The Congressional Medal of Ugly

I’m sitting here watching the Pete Hegseth confirmation hearings, and I can’t help but notice that Pete Hegseth is a pretty attractive dude. And I’m a guy. Six-two, chiseled good looks, looks like he does triathlons and jiu-jitsu at the same time, suit fits, knows how to tie a tie. Not hard to picture him in a porno. He’d be humping two pillows, a sock, an ass, an armpit, an Airedale, and look good doing it. Just a living, breathing, walking molecule of testosterone, so cartoonishly masculine that you can hardly imagine a caricature like this attaining the highest level of government, instead of ending up getting spit out the bottom of professional wrestling. But so it goes in Trump’s world, he likes people on TV, and people on TV tend not to be ugly. His own daughter is a dime, and when she was a teenager, used to grace the Trump casino billboards coming out of the Holland tunnel in New Jersey. I should point out that nobody is beating down my door, asking me to go on TV. And I really don’t give a fuck.

I am not Pete Hegseth. I am six feet, 240, with uncooperative gray hair, an eighteen-wheeler of a nose, a droopy eyelid, and jowly cheeks. My pants fall down because I have a flat ass. I don’t look like a Fox News personality, I look like…a writer. Writers are ugly. I am ugly. I compensate for it by whitening my teeth and buying nice clothes, but I am not winning any beauty pageants. My wife is a million times better-looking than me, and I don’t take it for granted. How she ended up with an ogre like me is a mystery waiting to be solved.

There are significant benefits to being attractive. And downsides, too. If you are really good looking—and this is even truer for women than it is for men—people tend not to take you seriously. They think that you can’t be smart and pretty. As it turns out, all the good genes tend to cluster in a small number of people, so the people who are smart and also athletic and also artistic, are also often…pretty. Smart, talented people tend to be good-looking. The smart, talented people who are not good-looking end up on Jeopardy. But even there, the three all-time Jeopardy money winners: Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and James Holzhauer, are all pretty good-looking guys. So the thesis survives another day.

Lucky for me, I don’t have that problem. Being taken seriously. If you are smart and ugly, you are taken seriously. Slavoj Zizek, for starters. I’ll throw in Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Stephen Jay Gould. Malcolm Gladwell. If you are going to be an intellectual, better that you are ugly. And I’m not including pop intellectuals like Tim Ferriss. Also true in the financial world—the uglier the better. Nouriel Roubini looks like a hairfoot hobbit on his way back from second breakfast, and cleaned up during the ugly times of the financial crisis. If I looked like Pete Hegseth, I’d have a hard time being taken seriously in my line of work. They have a word for this, too: an empty suit.

Not to rip on the TV people too much, because they are actually pretty smart. If you are a CNBC host, you have to have a pretty good command of a range of issues, stuff that I don’t think about in the course of a day, from trade policy to lawmaking to corporate earnings to derivatives and everything in between. You also need to get veneers. I have actually thought about getting veneers on my teeth, and—this is the thought process I went through—the veneers would be so out of place on my ugly face that it would be jarring for people. It wouldn’t be an improvement; it would turn me into a freak. The most obvious improvement I could make to my comeliness would be to stop eating Hot Pockets and get on the treadmill once in a while, but here I am in front of the computer, writing this nonsense.

The nice thing that people say about ugly people is that they’re “not traditionally good looking.” I am fond of saying this. And the reason I am fond of saying this is because I believe while there are traditional standards of beauty, just about everyone is beautiful in one way or another. I will say something nice about myself. I have nice eyes. They’re hazel, which is a bit striking with my dark complexion. And even though my hair is gray, I have all of it. I don’t envy the guys that go bald and then have to grow a beard so they don’t look like a baby. But yes, if you look hard enough, you can find something attractive about every single person.

You can compensate for being ugly by having a “good personality.” Well, I lose in that department, too. It is a real effort for me to talk. Once a month, I might get on a talking jag. I prefer to be alone with my thoughts, and let other people talk—another characteristic of writers. I will write more words in this essay than I will speak over the course of an entire week. So the INTJ guy with uncooperative gray hair, an eighteen-wheeler of a nose, a droopy eyelid, and jowly cheeks, wearing all black, sitting in the corner, scowling, is not going to get a lot of attention from the opposite sex. It wasn’t always this way. At age 16, I had a mop of Michael Hutchence hair, curled and sun-bleached, a cheerleading cannibal, a happy warrior bounding into school with a backpack that sunny August day in the beginning of the semester, ready for another year of serial monogamy. I had personality. I would talk to anyone! The biggest fear for most men is going up and talking to another woman. I talked to everyone, figuring that the Law of Large Numbers would take hold after a while and I’d get at least one date. Well, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. If you’re a cucumber and you turn into a pickle, you can’t go back to being a cucumber.

All of this may make me sound very insecure. Au contraire. I like who I am—I like sitting in the corner, wearing all black, thinking about shit. Usually, I am thinking about some book I am writing. When you’re writing, you’re writing even when you’re not writing. You don’t get to take a break. And I like being an observer of people. Their foibles, their strengths, their weaknesses, their shortcomings. Hang around me long enough, and you’re going to end up in one of my books. The irony here is that people generally think I’m self-absorbed, when I’m actually busy watching other people. You can’t be a writer and not be a great observer of human behavior. And you can’t be a writer without a huge imagination. So when I am sitting in the corner, sulking, I am letting my mind run free, and going all sorts of places in my head that I couldn’t go in real life. You don’t have to be good-looking to do that.

But yeah, I should probably give up putting my author photo on the books that I publish. I think it is scaring people off. HOW MANY TIMES has someone told me that I have a face for radio? It wasn’t funny the first time, and it wasn’t funny the billionth time. I had a radio show for two years, nationally syndicated. I still go on the radio now. All I have to do is say “radio,” and out comes the joke. I have a face for radio. Thanks. I have never heard that before. You are literally the first person to think of it. Now get the fuck out of my face before I throw you out of a fucking helicopter. We’re all allowed to have pet peeves, and this is mine. In all seriousness, I love radio. I like just being able to talk about not have to think about what I look like talking. TV is another whole layer of complexity—you’re constantly thinking about how you present, with your facial expressions, your hand gestures, everything. I don’t enjoy TV—I do enjoy radio.

Alas, 90% of us are ugly. The key is to use our ugliness to great advantage. You’re never going to be on a reality show about plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills. But you could become one of the great thinkers in human history. I know which I will choose, every time.