The Ever So Human Infatuation With Beauty

 

Is this infatuation a design flaw or planned obsolescence?  Does beauty truly serve as a deciding factor in positively moving the species forward, is Mother Nature actually that shallow? Or is our fascination just a huge evolutionary mistake? After all, physical characteristics denote nothing about capabilities or inner qualities. So if natural selection is selecting the wrong traits, what does this say about us as a species?

 

Many people get stuck in thinking they are not good looking enough, some people get stuck in thinking their looks will open any door, regardless of skill or effort. Thoughts and feelings about physical appearance have ripple effects. One woman I know pushed her adopted daughter into modeling because she, herself, had never felt pretty or popular and wanted to experience these through her daughter. My friend was smart, funny, and a talented writer and business woman, but still her early teenage beliefs lingered and nagged. Her sweet and beautiful daughter ended up in a shabby LA apartment, living with an emotionally abusive man.

 

Learning to navigate successfully in a world that judges unfairly is a skill. Numerous studies abound discussing how women are judged by their appearance. Psychology Today published an article entitled “Looks Do Matter, Especially For Women, And Also At Work”. There is a funny breathlessness about how this headline doesn’t roll off the tongue. I’m imagining a young, well dressed man running into the newsroom to make this announcement, as if he was on the brink of discovering some essential truth. Silly him, we have known this all along.

 

 An article about the history of Plastic Surgery, in verywellhealth.com, discusses the plastic surgery techniques surgeons developed during war time when “the causalities of war made reconstructive plastic surgery a must for many soldiers”. From there “…surgeons began to fully realize the potential influence that one’s appearance could exert upon the degree of success experienced in his or her lifetime. Because of this understanding, aesthetic surgery began to take its place as a somewhat more respected aspect of plastic surgery “. Thank goodness?

 

Friends and family have criticized me about my efforts to try to stay pretty, or at least attractive. Ambivalence best explains my beliefs on the subject. Sometimes it’s fun, as when one is buying new shoes, clothes, or make-up. But often trying to look pretty is exhausting, embarrassing, and expensive. Because I come from a family in which looks are overvalued, I sometimes find it hard to pass a mirror without looking, just to make sure I have not acquired a new wrinkle or eye bag that need immediate attention.

 

If you scratch the surface of almost any woman, you probably will find a record of harmful, inaccurate, disrespectful comments about her appearance, either just below the surface, or buried deeply. My impression is that few women make it through adolescence without someone, somewhere, disparaging her looks or body.  My theory is that hazy, unremembered comments do the most damage. These snippets of thought appear to uneasily dance around the edges of our minds and very often make us react in ways that belie our insecurities.

On Reddit, I have read some heartbreaking stories about women who describe themselves as being exceedingly unattractive. In a post entitled “Being an ugly woman is terrible”, one woman writes about “how people instantly forget (her) when (she) is introduced to them”. And, “Strangers insult and ridicule me.” At the end of a well written post she says “I hate being ugly. I hate myself. The end”. Another woman judged to be unattractive writes that she asked a man out and he became angry with her over her audacity in thinking he might say yes. Or this, “I gave up on trying to socialize casually freshmen year of college because I was so ugly people would act like talking to me was a chore”. You would have to be so very strong to get beyond these type experiences.

 

So what happens if you start fooling around on with the Goog Machine? Enter “women over 60”, here’s what you might find: hairstyle advice-“the most beautiful women over 60”- “Can 60 plus year old women have sex”, “Sexy Looking Bodies on Women over 60”. And my favorite: “6 fashion tips that prove grannies have the best style”. There is always health stuff, articles about older women’s feet.  Shoot, feet, I forgot to worry about having pretty feet! Never mind the need for foot functionality.

Google women over 70, lot and lots of articles about hair-then we get “Most Beautiful Women in Hollywood over 70”-and little ditties about ageless beauty. Then a weird little website about dating, saying “Your 70’s is the Time to Start”.

Women over 80? More beauty tips; “100 Beautiful Women Over 80”;  sex advice, how to look good at 80, and skin care articles. It isn’t until you google women over 90 that the hair and makeup tips fall off, replaced with queries as to how likely is it that a person will live past 90.

In my internet inquiries, I stumbled upon this morsel.  From “The American Journal of Physical Anthropology” comes a study entitled:  “Facial Aging Trajectories: A Common Shape Pattern in Male and Female Faces is Disrupted at Menopause”.  The stated reason for the study was furthering the field of forensic anthropology-how to accurately recreate facial characteristics from skulls for historical research and criminal investigations. A line thrown into the end of the study read “the face is also of large economic interests in modern societies”. According to the article, statistics for facelifts in America in 2017 was 123,000, which seems absurdly low (if you read People, the National Enquirer, etc.-you know that tons of people, mostly but not entirely women, have had procedures).

And then, think about dating websites. Your entryway into evaluating potential mates is through facial photos. These photos dictate whether you decide to learn more about the person. One male friend said to me: “I find myself looking at faces first and there is an instinctual primitive attraction/repulsion/objectification pornographic “something”.  True, but this point of view has not stopped this very smart man from only dating pretty, younger women.  When I am looking at men’s pictures I must admit I ask myself if “could I kiss that face?”  But the thing is, lots of the men I would like to kiss are potentially not nice, interesting, or fun, whereas the lesser kissable faces might belong to nicer, more fun me. Kissing frogs, I guess.

How to resolve these conundrums? To me the task of being human is being aware of one’s primitive urges, holding them in our back pocket (so to speak), and relying more on all that lovely gray matter in our Neo Cortex. It’s our Neo Cortex which gives us the capacity to register the human, deeper qualities possessed by an individual. Perhaps this is why our maker gave us large frontal lobes. Maybe it’s a test to see who uses their higher brain for good or evil.