Don’t Love Me Because I’m Beautiful

Heather Wilhelm:  Many moons ago, while having a drink at the Oak Bar in New York’s Plaza Hotel, I ran across an old college acquaintance with the tremendous nickname of “Mr. Chuckles.”

I was about 22 at the time, and lived in a decrepit Manhattan “apartment,” which was actually a tiny, halfhearted pile of bricks, futon covers, and hollow cardboard-weight doors slowly miming a poor, sad imitation of a real, non-joke apartment.

If memory serves, the approximate square footage hovered around my all-time low bowling score, and I had also recently had a giant cockroach fly out of a sweater as I was putting it on in my gnome-sized closet, so I have no idea why I was wasting money at the Oak Bar in New York’s Plaza Hotel.

Now that I think about it, maybe I was scared to go back home. The cockroach, after all, was still there.

“You know,” Mr. Chuckles told me, apropos of nothing, perhaps on his third or fourth drink—he looked like he had been there for a while—“I really like dating girls with low self-esteem. They’ll never break up with you, no matter what.” He then went on to detail all the different neuroses (eating disorders, shoplifting habits, obsessive roller blading, acting as a Hamptons drug mule) that gave away low female self-esteem. Meanwhile, I sat agog, chugged my cocktail, and silently plotted my escape.

If this had happened in 2015, of course, Mr. Chuckles could have been hogtied, dragged out of the bar, tossed in the fountain, and publicly shamed for his transgressions—or at least put through a thorough Twitter scolding. But according to the latest batch of grievance culture “think pieces” set adrift on Internet way, he was free, at least, of one problematic offense: He did not comment upon anyone being unusually pretty.

Oh, the Agony of Gorgeousness