HAHA Well! I do not class myself in either of these categories very often but I will endeavour to help with the debate.

The distinction starts very early in ones life. At school the pretty girls and cute boys are never without a friend to sit by them on a long school outing. Other kids clamor for recognition and the plain Janes and Jims sit together wearing their specs and talking about Pythagoras. You will have noticed that the Prom Kings and Queens are the most attractive kids in school. But can the majority of them tell you who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 without Googling it? It was Al Gore. Over in the US they have nasty Beauty Pageants for kids! Mums being beautiful vicariously through their children. Just wrong on so many levels. But the quest for beauty abounds at the expense of education. Surely teaching a child to be beautiful above all other areas holds a degree of abuse.

Who hasn't met someone outwardly beautiful only to find that they are actually quite thick and selfish?

A 'handsome plank' has only one redeeming quality. Arm candy. With the possible kudos that being seen with someone so beautiful may eventually rub off on us.

Men will want to be seen with a healthy beauty, it looks good for the Tribal Alpha Male but they will inevitably prefer to go home to someone with whom they can have a decent conversation and who doesn't mind getting her hands dirty in the process.

Being clever is not something inherent in all of us. We can be genetically beautiful but it takes time and effort to be clever, far more effort than getting a spray-tan and just as painful as a back, crack and sac tidy up. Beauty that knows no humility is not beauty at all but an ill-mannered slur on the rest of the populace.

There are the beauteous Angelina's doing their thing for Charidee and the less fortunate but this is 'sung' from all the covers of mags the world over. When we think of 'unsung heroes' do any of us think of outer beauty? A resounding "no" methinks.

Although I scrub up well for social gatherings and can be deemed good looking, by the time I am in a wonderful conversation about Quantum Physics my eyeliner has usually migrated down my face, I am drooling and my hair needs a Wrangler. I can appear clever or good-looking, but not, seemingly at the same time.

With todays throw-away society being beautiful is only a short call to a Plastic Surgeon willing to take advantage of insecurities but in the very next office there is a Psychiatrist waiting to pick up the pieces and...erm...willing to take advantage of insecurities.

End note.

If people want to decide whether I am clever or good looking then please, please let me abide in the clever category but tell me I'm good looking now and then

Learn more about this author, Jem Gedwing.
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