Brains over Beauty

I was listening to a radio programme debating the idea of 'brains over beauty' in terms of human attraction the other day; of course all the contributors were emphasising that they, personally, were far more attracted to brains than beauty and couldn't see any future in living with a mindless bimbo (this was the BBC, after all -- but who would admit in public to valuing surface appearance over substance?) And I was busy nodding along and thinking complacently to myself that of course I'd always been attracted to intelligence and found conventionally smooth and characterless faces very unappealing... when it dawned on me that if I'm honest, I do actually find ugly faces very distasteful to look at.

I'm not thinking about 'ordinary' non-beautiful faces: I'm remembering actual deformity, which I morbidly shrink away from. (And my mental definition of deformity is seemingly as shallow as 'people with warts on their faces', never mind some of the genuinely disabled people I see.) So I'm apparently not nearly as objective as I think I am :-(