Turns out that Karl Marx was wrong, and not just about Communism. Found this odd little scrap while doing some research (on something completely different, of course).

"The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day." -- Karl Marx

So who, except possibly some savvy historians, remembers that Karl Marx had pimples? (Actually doctors now believe it was a rare condition which causes huge boils in the groin and armpits.)

Many a time I've wondered how self-image effects not only what we project into the world, but indeed how we see the world and how we perceive its possibilities. As a kid, one of my best friends had a desperately severe case of acne - a kind of acne you really don't see much anymore, thanks to antibiotics and other dermatological treatments. Acne ruled his life and made him a creepy character. He didn't enjoy being out in daylight so much as having friends over to his dim hidey-hole of an apartment. His intelligence fueled a dark and cynical sense of humor that could, without warning, turn vituperatively on any one who came near. He was smart enough to recognize other peoples' vulnerabilities and evil enough to exploit them. He had a remarkably attractive and worshipful girlfriend who he treated like crap, and a crew of devoted sidekicks over whom he reigned supreme, playing esoteric music for them and expounding on life like a guru while they listened and learned and mainly took an awful lot of drugs. Like him, they all felt like outcasts: and, like him, they got hooked on heroine to forget who they were.

I lost track of him after college and occasionally wonder if he ever got his shit together. Did he overcome his agony over the way he looked? Did it continue to shape his choices? I'd like to think he finally came to terms with his body and built a warmer, stronger life for himself. But maybe his self-hatred - or the drugs he took to forget how he looked - finally killed him.

Seems to me a lot of people experience small afflictions as overwhelming afflictions. I've known too many people who define themselves by their afflictions. As if the affliction was the first, if not only, thing other people noticed about them. People who go through life feeling inferior or angry or ashamed because they believe they are too fat, too skinny, too short, too tall, too pimply, too bald; because they have a limp or a cleft palate or a club foot or a foreshortened arm; because they believe, quite simply, that they are uglier than the rest.

When I was a little girl, my much older sister told me that when I was born, the doctor discovered that I had no nose. He snatched a potato and quickly sewed it to my face to replace the missing nose.

I was so little that I believed her. Since she repeated it over and again, I kept believing her for at least a year or two. I would climb up on the dresser to inspect my nose very carefully and see if it was well attached. It definitely looked like a potato: it seemed too round to be a real nose. I felt desperately ashamed of it. I hated my nose. It made me feel so homely. When a case of the chicken pox at age 6 left a tiny scar at the tip of my nose, I dreaded going outside, certain that the first thing people would see upon meeting me was a bulbous potato further deformed by a scar. I have no doubt that a lot of my bad choices and self-destructive behaviors in adolescence were, in part, the result of believing I was hopelessly ugly.

It took decades to shake that belief. When, at age 30, I found my favorite old doll in my parents' basement, I laughed and grieved all the same time to see the doll's nose. I'd forgotten that in a fit of inchoate childhood frustration, I had once taken a Bic pen to the doll's nose and colored it dark blue. Although the doll was made with what I would now call a button nose, as a child it was a potato that I had to destroy.

I can look at childhood pictures today and think, "wow, wtf, I was a cute little kid, how is it possible that my image of myself was so distorted?" But I guess I know the answer to that. When we perceive ourselves through our afflictions - whether real or imaginery - the mirror itself becomes distorted.

October 31, 2007 in Sexual Beauty | Permalink

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