Of the Quantification of Beauty, Part 2

"I'm happy people find me attractive, but really it's a matter of mathematics: the number of millimeters between the eyes and chin." - Paulina Porizkova

                                           Porizkova. She's interesting to listen to, too.


In 1960 a London newspaper published the pics of 12 young women, asking who's the prettiest. Over 4000 people responded, from all over Britain, every social class, ages from 8 to 80. The unanimity about who was prettiest was consistent to a remarkable degree. In 1965 a similar test was done in Unistat, with over 10,000 responses, with again a very high degree of consistency as to who was the fairest of them all. A few years later the psychologist's lab studies on prettiness/beauty began, and hasn't stopped.

What's another remarkable thing is that almost everyone agrees that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," but then they pick the same pretty face that everyone else does. After a good 30 years of various tests of beauty - including cross-cultural studies - it seems safe to assert that we are all attracted to the beautiful, even though we're uneasy about it, for various reasons.

In 1984, Raquel Scheer and Robin Lakoff (then George's wife) published a book, Face Value: the Politics of Beauty. They asserted that beauty was a social construction, and that, "Beauty is not instantly and instinctively recognizable: we must be trained from childhood to make those discriminations."

Do you agree?

In another 1984 book, Forbidden Fruits: Taboos and Tabooism in Culture, ed. by Browne, another female academic, Jane E. Caputi, wrote an essay, "Beauty Secrets: Tabooing the Ugly Woman," in which she asserted we acquire our tastes for beauty via acculturation.

Are you on Caputi's page?

Eight years later and probably most famously, Naomi Wolf penned The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. For Wolf, beauty was not a universal and objective thing, but a myth foisted on us by The Man. Here's classic Wolf: "Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact."

Are you with Naomi, Dear Reader? Here's a pic of Wolf, just for kicks:

                                  Sisterhood must really be powerful. Wolf is pretty to me, I find her 
                                             comely and smart and her politics has drifted closer to mine over the 
                                             years, which makes me wonder....Does she seem ambivalent about
                                             having her picture taken here?


Enter a psychologist named Judith Langlois, now at the U. of Texas. She's studied social perception, with an emphasis on perceptions of physical attractiveness. She did a study in which she collected hundreds of pictures of faces and asked adults to rate them regarding degree of attractiveness. Then she showed the same pics to babies aged three to six months, and the babies found the same pictures attractive that the adults did! Q: How did she and her colleagues know what the babies thought? Answer: The babies spent much more time looking at attractive faces than unattractive ones. Even if the baby's parents were white, the babies lingered over pretty African faces, attractive men, attractive other babies, good-looking Asians from all over the world...

There's no blank slate, here: we seem to be born with some predisposition towards liking symmetry, proportion...I don't think the media or the Male Gaze did this to us. It made for some heated politics of "gender" and of questions about what's socially constructed, to what extent, how, why, etc. But I think the "brainwashing" idea about beauty is moribund, if not kaput.

Are you still with the postmodern politically-correct academic women? (If you ever were...)

HERE's a 2006 article discussing Langlois's work, surmising that pretty faces take less information processing power, and so are pleasing - a sort of literal take on "easy on the eyes," - etc. A profile of Langlois and how she got into this line of inquiry, etc, is HERE.

What about the idea that advertising has hypnotized us into a Madison Avenue world of beauty? We've seen this argument before, and once I started reading all those studies on symmetry, the phi ratio, and fer crissakes, babies?, I can't believe how utterly lame that argument is/was. Yes, we only drink sugary sodas because Coke and Pepsi and their ads have brainwashed us! We only love fatty food because of all those McDonald's ads.

But then where did so many smart people get such bad ideas? I'm not sure, but there certainly seems like there's DANGER lurking in beauty. In King Kong it killed the Beast, remember? Recall that the Judgement of Paris was a beauty contest instigated by the spurned goddess Eris, which ultimately started the Trojan War and made James Joyce's Ulysses possible... Beauty's not only dangerous but unfair: with regards to one study, attractive men earn $250,000 more than their counterparts over a lifetime, according to economist David Hammermesh. Attractive women will earn 4% more over a lifetime than not-so-attractive women in the same lines of work. Managers admitted in a survey published in Newsweek that, in this bad economy, pretty people's luck was better in getting hired. The most important thing was experience, followed by confidence, then attractiveness, then what school the applicant went to. The lesson: it's better to be average and attractive than brilliant and unattractive.

Scads of the research talk about a "Beauty Bias," "Beauty Premium," "Beauty Advantage,"or "Beauty Bonus." This stuff has been known forever, but we still like to say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," and we probably think we really believe it when we say it. See, for example, Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, by Deborah Rhode. She's at Stanford, and wants to make "lookism" tougher, legally. How this can be done, I have no idea. I have not read Rhode's book, but the Slate article and other reviews make me want to get to it if I find the time. The City of Santa Cruz, California has tried to make "lookism" illegal, and Robert Anton Wilson - who lived at the edge of Santa Cruz - wrote one of the most devastatingly LOL-funny Swiftian satires on that that I've ever seen; unfortunately it hasn't been collected in any of his books, but if you find the collection Popular Alienation: A Steamshovel Press Reader, ed. Kenn Thomas, look for "A Modest Enquiry: Some Possible Problems With a New Santa Cruz Anti-Discrimination Law," pp.67-70...

[And yet: Ugly People strike back in beauty-obsessed Buenos Aires. Good luck with that...]

I think most of us are a bit mixed-up about beauty. It's so pleasant to see a beautiful person. We're probably wired that way. In fact, I'd bet on it. But we don't like unfairness, and most of us sense that the beautiful get an easier ride, through no merit of their own. Especially liberals: we believe in meritocracy over birth, beauty, inherited money and privilege. We highly value merit, knowledge, real work. 


And yet...the beautiful enchant us. We can't help it, and I suggest we give over to it, as part of the payback of the whips and scorns of time and general difficulties in life. Eleanor Roosevelt was asked about regrets in life and she said she wished she'd been prettier. Count Tolstoy mourned the good looks he never had. I harmonize with Tolstoy on this. Men wish they were prettier, too. On the other hand, when Woody Allen was asked if he had any regrets in life, he said his only regret was that he wasn't someone else...

A shout out to Nancy Etcoff's Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, which I found in 1999, and it's therefore "dated": so much more science has been done on the topic since then, but Etcoff's book is still a well-written and researched and delightful, funny, and candid text well worth reading on the topic.

Indonesia is the country with the most Muslims in the world, so on a lark, because I know no one from Indonesia, I Googled, "Beautiful Women of Indonesia" and got this.
                     
Here's People magazine's "Sexiest Man Live For 2011," an actor named Bradley Cooper, who I'd never heard of.

Part 1 of my musings and gleanings on beauty and its measurements, etc.