Oh You Beautiful Doll

Male beauty.

Now there's a meaty, controversial subject.

I recently came across this gem about DANNY Volume 1 which popped up on Google. "... At its core, Danny is about nothing more than the twisted obsession of one man for his beautiful younger brother."

This is - at least so far, no doubt it will be bettered in time - the most stupefyingly dumb one line synopsis of DANNY I have yet to read. And, believe me, I've read some doozies.

'At core' is the important part here because, of course, at core DANNY is barely concerned with beauty. Beauty in DANNY, like beauty in real life, is skin deep. Unlike real life, however, the beauty in DANNY is there as much to throw you off the scent as anything else. It's there for the characters, and indeed the reader, to embrace as an apology for any range of behaviour they choose to attribute it to. Beauty in DANNY is nothing but an excuse.

You can, of course, exactly as this reader has done, see only that in DANNY. Just as you can see only the sex. It's about obsession, it's about beauty, it's about farming are all equally valid, and equally stupid.

As with all reviews this one tells us a lot more about the reviewer than the book. If you know DANNY you know immediately that our reader only sees beauty & obsession, and she wants you to see that too - that's how, like the characters in the book, she creates her 'reality'.

DANNY is about beauty like Superman is about stunt-flying.

But nevertheless, beauty, and male beauty at that, is a very potent beast indeed.

Male beauty is not the same as female beauty - not by a long shot.

For a start it's far rarer. Female beauty has by its very definition a 'feminine' quality. Beautiful bull dykes are a rare breed, simply because the essence of beauty is a feminine one.

Male beauty walks a very thin and precarious line and so very few men achieve it.

The world is stuffed full of handsome men. Hell, you can fall over them at the supermarket. Good-looking is ten-a-penny. These are the male equivalents of female beauty. Female beauty is manufactured, simply because it is so artificial.

You take a basically attractive featured woman (i.e. with a symmetrical face and the standard placement of eye to nose to mouth ratio.) You then cosmeticise it. Bring the hair colour up or down, enhance the eyes and mouth with cosmetics, dress the body to enhance or emulate the currently accepted female shape and bingo - you have female beauty.

Any half-wit with regular features and a vague colour sense can achieve it. It truly is skin-deep.

You can do the same process with a man to make him good-looking. Cut the hair, highlight, take the designer stubble on or off; clothes cut to show off or disguise his bone structure/build; a power suit, a black shirt, trousers cut to flatter. Bingo! You have a good-looking man.

Good-looking, handsome, pretty (that's maybe not quite ten-a-penny but it's damn close). And it doesn't mean squat to me. On a scale of one to ten - fuck off and don't bother me.

Chat me up in the queue, make eyes at me across the room, be interested in me, use your 'feminine side' to relate to my female psyche.

Oh, fucking give it a rest. Do I look like you'd interest me? Is there any part of this fuck off face that is failing to convince you?

But beautiful men - oh dear God, the power.

I am absolutely terrified of beautiful men. Good-looking men often turn me off and annoy me (I wonder sometimes, is this true in reverse? Are men ever annoyed by good-looking women?). That manufactured, careful air, that sense of some obscure benefaction that they are bestowing on you, that short attention span, shocked surprise that they often exhibit of 'Is she really not interested in me? has got to be one of the most unattractive traits a human being ever displays.

Good-looking men do not, on the whole, impress me. Neither do pretty ones, who are even more irritating. Girls with penises so we won't feel threatened. All the little fag-boys masquerading as straight so that we won't get a fit of the heebie-jeebies and run off to our girlfriends to share chocolate and nail polish.

Pretty is forgivable at fourteen - just. But any older and I'm having doubts.

Which brings me back, because there is nowhere else to run and hide, to the subject of beautiful men.

Johnny Depp is a beautiful man. But you know that. Even if you're not sexually attracted to him (what is wrong with you?) you know that.

I've lost count of how often I've heard his co-stars - and I'm talking male ones here - talking about how beautiful he is. He also appears to have a portrait in the attic, but that's another story.

I remember Dustin Hoffman saying of him in Neverland that he was a "seriously beautiful man" and that although he was stunningly handsome on film he was even more beautiful in real life. And that that wasn't easy.

Damn right it isn't. And I cannot begin to imagine what it feels like to possess that power. If, indeed, it is power.

Johnny Depp's girlfriends are always 'beautiful', but he overshadows every one of them.

You just know that whenever the Depp Dream Couple are sparkling down some red carpet, that the gawpers and gapers hanging onto that rope for dear life, hoping to touch a hem or two, aren't looking at his model girlfriend, French and thin and perfect. They are not looking at his co-star, lush and raven-haired and very delicious. All eyes, and I mean all eyes, male and female, are on him.

That, my friend, is male beauty and I fear it - to the very depth of my soul.

I would not like to meet Johnny Depp. I would not even fantasise in the deepest depths of my hidden, secret soul about snogging him, never mind fucking him. I have never had the barest glimpse of a sexual fantasy about Johnny Depp and I never will. Is this because I am not sexually attracted to him? Perhaps I only appreciate his beauty distantly, like a sculpture, but sexually it doesn't hit the right buttons?

Yeah, like fuck. He's a clit-stand on legs. You get wet looking at him. His paparazzi photos look like a dog's dinner, nine times out of ten. He looks like some drunk that's slept on a bench, with his four day growth, scuzzy 'casual' clothes and old, ratty woolly hat, and still your mouth goes dry at the sight of him.

And I do not know why.

That's the real rub. Yeah, sure he's got an unbelievably photogenic bone-structure, lovely expressive eyes, a charismatic way with him, all of that. But is the secret in there?

I don't know. For once in my life I don't have an answer. But I do feel it lies somewhere in mystery ingredient X. I do feel it's that 'charisma' that is the true secret. I suspect, in Johnny Depp, what we are seeing is a damn fine set of genetics coupled with an overly generous does of charisma.

Charisma explains the John Jackson Moores of the world, the men who are not technically 'beautiful' but who have that charismatic pull. It's that same pull we attribute to Satan or vampires. That sense of hypnotic power. I want to shag him now, but I know not why.

Women possess this too, but they are seldom allowed it in the same way. Women have to first match the credentials of 'beautiful' before we allow them to possess 'beauty'. Fortunately for men (now, there's a coincidence) they don't have to meet that high criteria.

I remember once when I worked in an office a co-worker saying to me, and meaning it as a compliment, that I "wasn't beautiful in a conventional sense" but that I "possessed a quality of real glamour."

I was dead chuffed at the time because I was a poor love-starved, compliment-hungry kid. Later, though, I did begin to wonder about it. There was no way I genuinely possessed the quality of glamour, because the nature of glamour is synthetic.

If you look it up, the dictionary definition runs something along the lines of a supernatural magical quality of making something more beautiful than it actually is. An illusion in other words. And the one thing I have never been is an illusion. I am not a high-heel, lipstick wearing kind of girl. Never have been. But I have always had followers, fan clubs, acolytes, people (of both sexes) desperately wanting not only parts of me, but to be me. I even have to run away from it every few years to escape it, like some kind of bizarre worshipper lime scale.

It has to be charisma (either that or I really am the Anti-Christ), inexplicable pulling power. I'm attractive, but not conventionally 'beautiful'. I am not possessed of Johnny Depp's lethal wonder-mix, but something in me fascinates nevertheless.

Is this why I fear him? Is he competition? Is that how I see him? Do I avoid beautiful men because I need to be the peacock?

Sadly no. I wish it was. I fear them for much more insidious, wormy, dark reasons.

I fear them because I want them in a way that feels like a hand ripping my guts out.

Beautiful men own me. They have a power in their grasp that no other human on this planet could possibly have over me.

No-one owns me. I am my own person to an, possibly for some people, alarming degree. I am certainly my own person to a very unfashionable, 'unfeminine' degree.

I remember one of my detractors saying a while back that "Stone's boyfriend is as real as her book sales". I'm paraphrasing here, because I'm more interesting. But words to that effect.

I remember first being perplexed by this, wondering if this was supposed to be insulting (I felt that it had to be) then wondering why the fuck anyone would find that insulting. (I still do.)

We won't go into why this particular detractor, who I imagine considers herself something of a feminist (hey, probably a post one, they're different - sexier and more man-friendly) jumped immediately onto that ancient, creaky, can-be-traced-back-to-Plato bandwagon that any woman who 'speaks out of turn' can't get a man, but she's definitely a post-feminist. They're allowed to be bitchy and criticise other women's appearance, weight and lovability - which is, of course, in no way sexist - while demanding equal rights.

I find it deeply ironic, but not as satisfying as it should be, that since I took up active heterosexuality at the age of nineteen I have never ever, not for one single solitary moment, been without a boyfriend.

And do I think this is good? Makes me worthwhile?

Why the fuck should I?

Have I ever brought it up before? Have I ever told you this proves something about me?

Does it?

Perhaps our post-feminist could tell us why it matters to her. Why she thinks it's insulting. Why she feels no boyfriend = failed woman.

I know it will shock her to the core, and possibly many of you reading this, but I find the permanence of a boyfriend deeply disturbing. I think I've paid a terrible price for it and one I wouldn't recommend to other women. Ever.

I want to take all the single women in the world, particularly those who actually elected to do it, and say to them "Stick with it. Don't let anyone Bridget Jones you." Needing a man is horseshit, and I'm not bullshitting you here.

I am a woman who has never needed a family, children, friends. I have chosen to live without those things. Never looked back. If only I'd had the guts to reject the boyfriend too who might I have been? What might I have done?

So I let the boyfriend stand in the way, push my career side, dominate and dictate to me?

Oh ha, ha, hee, heee. Can you see it? Me? Get real.

The Boyfriend has done everything on my terms, and I mean everything. I stopped cooking and washing up at nineteen - that was his job. I haven't done it since. And that is but the tip of the iceberg. But it doesn't stop me wondering, in my ruthless way, if I couldn't have done more without one.

He's my one-man support team, handling my depressions, my rages, my ruthless self-determinism and on top of that he has to do all the cooking and the washing up and pay the bills and do I appreciate him for it?

Do I fuck. In fact I wonder regularly if I couldn't have been even greater without him.

I am truly the demi-god of feminism. Believe it.

Which still doesn't really tell you why I deeply fear beautiful men, but then maybe you can put that one together yourself. You'll have to, because some secrets are too dark to reveal.

And that's apparently one of them.