No doubt John Keats was at his metaphysical sharpest when he wrote, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty" in "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

But the truth (inconvenient to some) is that truth, beauty, and all of the virtuous like are, to many men, often contained in the ugliest vessels.

While women are socialized to discern, create and embody cultural ideals of physical beauty as proof of both innate quality and learned refinement, many men embrace the ugly, either as an oppositional stance against cultural dictates, an assertion of functionality over form, or simply a statement of what they believe to be natural and "real" versus constructed and contrived.

Does anyone actually think the mullet looks good? Heavens no! But the more heterosexual women mock it, the more the Tennessee Waterfall flows.

Take that, Tina Brown.

When Crocs first hit the shoe racks, marketers quickly identified men as a target audience, the likely assumption being that the ugly, foamy things would be embraced both for their promised comfort and for their bullet-proof indifference to style.

Fact is, for many men the lack of obvious physical comeliness is a signal, true or errant, that something is genuine and thus more in tune with masculine ideals of such. For all we know, Brad Pitt may be a swell, down-to-earth dude, but his obvious good looks raise suspicions that a guy like Paul Giamatti may never have to, um, face.

Consider YouTube legend and mixed martial-arts spectacle Kimbo Slice. With bald dome, pot-scrubber beard and eyes that could pierce Kevlar, Slice isn't the monster in the closet, he's the guy that eats 'em.

A large part of Slice's popularity is anchored in his cultivated image as a wholly unrefined product of violent nature. And while reality may never catch up to that perception, it's fair to say that the mere sight of the big uggo is endlessly compelling.

(I'd throw NBA veteran Sam Cassell, who looks like an extra from "Enemy Mine," into the discussion here, but his looks improved significantly when he joined the Boston Celtics. Who doesn't look sharp in those green unis?)

Cynics might argue that the masculine embrace of the ugly is a simple matter of men rejecting standards to which they can't, or won't, live up. That may be true, but it's likely more complicated than that.

Men are capable of appreciating beauty as much as women (I did name my cat after Isabella Rossellini, after all), but there is something in the sight of the English bulldog, the Stevie Ray Vaughan goatee, the lime-green Gremlin rusting in the garage that resonates within us.

The English painter John Constable once remarked that he had never seen an ugly thing. He was no doubt commenting on the subjectivity of the artistic eye, but God bless him, he just may have been speaking for all of us.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.