The people most impressed by beautiful women are sometimes the beautiful women themselves. Anyone who doubts this need only spend some time surfing the Internet to realize how true it can be. For example, I just stumbled across words written by a gorgeous woman. She wrote, “my name is christina i've lived in cincinnati ohio my entire life I'm 22 and a vocal performance major at OSU⁽¹⁾. that makes me better than you.⁽²⁾”

You don't need me to tell you that such a comment is dripping with arrogance and replete with numerous grammatical errors. Gee whiz, a vocal performance major—is that challenging enough to warrant such a high-and-mighty attitude? Obviously not, so the reason that Christina is so enamored with herself is more likely to stem from her beauty.

I met a young woman in the ER whose ego was just as lofty, and with equally tenuous justification. Allison was hot. No doubt about that.

I've never understood people who begrudged a person mentioning his or her attributes. If the attribute is real, it is a fact, not hubris. The definition of hubris goes beyond a matter-of-fact acknowledgement of some attribute; it smacks of an arrogant, haughty disdain for others. The dictionary definition of hubris is “an inordinate sense of one's superiority.” Not a justifiable sense of one's superiority, but an inordinate sense of one's superiority. Consequently, if Allison's ego were confined to her appearance, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Her appearance was superior. I think people should be cognizant of their attributes, and capitalize upon them to the greatest extent possible.

However, judging from the things she said and how she treated others, Allison didn't just think that she was mesmerizingly beautiful, she acted as if she were royalty. Her most salient accomplishment, other than having the luck to be born beautiful, was completing the first year at a local community college. That's good, but hardly reason to act like royalty.

Some attributes, such as intelligence or a magnetic personality, often last throughout life. In contrast, beauty is relatively ephemeral. With each passing decade, the proportion of beautiful women drops off so rapidly that few women are considered beautiful by the time they reach the age of 40. Interestingly, a robust body of evidence strongly suggests that male appearance is better preserved. One example of this is how men old enough to join AARP can still be considered handsome enough to be the leading man in a movie. However, when Hollywood needs a woman with equal appeal, they cast much younger women, most typically 20-something babes. Hollywood executives know that a 57-year-old man can still be perceived as a hunk, but a comparably old actress is unlikely to be perceived as a babe, even if she can afford the best plastic surgeons in the world.

This disparity in the degradation of appearance will widen when hair cloning, which is just over the horizon, becomes available, because alopecia is one of the major signs of aging in males. However, the things that decimate female beauty—wrinkles, cellulite, varicose veins, stretch marks, shrinking breasts, sagging breasts, and other losing battles against gravity and the ravages of time such as packing on pounds in all the wrong places—are not so easily remedied. Women could do a much better job of preserving and even amplifying their attractiveness if they read my books (Fascinating Health Secrets, The Science of Sex, and How to Lose Weight Without Dieting, Drugs, Herbs, Exercise, or Surgery) that discussed numerous ways to do that. However, most women never bother to take the time to read about effective ways of combating these things that diminish beauty. Or they may read about it, but choose the wrong sources, such as women's magazines.

Think about it: the covers of those magazines have been promising beauty breakthroughs for, oh what has it been, the past 50 years or so? Are today's women better at preserving their beauty than women were a half-century ago? Hardly! If women's magazines told you my beauty tips, you could learn what you need to know from one issue. You wouldn't need to read them year after year, vainly hoping for a beauty miracle. Therefore, you would have less incentive to continue reading them, because you would already know what you should know about beauty. However, that would erode their profits, so what do they do? Keep stringing you along with promises of “must-have” info, without telling you what really works.

Therefore, for most women, beauty is distressingly short-lived. It usually lasts long enough to land a husband, but not long enough to keep him from lusting after his secretary 20 years later. If you think that beauty longevity of a decade or two is depressing, what about beauty that's gone in a flash?

I'd come to the ER about 45 minutes early because I would sometimes do that to help catch up before my shift was scheduled to begin. When I walked into the Trauma Room looking for a particular type of suture, one of the nurses greeted me by name. Then I heard another female voice, but this one came from the patient lying on the trauma room gurney. “Dr. Pezzi, are you there?”

I couldn't see who it was because she was surrounded by the ER doc working the afternoon shift, other members of the trauma team, and a couple of ER nurses. When I approached, two of the residents moved away, as they sometimes do in deference to an attending when they're not doing anything that moment.

Even for a veteran ER doc, the shock of seeing her was gruesome. The left half of her face was mutilated, and her left eyeball dangled out from what remained of her eye socket. The other side of her face was covered by numerous lacerations and was so swollen that her right eye could not be seen. Caked, dried blood was everywhere, and part of her skull was visible where her forehead used to be. I wondered, could she see me through her left eye? It wasn't moving. And who was she? I didn't recognize her.

“It's Allison Adams*,” one of the nurses helpfully pointed out. “MVA.”

I stared at her face, searching for some vestige of familiarity. The ever-present tan was still there, but nothing else remained the same. Her lips were partially avulsed, revealing multiple missing and fractured teeth. Lips that were once so alluring to men were now ripped apart, perhaps lying in her car or on the highway.

“Allison?” I replied questioningly. I couldn't believe it was her.

The nurse frowned and shook her head affirmatively. Allison said, “Yes, it's me. Am I going to be all right? Will I still be pretty?”

I wondered, Oh shit, what could I say? She had no life-threatening injuries from what I saw, but her beauty? Her days of being a babe were over. Sure, plastic surgeons could reconstruct her face, but I knew they could not transform this facial hamburger into the work of art that men once found so irresistible.

Medical students learn early on that patients can be devastated when a physician hesitates before responding to such a question. “Oh God, here it comes. Bad news!” they reflexively assume.

Knowing this, I did my best not to pause before responding. “You're going to live, Allison, and we'll have our plastic surgeon take care of your facial injuries.”

“Can he make me as pretty as I was before?” she asked pleadingly, obviously seeking reassurance.

Searching for a way to respond truthfully without adding to her anxiety, I said, “You would be amazed by what they can do.”

I thought of Humpty Dumpty:

And I was certain that plastic surgeons could not put Allison together again so that her beauty was restored. Strangely, I felt sad. The old Allison was difficult to like, but beneath that arrogant “I'm better than you and everyone else because I am gorgeous” exterior was just another person with the same hopes and dreams as the rest of us. Her beauty had once cloaked that element of her humanity, but now, with part of her face torn off, it was visible.

“I'm scared,” she said. “Hold my hand.”

I looked down, and saw that her hand was streaked with blood, so I pulled a glove from my pocket and put it on before complying with her request. From the way she intermittently squeezed my hand, I thought that she was seeking more reassurance, so I squeezed back. I wish I could have done more, but I had my own patients to attend to. She would obviously be admitted, so I excused myself and left.

Allison returned to the ER almost a year later a few minutes before my shift was due to end that morning. I removed her chart from the “To Be Seen” bin and was scanning it when Bob, the ER doc coming on to relieve me, said, “I'll take care of that, Pez. Go home and get some sleep.”

Ordinarily, I would have welcomed such a gracious offer, but I wasn't about to pass up this opportunity. I wanted to see what the plastic surgeon and other specialists were able to accomplish.

The results were interesting. The parts of her face that were relatively unscathed by the accident were still recognizably the old Allison. The rest was about what I expected: a patchwork of scars, grafts, shallow gouges, and distorted symmetry. The overall appearance was . . . well, let me put it this way. Instead of men asking for her phone number, they were probably now asking, “What happened to you?” It was that obvious.

However, what struck me most wasn't the aftermath of her reconstructive surgery, but her facial expression and demeanor. Gone was the arrogant old Allison, who seemed to exude Christina's “that makes me better than you” attitude. In its place was a young woman who now preferred to stare at her lap than to look me in the eye, as she so boldly used to do. Her once-smug voice was now diffident and quavering. I felt sorry for her.

Allison presented to the ER this time with what seemed to be a simple bladder infection, but I asked her all the routine questions pertinent to that possibility: Abdominal pain? Back or flank pain? Fever or chills? Nausea or vomiting? Vaginal discharge? Any possibility of pregnancy?

“Dr. Pezzi,” she said while shifting her gaze from her lap to me, “I haven't had sex since before my accident. Would you or any man want to make love to someone who looks like me?”

A rhetorical question, no doubt, and one that was best left unanswered. She continued, “I don't even have a boyfriend anymore.”

Her gaze shifted to her lap once again, and I wondered what I should say, struggling to think of something before the pause before replying sent a message of its own. “Is your plastic surgeon planning to do more surgery?”

“He wants to revise some of my scars, and do more work, but . . . .” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she began sobbing. “But I know that I'll never look the same as I once did.”

The crying intensified and her face contorted in misery as she looked at me. “My life will never be the same again, will it?”

I wanted to mitigate her agony, so I gave her a hug and told her about some research being done that might produce better results than she expected. Her crying tapered off and she said, “Thank you.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For the hug, and for holding my hand after the accident.” I'd almost forgotten about that, but she had not. “I was so scared, and I couldn't see anything.” I remembered her left eye, which was now replaced by a prosthesis (an ocular prosthesis is usually called a glass eye). “I know that I used to be a real bitch, so you didn't have to be nice to me.”

Allison did not realize that part of being an ER doctor is trying to be nice to every patient who comes in. We're supposed to leave the judging to others. That's not always possible, since we're human, too, and never as perfect as we'd like to be. But we try.

I wasn't paid overtime at this hospital, so I was now working for free. I didn't mind it, though, because I would rather be doing what I was doing than my usual morning ritual, which was to eat breakfast and try to fall asleep. Allison gave me an interesting glimpse into one aspect of the human psyche. Beautiful women may act lordly, like stuck-up snobs, but I think most of them will eventually realize that their beauty can't do anything for others except to provide momentary visual pleasure. In contrast, other attributes can and do provide tangible rewards to others. A smart doctor can save your life. An insightful therapist can save your marriage, or give you a fresh perspective of life that enhances your appreciation of it. A wonderfully caring friend can lift your spirits. I could go on and on listing how various attributes of people benefit the ones they associate with. Inexplicably, however, our culture gives short shrift to those attributes while endlessly lauding the one—beauty—that does so little for others. Odd, isn't it?

Return to the story list

The beautiful woman syndrome will affect most men who pursue gorgeous women. However, most men won't recognize the symptoms of the beautiful woman syndrome, nor will they know how to effectively deal with it. Do you? Find out on: www.bwsyndrome.com