THIS weekend, when men in bars all over Singapore size up the pickings available, they will use a new lexicon for attractiveness: a woman will be either "lump sum" or "monthly" instead of "hot" or "have a few more drinks before you look again".
Women will have this week's news to thank - where a judge said that the court can look at a woman's prospects for remarriage in a divorce settlement when deciding the financial support the husband should shell out, including whether this should be a lump-sum payment or a monthly affair.
It is not spelled out but it can be inferred that a comely divorcee gets a lump- sum payment, while her plainer peer gets the assurance of a monthly stream of income until some other schmuck marries her for her conversation.
This was triggered by the divorce settlement of a 37-year-old Vietnamese Singaporean woman in which another judge had asked if the woman in question was attractive.
From the subsequent appeal of the lady in question - the maintenance sum for her son had been cut from $12,000 to $600, among several things - I have no choice but to imagine that she's the spitting image of Gisele Bundchen.
The cut in child maintenance might not have been solely influenced by the woman's attractiveness, of course, and might have something to do with the fact that $12,000 is a lot of Xbox 3 games, but that's fodder for another column.
In any case, enraged feminists (a redundancy, if there ever was one) have objected to the idea that looks have any bearing on alimony. The two main links in the argument that they object to are: attractiveness is objective, and attractiveness is an indicator of how quickly you can get someone to say "I do".
The short rebuttal to both arguments is: surely you kid. The longer one to the first concern about the subjectivity of attractiveness is this: while there might be room for quibbling about how someone is more of a 7 than an 8, the gulf between a 2 and an 8 is wide enough for most people to see (unless, of course, you're Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Railing against the objective definition of beauty is like saying that America's Next Top Model is bunk; it is futile and makes everyone suspect that the person doing the complaining is ugly.
And because the mind will wander where it wants, it pays to wonder how the actual court situation played out when, according to a recount of the event, the judge had asked counsel if the wife was attractive.
I suppose, to earn my fee, I would have said: "Goodness no, Your Honour! My client - she puts the 'ug' in 'ugly'!"
And as another aside, doctors have been found to use acronyms on patients' charts as coded messages for other doctors. One doctor in the UK narrowly avoided disaster in court when he was asked to explain what he had meant by "TTFO" in a patient's notes. In family newspaper terms, it had meant that the patient was told to go away.
It is the legal community's loss that I will issue no obiter dictum of my own in divorce cases, in which "CMI" will surely be scrawled.
Diversion aside, the other concern - that attractiveness does not have a correlation with chances of remarriage - is naive. Some have brandished the Women's Charter, saying that physical attributes are not mentioned.
The Women's Charter (which begins titillatingly with the definition of "brothel" but sobers up pretty quickly thereafter) mentions "income, earning capacity, property and other financial resources" of both parties as some of the determinants of maintenance quantum.
Since marriage is correlated with financial security especially where a woman is concerned, why can't her marriageability be considered part of her earning capacity? The day Donald Trump breaks with tradition and marries a Plain Jane, I will stand corrected.
One of the many studies done found that plain people earn 5-10 per cent less than average-looking people, who in turn earn 3-8 per cent less than those who are good-looking.
In an area teeming with KPIs and 360 feedback sessions, people have been proven to make lookist decisions. It is the most idealistic person who expects others to suddenly become impervious to looks in an area of life that can be solemnised on impulse while drunk and in Las Vegas.
Relying on marriage
If a relative lack of attractiveness qualifies as an impediment to your capacity to make a living, it confounds me that people would object that the courts try to redress that imbalance. Some have railed against the idea that women rely this much on marriage. But they do; studies in America have shown that single parents consider their economic situation far more precarious than married parents.
And if you argue on the basis that marriage is simply a technicality that can be postponed even by good-looking women, then the court's approach can be seen to be incidentally progressive. Even if a beautiful women never marries, she is likely to be better taken care of by the workplace and quicker to find a companion who will split the COE with her, compared to a plainer woman.
To argue that this approach is an insult to women would be an insult to intelligence.
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This article was first published in The Business Times.
