Mirror, mirror

Body dysmorphia, the unfortunate medical condition whereby a perfectly pleasant/slender person believes themselves to be ugly/fat, is a strange and sad thing. I’d always presumed it to be (like anorexia and bulimia) a primarily female problem, so much more importance being placed on the appearance of women than men. Respectable medical surveys indicate otherwise.

Nevertheless, women tend to see themselves as less attractive than they are. A sizeable number of men, on the other hand, suffer from the opposite delusion. I call them Magic Mirror men, because they seem to possess an inner looking-glass which tells them that they are, indeed, the fairest of them all.

Why else do ugly men not feel ridiculous passing judgment on the attractiveness, or otherwise, of women? He may be a politician or a businessman, or one of those half-witted fat American men who insist on wearing T-shirts bearing the legend NO FAT CHICKS. But he will have no doubt that all women between the ages of 16 and 61 are waiting in an agony of exquisite anticipation to find out if he thinks them attractive.

Most popular

Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky counters Trump’s surrender deal

This being the case, he acts the cad when assessing the physical appeal of women he encounters. The very presentable Linda McDougall (wife of Labour MP Austin Mitchell) claimed that the barely human-looking John Prescott pushed her against a wall and put his hand up her skirt in 1978, when such behaviour ‘was very common for men at that time…I just rebuffed him, he shrugged and winked and we all carried on.’ The lardy lord brought it up in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, after declining to attend Mitchell’s retirement party: ‘Have you seen his wife? Built like a bloody barn door. If I threw her against the wall, the fucking house would fall down!’ This is rich from someone who had his lavatory seat repaired twice in two years at taxpayers’ expense.