Flawed women are hot

Think how many times you’ve seen the ‘Mona Lisa’. You’ve seen her in movies, in books, in cartoons; you’ve seen her as icon of female beauty, as an emblem of feminine mystique, as a commentary on the male gaze, or an amusing face on which to paint a moustache. But in all that time I bet 94 per cent of you have never noticed: she hasn’t got any eyebrows.

It is, however, true – go look again. La Gioconda is eyebrowless. Why? A few ‘Mona Lisa’ truthers claim the brows have gone awol, but the consensus is they were never there. She shaved them off, because that was the quirky beauty standard of the day. Which just goes to show that there is no ‘perfect’ universal beauty, that apparent flaws are often prized, and that White Lotus season three’s standout British star, Aimee Lou Wood, should chill out when Americans mock her goofy teeth. They’re envious of her magnificent so-called ‘imperfection’.

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I know this personally: because I once had a girlfriend with goofy teeth just like Aimee Lou Wood, but maybe goofier. My girl (let’s call her Davina) had two front teeth that skewed apart like drunken gateposts. She also had a face full of freckles like she’d been caught in a rust storm, and she often lamented her notable lack of stature – she was 5ft 0in.

And of course I adored all of it: the freckles made her look deceptively innocent; the teeth came with a sad, touching story – which made her her; and the fact she was so short she could almost run under a weasel meant I could playfully shift her around a bedroom with gratifying ease. It was some of the best sex and greatest fun of my life. Indeed I miss her to this day, and when I am lamenting her absence, I specifically remember the teeth, the freckles and her sensual petite-ness with a wistful sigh.

Nor am I alone. Many men adore imperfections. We don’t just tolerate them, we love them, obsess over them, sometimes fetishise them, and we definitely seek them out. We fondly recall that girl with the lazy eye that wandered off like a child in a museum. We yearn for the lover with the scar on her chin that made her self-conscious in the sexiest way. Because that made you want to protect her. Despite the orthodoxies of orthodontics, and Hollywood’s beauty rules, we desire the fat and the thin, the tall and the short, the wonky and the shambolic, and we love them despite the algorithms saying no.

That is not to say ‘perfectly beautiful women’ are not desirable. Of course they are, often wonderfully so. But, sometimes, they can also be forgettable, robotic, inauthentic, and therefore oddly unsatisfying. It is the same way perfect voices in modern pop music – fixed by computers and autotune – all sound the same. They blur, one into another, until you hunger, greedily, for something different: a girl with a rasp like a young Mariella Frostrup, or the throaty scorching blues of Amy Winehouse. Those voices were real, imperfect, unique and compelling. That’s why they were sexy.

What’s more, the list of imperfections desired by men, throughout history, goes much further than cross eyes or an overlong nose or sensually gappy teeth (les dents du bonheur, to the French, who wisely appreciate female flaws). Over time men have desired quite remarkable things in their womenfolk. Things we’d regard as insanely imperfect.

We’ve heard of the non-eyebrows of Renaissance Florence, but what about the much-admired black teeth of pre-modern Japan? Yes, black teeth. From the 10th century to the 19th century, ohaguro (tooth blackening) was ubiquitous among Japanese aristocracy. The women achieved this image using a solution of iron filings, tea and vinegar, thus giving a deep lacquer-black hue. Chinese and other visitors found the teeth repulsive, but the Japanese were not for the turning. For upper-crust Japanese men and women, up to the cusp of the 20th century, white teeth were seen as gauche, animalistic and unrefined, and ink-black smiles were the epitome of loveliness.

As for the Chinese, they were in no position to criticise. For about a thousand years they practised footbinding (which was downright cruel as well as peculiar). Elsewhere in Asia, women have been revered for absurdly long necks (formed with rings by the Kayan people), in Africa women have been adored if they enlarge their lips with six-inch wide clay plates (the Mursi of Ethiopia), and in Europe women have been advised to constrict their waists until they are weirdly thin, using whalebones (the Victorian English).

Coming back to the here and now, there is one more reason that men love imperfections: because love itself is imperfect. It limps. It stammers. It forgets birthdays and gets mustard on the ceiling (true story, Davina again). It gets things wrong, then wronger, then somehow right again at three in the morning with a sloppy kiss and a crooked smile. And it wouldn’t exist for long if we didn’t wisely know to celebrate the messiness.

When a man really loves a woman – deeply, enduringly – it’s almost never because she matches some airbrushed archetype or comes pre-filtered on Insta. It’s because of the way she swears in Welsh at her laptop. It’s the weird little snort in her laugh. It’s the mole she hates but he thinks is exquisite (beauticians of old knew this – which is why they added fake beauty spots to flawless faces). It’s the burn she got when she was 17, and the way her left ear sticks out way too far. It’s because she is herself.

So yes, the ‘Mona Lisa’ has no eyebrows. And yes, Aimee Lou Wood has teeth like a cartoon capybara. Yet, Aimee Lou Wood is by far the sexiest thing in all of White Lotus, and once upon a time, I loved a girl just like her. With great big gatepost teeth, a rust storm of freckles, and the ability to run under a weasel. And, my God, I’d do it all again.