John Molony, the mayor of Mount Isa, an Australian mining town, put it bluntly: "With five blokes to every girl, may I suggest that beauty-disadvantaged women should proceed to Mount Isa."

For this, he got a goodly portion of Australia (forgive me) hopping mad.

"We're appalled," a councilwoman from Mount Isa told Australia's Courier-Mail.

"It's a public attack on women and a form of verbal and emotional abuse," said a domestic violence worker there.

But really: Who is being abused?

Molony did not point to specific women: "You there! In the tube top! Get over here!" And he didn't elaborate, either: "You know, I'm talking about anyone with bleached blond hair who looks like my big fat sister." He left "beauty-disadvantaged" in the eyes of the beholder — which is where it always is. Same as beauty.

The thing about beauty and love is that they are intertwined in many different ways, not all of them so hot. It actually may behoove the men of Mount Isa to be surrounded by a bevy of non-beauties. And the non-beauties may have a better shot at happiness than the hotties, at that. Just ask Christie Brinkley.

In the short run, of course, pretty is powerful. It's what the former editor of Psychology Today, Robert Epstein, calls a "motivator." If you're a guy and you run into someone who looks like Halle Berry, or if you're female and you run into that Olympic beach volleyball guy from Switzerland — the one with the beard and the mean partner he did not deserve — you are "motivated" to get to know that person.

But googly eyes across a crowded room — or stadium — are not necessarily the surest path to wedded bliss. (Bedded bliss, another story.) In preparing a new reality TV show called "Making Love," Epstein found that "romantic" marriage, the kind that begins with a lightning bolt of lust, often ends up less happy than the typical arranged marriage.

"The love in 'love marriages' starts out high and decreases very substantially after a year and a half or two years," the Harvard Ph.D. said. "But in arranged marriages, it starts at zero and gradually increases. It surpasses the love in love marriages at around the five-year mark." By year 10, it's — on average — double. Beware of the relationship based on va-va-voom.

On the other hand, deep love can grow out of something very different from beauty: proximity.

If you're in a room full of strangers at a party, you head for the hunk or hunkesse. "But if you're in a room full of people you're working with every day, then, over time, other kinds of interactions take place which allow the superficial characteristics to fall away," Epstein said. "So in other words, you can become psychologically intimate with somebody just because of proximity and repeated interactions." Tell me that never happened to you.

All Mayor Molony was trying to do was set up those simple daily interactions for his manly miners and some women who felt they weren't going to win in the party setting.

Ironically, Mount Isa may be in for a flux of foxes. So many pretty women don't believe they are. Ever read People magazine's "Most Beautiful" issue? All the starlets say, "In high school, my legs were so long I hated them." Boohoo.

Anyway, whoever eventually arrives in Mount Isa, it seems a fine town awaits. Far from discrediting his neck of the woods, Molony made it sound like a place that's not totally skin-deep. Also, a place where you don't have to spend a lot of time at the gym. And forget about waxing.

For all we know, the economy isn't in a tailspin, either. Guess that's what they call a high koala-ty of life.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at The New York Sun and Advertising Age. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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