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A Random Act of Thinking: The Perfect Lie

In ancient Egypt many believed that, after death, the soul would eventually return to the body and inhabit it again. The purpose of mummification, then, was to preserve the body for that time when it would be reanimated. Being pragmatic, the Egyptians also created "Ca Statues," entombing them with the individual so that if the body did decay, there would still be somewhere for the soul to return. The statues were supposed to be made in the likeness of the deceased, but usually represented an idealized version of them. In the case of royalty, unblemished statues depicting the ruler and family around the age of 30 were common. Their bodies were the perfect shape; the Ca statues would always remember them as youthful.

The Greeks also created statues - Korus and Kore - as depictions of the male and female forms. Korus statues depicting male youth were the most common and idealized. These were typically naked and possessed of unnaturally smooth musculatures, whereas the Kore were always covered because, according to the standards of that time, the female body wasn't beautiful. Yet, though draped in bag-like robes, the Kore still projected an air of perfection. Greek art eventually progressed past that point, and their statues became more lifelike, but the early Korus and Kore left their marks on history.

Though the statues themselves have been replaced by models in glossy magazines, their legacy lives on in our time. Barbie is the modern Kore, with the addition of moving limbs and the occasional pull string. We still idealize our celebrities, creating images that are too good to be true. And although few people can live up to these standards, whole industries are devoted to helping them try - for a price.

None are more caged by the cult of image than the disabled. The goal of a disabled person is "supposed" to be the average look - the highest compliment being "you don't look disabled at all" - while average people are expected to strive for a look beyond the norm. So, most people want to look like something they're not, proving that math equations aren't the only things we inherited from the Greeks. The wheelchair, the cane, the leg braces, the hearing aides - these are things we acquired to make our lives easier. The downside is that they forever mark us. We'll probably never be models in magazines or a mould for the latest Barbie. No one is supposed to idealize our looks or revere our images. 

Yet, the disabled don't have a corner on the imperfection market; most people who lived through the 60s weren't as thin as Twiggy, most teenagers don't have the clear face of the Noxema girl, and the last time anyone could find a room full of beautiful women with 13 inch waists, Catherine Dei Medici was still alive. Women in the Victorian era, still draped in heavy sacks and petticoats to hide their scandalous forms, were hard-pressed to keep their fashionable pallor - most prized when they had high, round foreheads. And the foot binding custom, practiced for centuries in China and in other parts of Asia, left millions of women (and a few men) with serious disabilities - woman were most beautiful, after all, when they tottered rather than strode.

Even those who appear "perfect" usually aren't. Some models are confined to a certain weight in their contracts, and so they battle natural hunger to keep their ribs safely visible. When the beautiful people show up for a photo shoot and anything untoward appears on the negative, it's usually air-brushed out before the print hits the gloss. 

Flawless people sometimes find themselves trapped by an image that never actually existed. Some have expressed their distaste for how the public has created a concept of them that differs so drastically from the reality of their lives. Doctors and lawyers have posed in Playboy, only to find that, on joining the ranks of the beautiful people, they became little more than fare for the meat market. They are proof that the physically perfect aren't born, but made. We mould them, shape them, deify them, and then try desperately to live up to their examples. 

Maybe perfect people are less common than we think, or perhaps they don't exist at all but are myth like giants or heroes of Greek lore.

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