It seems to me that
Mr. Julius is relying on a very narrow and frankly insupportable definition of "
beauty".
My senior wife seems to me to be
the most beautiful of women, yet she's almost fifty years old and she takes liberties with me which
my lesser wives would tremble to contemplate. My youngest
junior wife is, by most ordinary standards -- including my own,
all other things being equal (though the point of this piece is that they rarely are) -- more
beautiful: She is young, unworn by care and hard labor, commendably demure and submissive, and so on. On paper, she's
a paragon of young womanhood, but
my senior wife delights me more.
How can this be so?
It's quite simple: I am neither a camera nor a robot. I am not a neural net:
I am an immortal soul in a human body.
My perceptions are not, and cannot be, purely visual.
When we look on stranger, all we see is the surface; when I look on
my beloved senior wife, I see the woman who has been my devoted
helpmeet for thirty years, through hardship and combat.
Thus our perceptions of
those who cavort with Leo, and of those who do not: Were I to so
cavort, those who drool over such nonsense would come to recognize my face. They'd read about me in the pages of
People, and I would in a sense (
a sense meaningful to them) become a part of their bleak, desperate little lives. Two
starlets with equal visual appeal are
not equal in perceived beauty (the only kind) if one of them is well publicized and the other is not. I would guess that last year, your 50-year-old woman was a stranger to
People's readers, and that now, in a crude and limited way, she is not.
There are other factors as well:
Familiarity breeds contempt in many cases. Maybe people are tired of
Ali Landry, whoever the hell she is. Or maybe she's just been out of the news lately. Are "
beautiful" and "
interesting" so different? No, they're intertwined. Both exist in
that musty little crawlspace between our ears. Maybe if she
had changed (even
physical beauty has more than one axis; she could be not more nor less, but
differently beautiful), she'd have held everyone's attention a little longer.
Or, uhh, you know, whatever.
Physical beauty is only one element of that complex of phenomena called "beauty" both in the pages of
People magazine and in the wide world outside. The details aren't important.