The Last Tan Line: A Whiter Shade of Male

Beauty is the cruelest of task masters.

When it comes to the Pretty Principle, enough is never enough. Between all the body-sculpting, aerobicizing, waxing, hair coloring, moisturizing, and airbrushing, the building of the perfect beast is beginning to wear us down. There’s a quagmire of products that promise to augment your lips, thicken your eyelashes, or brighten your smile, all of which are supposed to unlock some hidden potential you lack in influencing people.

Now, never once has a smile — essentially an involuntary facial reflex we’ve ascribed a social magic to and that any sociopath can flash at will — won me over, nor have I ever noticed another person’s teeth when I meet them. Men will buy penis enhancement pills and women have tried creams that purport to enlarge their breasts, but if I applied that logic beyond genitalia and offered you a product that could, say, increase the length of your arms or legs, would you buy it?

It’s the beauty mandate called tanning — more than even steroids — that I loathe the most. As a lifelong paleface, I’ve been made privy — always without asking — to casual urgings that I should get some sun to make myself more appealing, the implication being that fairness makes you some sort of of photosensitive albino who dwells in darkness with a cadre of bats and mushrooms as your sole companions.

One barely-casual acquaintance (a cunt) I encountered in a gym (wherein everyone always looked as if they’d just traipsed in off the Aegean seashore year-round) advised me that I looked positively anemic and waif-like. All the while I simply took in the extremity of his sun worship and marveled how, at maybe thirty-six, the pores on his arms were craterous, his skin had the tone more so of adobe than sunkissed, and he was developing bastard lines that ran from his eyes down to his jawline.

How weirdly paradoxical the obsession with epidermal beauty is; it would be the nadir of tactlessness to suggest that a non-caucasian should lighten his skin — those who would or even do are viewed as the ultimate of sell-outs — yet we who are naturally fair are pressured to alter our pigment as if it were nothing.

All of us can certainly relate to encountering people who’ve opted for the Dermoblast 4000 treatment (call it the John “Recession Be Damned! I Say Bronze!” Boehner effect), ample evidence that the line between glamor and farce is razor-thin. How many generic urban tans can you pass by in the span of a single block?

Three things for the edification of the UV-inclined courtesy from those of us who are translucent: first off, our skin is more sensitive than yours, meaning we have to be more cautious around certain soaps, detergents and antiperspirants; next, Scandinavian or Northern European ancestry allots you less tolerance for heat; finally, tanning may have evolved into a cosmetic principle, but all the finesse doesn’t erase the reality that it is and always will be a biologically imperative response to the potentially deadliness of the sun’s intensity in which our skin (actually an externalized organ) toughens itself to fend off damage.

You can understand how the notion of cooking myself Luau pig-style in what amounts to a UV-blasting coffin might not send me in the same way it does you.

Yes, I have the Viking blood in my veins. I’m not ashamed. Along with the extant urge to rape, pillage, and slay the stray ice vurm, it’s been very kind to me: I’m 6’2, ice-eyed, I was born with klieg-light blond locks, I have full lips, broad features, legs that go from here to ya-ya, strong bones, and smooth skin.

Sure, there are debits. The last place I want to visit for a vacation would be a tropical setting with beaches and pools. My scene veers more toward the windblown streets of Oslo or Copenhagen. In the tough urban summer months spent on steaming asphalt, I sport mainly tanks, not to flaunt my physique, but because anything heavier makes me feel like I’m wearing a fucking suit of armor. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve felt cold in my life.

I keep my heat turned down low in the winter, and sleep with a fan next to my bed even in January, a benign quirk that caused one bemused love interest to compare me to a Newfoundland that could happily lie in a snowdrift than next to a roaring fire. The Newfoundland dog breed has historically been used for cold water rescues and fishing. They’re very comfortable in extreme cold. When I was little, my neighbors had one and the sexy bitch would lie in the snow and sleep.

Admittedly, my taste runs toward the darker and swarthier Mediterranean type, but it’s more the attraction to physical difference than the desire to become what catches my eye that accounts for that. I could stand in a chamber and be bukkaked by a dye-spraying gun or baste myself in fake tanner to get that fab naugahyde sheen, but it would also require plenty of hair color, dark contacts, and follicular facial hair transplants to even remotely make me resemble some stubbly, olive-skinned Hungarian from a Csaba Borbely flick.

It’s just way too much upkeep, and being an irksome rationalist when it comes to everything — from politics and religion, to career and relationships — I know that the beauty industry is centralized around fighting everything natural about yourself in order to futilely transform yourself into something you can never reasonably be. Just as I’m too lean-muscled and long-limbed to ever look like a Chelsea Guy without the aid of anabolics, I will never be able to conform to the cliché “Tall, Dark, and Handsome” aesthetic. Tall, Fair, and Pretty is more my speed.

All fads reach their saturation points, and while the well-publicized health risks aren’t likely to push the trend over the line, a new standard of sex symbol hood may encourage the Fellowship of The Sun to dial it the fuck down, or at least keep it to themselves.

Credit non-stop summer obsession True Blood and its two resident vamp bitch magnets Stephen Moyer(opening photo) and Alexander Skarsgard(above) with their gorgeous corpse pallors for turning the hackneyed notion that bronze-fleshed equals hot-blooded on its head.

For those of us who prefer to move by moonlight, you can color us grateful.