Human book covers

May 23-This is a republication of this essay, now available to all readers and commenters, not just paid subscribers.

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“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Most people reading that will quickly pass over it, unconsciously slotting it into the mental category “stuff all decent people know.” It lives in the “good, old-fashioned advice” part of our brains.

It’s a lie. Always has been. The phrase is used to scold people for making assumptions or judgments about other people based on how they look. The advice is repeated so often, with a tone of “this is beyond question; only an insane person would differ,” that it may be hard for some readers to entertain a challenge to it. The advice is practically synonymous emotionally with everything else your mother or grandmother told you at her knee that you think of fondly.

It’s still a lie, even though your mom and grandma weren’t consciously lying to you.

The way people groom themselves, the hairstyles, makeup, clothes, adornments, and modifications they choose are good indicators of character and disposition broadly. They won’t tell you fine details, and they won’t account for the outliers. For example, I know some women who look on the outside like leftist chicks—they have odd hair color or a lot of piercings, for example—but who are conservative libertarian constitutionalists. I know there are outliers; consider this your “not all” allotment for the duration of this piece.

Books cannot be accurately judged by their covers because the cover conveys nearly zero information about the form and substance of the book. Book covers are arbitrarily chosen for reasons other than communicating the style and content of the manuscript.

Humans are not books. And if we are to think of them as books, then we should note that they are conscious books who design their own covers. Those design choices are not arbitrary. They communicate intent, and to some degree, likely character.

You’re obviously more likely to get beat up by a group of 20-year-old young men with ass-sagging pants than you are by the 50-year-old in khakis. Everyone knows this. It’s how Ted Bundy charmed his way to so many victims, and even worked at a crisis hotline. He was conventionally good-looking, dressed like a respectable suburban man, and drove a responsible VW beetle. It wouldn’t have worked if we as a society didn’t already correctly associate that kind of grooming with “probably not a serial killer.” The exception proves the rule.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” has transformed in recent years into an even more imperative command: “Never judge a book by its cover.” This tracks with the other commercial-dialogue shibboleths now enforced: “no boundaries,” “nothing is more important than you,” “be kind.” It’s part of the New Normal, the feminized ethos that has been slowly taking over our culture until it happened suddenly all at once.

It’s worth noting that admonitions that warn you away from making judgments are convenient for people who don’t want to be judged. That may be their preference, what has that to do with your interests? Are you truly committing a moral wrong by exercising your faculties, weighting risks, and making a discriminating choice, even if it’s based on less than complete or perfect data?

Or, is it that you exercising your faculties is highly inconvenient to the type of people who do wrong but want to be seen to do right?

This is, clearly, related to the nearly universal public pronouncement of the article of faith, “stereotypes are not true.” Most of the time, it’s not articulated that way. People grunt emotions at you if you confess to using stereotypes as part of your judgment process. It’s just assumed, a priori, to be “bad.”

Inconveniently, stereotypes are much more true than they are not. We all know this, actually. Very few, including very few on the left, really believe what they say. They live in the same world that everyone else does, they just won’t be honest.

Real-world examples

This is pretty easy to see in the case of modern fashion glasses, and when considering the history of tattoos and their recent rise in mainstream popularity.

Problem glasses. Borderline glasses. Cluster B glasses.

You all know the ones I mean.

People want to know how to quantify it. What, exactly, makes them "problem" glasses?

It can't be exhaustively quantified; there's too much variation. But there is a quality they all have that make them this kind of glasses.

If you notice them more than you'd notice glasses usually, they're probably those. If they grab your attention and focus it on the glasses, that’s telling you something about the character and intent of the person. It might be excess vanity, it might a desire to intimidate, it might be to signal allegiance with a social set, merely a too-deep commitment to fashion, a mixture of those, or something else. But you are picking up something, probably, that indicates the person is more likely than average to be troublesome.

It's not about the exact thickness of the frames, or color, or any of that. It's about whether they grab your eyes. If they do, the person chose them for that reason. They made a choice to buy attention-seeking glasses. That's what you're picking up on. The choice indicates something about personality.

This was demonstrated perfectly by the recent appearance of feminist Deborah Frances-White on Triggernometry. You need only watch about 20 to 30 seconds of any portion of this dread conversation to know what you need to know about her psychology.

Tattoos are similar. As a reminder, if you have tattoos, I’m not saying “that means you have a personality disorder.” I realize there are exceptions. I am generalizing, not proclaiming that all people fit into these categories. But I am saying that many, and often most, do.

Here's the theory behind making judgments about likely character/personality by the ways people choose to groom themselves. Nothing I'm saying is new, or weird, or bigoted. Everyone, including you, always knew that these judgments are often sound. It's just that in the past couple of decades there's been a project to tell you not to believe your eyes, and not to notice patterns.

Grooming choices are often very good predictors of character, at least on a broad level. Yes, I mean that you can often make good guesses about whether someone is safe or predatory, stable or likely to melt down, and similar, from how they dress and adorn themselves.

Everyone knows this. We all know that gang members and others like that have a distinct look. This isn't new to you, we’ve just been taught that it's "mean" and "not true."

It is not mean, and it is true.

I use what I call the Burger King Scenario to describe the way modern adults react to people noticing completely normal, reasonable things that everyone knows correlate, but that everyone has to pretend to be offended by. You’re standing in line at Burger King. Ahead of you is a an off-duty Burger King employee. You ask him if he’s tried the new sandwich and what the thinks about it.

He goes full simian on you. “What the hell? Why would you ASSUME I work here!!?”

You: “You’re wearing a Burger King uniform and you just came out from behind the counter.”

Him: “SO BIGOTED. Oh. My. God. I CANNOT EVEN” etc. and so on.

Tattoos are a great example for two reasons:

1. They have changed what they signal over the years to some degree

2. They still signal some of the traditional things they've always signaled, just not as strongly

Until about 20 years ago, any tattoos were frowned upon by polite society. They were considered vulgar, low-class, and an indicator of potential problem behavior. This was correct, because tattoos correlated strongly with problem behavior, almost exclusively in men. Women with visible tattoos were rare and not so long ago.

Observing reality such as this is not “mean.” Psych manuals drawn from working with prisoners, and then from further studies, documented the correlation between having tattoos and the chance of having an unstable or sociopathic personality. What I’ve linked is just one paper; there’s a lot more. At one point, just going from memory without checking, shrinks in the 40s noticed a correlation between tattoos and psychopathy in men.

This should surprise no one. Until recently, choosing to get a tattoo was to deliberately and with intent mark yourself as a social deviant. It was a conscious choice to tell onlookers that you were associated proudly with brawlers, gang members, prison guys, etc. If you were a woman, it nearly always meant you were a prostitute.

Yes, there really was (and still is, though changed) a correlation between having that type of personality, and having tattoos. Today, I think it takes many more of them to indicate what fewer tattoos used to indicate. But then tattoos became significantly mainstreamed, and they went co-ed. This happened as part of or alongside with the astonishingly rapid social acceptance of obscene behavior by women in public.

So far, so good.

But tattoos are correlated in our era with borderline and histrionic personality traits in women particularly. All other things being equal, a woman covered in aggressively in-your-face tattoos that cannot be covered is much more likely to have a Cluster B disposition than a non-tattooed woman. The same is usually true for men; it often indicates narcissistic and borderline traits. But the numerical rise in women covered in tattoos stares us smack in the face.

It’s just true that unstable, promiscuous women are the type that choose loud tattoos more often. It’s not every woman who does, but it’s a general pattern. Many other traits and behaviors, especially addictions, are common to those of us damaged in childhood.

This is useful to think about when contemplating what grooming choices signal, and how to stay on top of those signals even when they change aesthetically or take on different or opposite meanings over time. To boil it down, the point is: is this person making a grooming choice that frequently communicates narcissism or instability or something else fractious? Are they trying to get my attention in their grooming?

Or, we can put it as a counterfactual. If everyone in our society had tattoos as part of their normal upbringing, if having a tattoo was society-wide-normal the way wearing clothes in public is, then the people who did not have tattoos would be more likely to be problem personalities. It’s the motivation, not the specific look. It’s not a coincidence that I bleached my hair and wore fake blue contacts when I was young and unstable. And other people weren’t wrong to notice the correlation.

This is why I recommend Gavin DeBecker’s book The Gift of Fear so often. He sees that we have been taught or “socialized” to turn off our good sense, our common sense, and our intuition. The people who want us to turn it off are the narcissists and sociopaths. The borderlines and histrionics are the most vulnerable to these manipulations, and the most likely to work as flying monkeys for the project. Lots of normal range but naive people are unwitting enablers; they’re the shushers and the “you’re so mean” types.

DeBecker focuses mainly on protecting one’s self from violence—assault, rape, murder. He’s right, and though I don’t think he uses this language, he’s describing predatory Cluster Bs and those vulnerable to them. I want to do something similar on the everyday emotional level, not necessarily connected to physical violence.

There are many emotionally, socially, and financially dangerous people about, and they have high perches in all forms of media. They can hurt you in ways that last. There are plenty of ways to suffer before we get to life and limb.

Telling ourselves, or worse our children, “don’t judge a book by its cover” is not only bad advice, it’s irresponsible. Humans are not books, and if they are, they chose those covers. For a reason. Don’t obey their command to close your eyes and stop reading.

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