of our sentient beings would cease to seem so glamorous if we remind ourselves that the source of our conscious bodies originate from various unaesthetic and dead material. First, there is the sperm and the egg, which is not only extrinsically unattractive, but is intrinsically made up of senseless and mindless organic material. Then there’s the food that your mother ingested and digested to feed you during pregnancy. It’s nothe onthing but dead matter converted into muscle, brain, bones, and organs. What stitches us together is comprised of what was once dead – animal corpses, excrement, and bits and pieces of inorganic matter like dead stars and the primeval soup that is shattered, spread out, and left over by the violent explosion of the Big Bang.

Atoms and particles that reside in our bodies once held residence in the bodies of all sorts of different objects and organisms: When a body dies, worms eat the body, chickens eat the worm, and we would in turn, eat the chickens. So life (as we know it) is not very appealing when examined from the perspective of its origins. We all have our beginnings in materials taken from a host of other repulsive objects. The forces that bring these parts together to form our bodies, consciousness, and, eventually, human beings are nothing but contingent and accidental ones. From this perspective, life is made from the dead, with dead matter swimming and swirling into each other in a meaningless void that is DEAD and LIFELESS.

Ok, let’s zoom out a little bit and focus on our external properties. Forget about the organs, the brain, and all of their origins. You can’t SEE them on a day-to-day basis (unless you are a medical student or a doctor); focus on what you can directly observe. But can you end our sense of anxiety simply by forgetting about the skin that we so heavily depend upon? I don’t think so. Our physical appeals, if they do exist, are fragile and unreliable. Even the most attractive of us feel insecure, anxious, and self-conscious about our appearances from time to time.

Everyone is imperfect in some way. Even if you are not seriously deformed, you worry about what your mate will think of you in the morning, right when your messy self wakes up from a temporary death. You worry about your bad breath, whether your gel is wearing off, and, for girls, whether your makeup is smeared or ruined by external factors beyond your control. The shape of your nose, the sizes of your eyes and ears, the size of your muscles are all exposed and open to criticism, despite the fact that they seem to look acceptable when you checked yourself out in the mirror this morning.

I am going to end with sex here, because I think it is the most monstrous of all human acts and interactions.

Sex I think, reveals the most beastly and debased side of us. It is an act that consists of blood, odor, violent penetration, frenzied movements, disturbing psychology, exchange of body fluid, potential spread of disease, unsettling noises, and even death. We must reveal some of our most ugly body parts to the very partners who we desperately try to impress. The imperfections of our bodies that are hidden so well underneath clothes and makeup are as completely exposed during sex. Despite the eroticism of our sexual organs, they are, in any other context, ugly, smelly, and anything but attractive.

We also need to reveal our most primal and debased psychological and emotional side to our partners during sex. The moaning, the way we breathe, the wet and slimy sounds that the vagina makes while it is being violated and penetrated, and the eerie and unsettling “slapping” sounds made by the impact of ferocious humping: all of that would seem downright depraved or sickening in a non-sexual context. It is amazing that our psyches and our minds can filter these monstrous elements out of the erotic picture to allow us to enjoy sex despite its imperfections.

But sometimes our security system breaks down. During sex, we find ourselves thinking, from time to time, “What the fuck am I doing? Who is this monster that I am humping and why is it making such weird noises? NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE! Why am I relentlessly and repetitively making such absurd back and forth movements? Those are moments when the real penetrates the symbolic; the barriers of language, ideology, illusions, and concepts break down, exposing the good old monstrous sides of our humanity. 

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Why are people so anal about writing/speaking with the utmost correct grammar and spelling?  Is it because that language is a metaphor for the collective consciousness that we are born into, like the way our bodies fit into pre-existing shapes and molds of clothes? Language can be analogous to an alienated organism that acts upon us like a program that shapes and molds us into its own will.  We become language’s victims, as it demands us to act and speak accordingly, and structure our lives and thoughts in accordance to its very own grammatical structures and sentences.  Language is not ours to begin with.  Discourses, words we use, and the rules that come with language are already there, established through out history, way before we were born.  So we are thrown into this “language matrix” to merely borrow the words that we express ourselves with. Language presupposes a sort of comformity, something that is never private, but is always shared in public with others in on-going relations.

When we speak or write with the wrong grammar, our intellects are automatically insulted.  We are judged upon, sometimes even laughed at by the way we operate and toss and turn under this limited and pre-established grammatical rubric.  Overtime, throughout our years of schoolings, syntax and grammar, structural sentences, vocabularies and punctualities become familiar routes of patterns that are laid down in our minds in the forms of neural pathways and computational algorisms.  For the rest of our lives, we are to play by the grammatical rules that are pre-established by history and society, and any misuse and transgression of grammar leads to the expulsion from the cultural systems that we were brought up in, and our status as human beings are involuntarily revoked and invalidated.  It seems to be the case that most people suppose that those who can correctly use grammar and those we are articulate, with refined writing and speaking skills and controls over language are more “cultured” than those who have lesser gifts for linguistic expressions and endeavors, and that we often judge how well educated and “smart” somebody is based on how they do with words and how they structure their sentences. 

As much as we would like to categorize people based on the categorization and the structures of language, some of the greatest minds throughout history have trouble with such a rule of establishment.  Einstein and Da Vinci are known to make abundance of spelling errors and grammatical mistakes in their notebooks and writings.  Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest thinkers in intellectual history just happens to be one of its poorest writers.   I think one of the reasons why this is so is that imaginative people are mostly right-brain dominated individuals, but that the lack of linguistic functionalities embedded within their brains are precisely what give rise to their visual and creative geniuses.  Analysis of Einstein’s brain reveals that the linguistic modules of his brain are slightly smaller than average, but this “defect” is overcompensated by the spatial-visual components of his brain, which are more active (wider physically) than the average brain.   It might also be the case that creative individuals and iconoclasts refuse to play by the rules to begin with, thus they are less attuned to the pre-structurally established rules of grammar. 

But don’t get me wrong…I am not saying that we are enslaved completely by language, for language is both the window to our souls and the door that shelters our minds.  We are all situated in a dark cave, and the only window that allows us to peak out into reality is the very same structure that keeps us locked in.  But we have no other means to climb out of this cave but through this window, for we can only use the same materials and tools that are imposed on us as means to escape and climb out of their very own configurations… into the recess of reality that seems more “real” to us than what our senses provide us with.  There is a lot of freedom and room for ingenuity within the pre-established structures of grammar, and just like freedom can never be manifested fully without the framework of deterministic layouts that serve as the background and the springboard for which our free will can be launched and projected, thoughts can never find their outlets without channeling through discourses of sentences and grammar.