I’m speaking about Gwendolyn Wallace Gooditis. She is an American real estate agent and politician. She is a Democrat and was elected to represent Virginia’s 10th House of Delegates district in the Virginia House of Delegates. I bet she is a good real estate agent because she looks so honest.
It’s nice to have a politician representing you who has a good face. This article is about the anatomy of a “good face”. And Gwendolyn has proposed a new law for the state of Virginia which bans the declawing of cats. A good face behind a good deed.
This woman is involved in all kinds of good deeds so her desire to ban cat declawing in Virginia is just one string to her bow.
The soul shines through the face
But looking at her photograph – and I have also watched her talk on video – she undeniably has a kind and yet determined face.
It is hard to pin down how personality comes through in a person’s face. But in my opinion, it does. I’m hardly relying upon research for this article because it’s difficult to find hard facts on the topic.
I’m not talking about a symmetrical face or a smiling face. I’m not talking about a temporary adjustment to a face’s anatomy but something much more profound. Something that comes from within, and which is the person’s character made visible in their face.
You’ll see the opposite effect in equal measure. People who are mean and nasty have faces which do not hide this characteristic.
I discovered one thing this morning which is this: there is a science called Physiognomy which is about determining through the analysis of facial features a person’s personality.
I didn’t know that so clearly science agrees that there is a connection between facial features and personality.
Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist and philosopher who is all over YouTube, believes that successful people are often disagreeable. They don’t mind being disagreeable. Perhaps they have to be disagreeable. And testosterone can be seen in facial features I believe in producing a squarer face which is associated with dominance.
And the concept of dominance is not going to be interpreted as kind. So perhaps testosterone plays a role in a purely physical way. And I guess, too, the kind of facial expressions that a person habitually makes in their day-to-day life affects how their face is interpreted by those who see it.
But you don’t have to be disagreeable to be successful as evidenced by Gwendolyn.
But I do believe there’s more. As mentioned, there is something deeper which is intangible, and which perhaps can’t be explained by science. Perhaps it is to do with the soul of a person which can be glimpsed in their face.
And Gwendolyn Wallace Gooditis has that kind of face. She isn’t the only one! I just happened to immediately notice it when I wrote an article about banning cat declawing in Virginia. You can read that article if you wish by clicking on this link.
Banning declawing no hugely popular in American politics
To propose a ban on declawing in an entire US state is not the most popular piece of legislation that you can introduce. Cat declawing in the US is very entrenched. Many people don’t see anything wrong with it despite it being barbaric, brutal and entirely unnecessary in 99.9% of cases. These are cases when it is carried out for non-therapeutic purposes. It is much more than ‘declawing’.
Horribly harmful declawing
But Republicans are business orientated and they would support veterinarians who want to declaw cats as it turns a good profit, whereas, as you might expect, Gwendolyn is a Democrat. The shocking thing about cat declawing is that the veterinarians want to do it. Not all of them but a huge number. They’ve completely forgotten their oath to do no harm to their patients.
And believe me, cat declawing does a lot of harm to a young cat which lasts throughout their life often. And there are tens of thousands of botched declawing operations because they are carried out too quickly leaving shards of bone left in the paw causing constant pain affecting gait, causing depression, causing arthritis, ruining lives actually.
A lot of people don’t know this, and a lot of people don’t care but Gwendolyn knows this, and she cares because she has the personality to care about these things and it shows in her face.
Attractive faces
There appears to have been something that I missed when I first wrote the article. It’s whether the attractiveness or otherwise of a face has an influence on the impression that it makes to others.
Along those lines, there is an interesting article in The Sunday Times today by Dominic Lawson who suggests that Rishi Sunak’s appearance (UK Prime Minister) will help make him successful at the next election in two years’ time.
Apparently, attractive people tend to get better assessments if they are a teacher and teachers give attractive schoolchildren better assessments than those that are less attractive. It seems that success is partly dependent upon the attractiveness of appearance.
Knowing that, and accepting that it is superficial, I wonder whether a ‘good face’ as I have called it need to be an attractive face. Can an unattractive face be a good face? I would say definitely yes, and I certainly hope so because I wouldn’t like to think that the world is that superficial.
P.S. Please share your thoughts on good human faces.
