» Fri Feb 19, 2010 8:00 pm
Beauty really is a strange thing. Even the arguments about its genetic basis, as far as being about selecting strong, healthy mates, are terribly thin and flimsy...despite probably being one of the stronger arguments in the area as a whole. Much of beauty is often directed toward the "shape" of a person's face, their general appearance, but that certainly has little enough to do with health. Having a big nose doesn't mean you're clearly predisposed toward heart failure. Body type and shape varies enormously in the healthy range; in the past, overweight was healthy and attractive. Today it's considered unhealthy and unattractive, while the standard for attractive is generally regarded as unhealthily thin. Neither standard has a strong link to reality, as almost any weight can potentially be healthy/not, and at the very least there's little enough difference in the "average" range, despite only a very specific area being the desired goal. Women who work out, and exercise enough to be visibly muscular, would arguably be high on the ladder of "strong, healthy" mates, yet by today's society are often openly considered offensive-looking.
And that's simply the angle of genetic preference, which immediately crumbles in the face of personal preference anyway. I've known/observed people whose personal standards of beauty encompass the entire spectrum; fat, thin, tall, short, long hair, bald, rough skin, smooth skin, young, old, pointy chin, broad jaw, bodybuilder, waif. No argument of normalcy or genetics or fashion is going to change what they find beautiful. I myself have been regarded as both attractive and not, by both straight and gay men and women, and a handful in between that silly old English has no proper words for.
Yet despite the power of personal opinion, which reasonably should be just about the only important factor, many of us let our standards be influenced, or even completely determined, by society and culture. People spend a fortune on products to make themselves look like what the TV and magazines tell them to look at. Only expensive people are to be considered beautiful, because those same commercials and ads convince everyone that that's what everyone's personal opinion is, and we buy it, even knowing how varied the real standards actually are. But those made up standards mean nothing. They're only going to change every few years as marketing recreates the definition of beautiful over and over. Even then it will still vary from region to region, culture to culture, without even going through the change in years. It's utterly meaningless. We know this, we have a word, shallow, to describe it. But we obsess anyway. People devour any bit of gossip or picture of a "beautiful" celebrity "caught" without makeup. We continue to treat physical beauty as not only a measurable product, but one so incredibly important that anyone straying for personal OR cultural standards is entirely deserving of being insulted for their failure. It really is all very strange.
The bizarre power and insanity of social beauty norms was pretty well captured by that thread about Justin Bieber and his haircut. Here we have someone that most of us only know exists by his popularity, and what's much of that popularity? Little girls screaming about his beauty. How unimportant is it to know that someone in the world is not attractive to you? How even less important is the nature of their haircut? Yet simply being aware of someone who does not fit their own standards, conflicting with the knowledge that other people are calling them beautiful anyway, with people being the fashion slaves they are, almost the entire thread was nothing but people openly despising and insulting some kid they know nothing about other than his face and maybe his voice, simply because it was the popular thing to do to find him un-beautiful by the standards of their social group.
Really, it's all another reason why I simply live as a hermit troll under a bridge. You humans are all nuts.
