I mentioned the other day that I was reading a collection of essays called Revealing Male Bodies and I just wanted to mention a not-so-obvious consequence of our general discomfort with our appearances.

The first essay, “Does Size Matter” by Susan Bordo of the University of Kentucky, nicely articulates the fairly obvious point that men tend to have the same irrational insecurity about penis size that women tend to express about their shape. (She details, for instance, how many or most of the men who get penis-enlargement surgery already have average to large penises but still feel inadequate, and she includes an anecdote that F. Scott Fitzgerald was so worried about his size that finally Ernest Hemingway pulled him into a bathroom, took a look, and pronounced him fine.)

What’s interesting, though, is she also mentions that contrary to what we all expect, men who really are larger than average tend to feel awkward or embarrassed rather than superior about their “advantage.” I’ve noticed the same thing in a number of women who fit one of the two stereotypical models of perfection (either totally busty and “stacked” the way men’s magazines typically rate perfection or totally thin and “racked” the way women’s magazines do.)

So what’s the deal anyway? Those who recognize that they meet our exacting standards of beauty are often self-conscious about it, and meanwhile the rest of us who don’t (including the ones who do but don’t recognize it) are … self-conscious about it.

According to Hanna Arendt, western civilization was really shaken up when Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter with his telescope because for the previous 2000 years or so our tradition held that our natural senses were all that was necessary to know the world. As Descartes put it, would a benevolent creator would give us a passionate drive to know the truth but not give us the senses to perceive it. His effort to derive a way to know something was true even if our senses were clouded by a malevolent entity is where we get “I think therefore I am.”

The biologist JBS Haldane once observed that the creator must have had “an inordinate fondness of beetles” (since roughly a quarter of known species in the world are beetles.) Mark Twain claimed the fondness must have been for biting flies. Were Douglas Adams alive today he might add that the creator also must have had an inordinate fondness for fashion and lad magazine advertisers, image consultants, and plastic surgeons because our contradictory and seemingly irreducible self-image problems make us a perfect prey species for them.