At around the same time I heard that NPR segment about chic headscarves, someone posted this on Facebook:
Are non-Eurocentric standards of beauty any better than Eurocentric ones? I don't know any reason to think so. What would they be, anyway? The footbinding of Chinese women, ended by the Eurocentric Chinese Communists, was one such, but I hope this writer doesn't want to bring it back. As for "cisheteropatriarchal beauty standards," the transgender beauties I hear about adhere to them absolutely, and they are celebrated by transgender allies.
Not that it matters much, because standards of beauty are inherently harmful. Their only function is to set a bar that most people in any culture, of any gender, will not be able to reach. As a result people will put a lot of energy into trying to reach them anyway, and when they fail they'll feel bad about themselves. At best such standards aren't totally unrealistic in that no one could possibly meet them, but most people can't, and there's no reason why they should.
One of the stumbling blocks is the confusion of "beauty" with "sexual desirability," though there is no valid standard of sexual desirability either. I think I was in junior high school when one of the photographic newsweeklies did a story on the politician Barry Goldwater, who was also a skilled amateur photographer. The article included a full-page photograph of an elderly Native American woman, with a face as wrinkled as W. H. Auden's or Mick Jagger's. The caption quoted Goldwater's opinion that she was totally beautiful.
I don't think he meant that he wanted to copulate with her, though who knows? But the remark made an impression on me: beauty doesn't equal sexual desirability. People use "beautiful" for everything from sunsets to flowers to babies to old ladies, so that insight shouldn't be surprising, but it seems to surprise many.
I don't remember when I began -- it might have been a result of
Goldwater's comment on his photograph -- and I don't believe I made a
conscious choice, but when I'm looking at people I try to see what
beauty they have on their own terms, rather than measuring them against a
standard that is designed to exclude them in advance. I fail more
often than I succeed, but that's the goal. Erotic desire is only part
of it, though it's certainly part of it.
Contrariwise, sexual desirability doesn't equal beauty, though given the elasticity of "beauty," you could argue otherwise. I do: the men I'm most attracted to aren't conventionally good-looking, but they inspire in me the deep thrill that means "beauty" to me. Most people who don't conform to white-supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal standards of beauty still find sexual partners who want them, and who themselves may not conform to those standards. Given that reality, why bother with standards at all?
The gay photographer Tom Bianchi thinks otherwise, and has belabored the point for decades, notably in a small book called In Defense of Beauty (Crown, 1995). Bianchi has often been criticized for the narrow range of men he photographs. Among the authorities he cites in his defense are Oscar Wilde, Edmund White, Stephen R. Covey (think The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) and Deepak Chopra. Bianchi sets out his position early on:
I am no longer surprised when I hear the charge that the people in my pictures are "too beautiful" or "only the most perfect bodies," for I have come to see the mistake in perception from which these comments come. The implication is that I am elitist, or as one friend suggested, the new word is lookist. But people who find fault with beauty, who trivialize it by assuming a negative quality in it, diminish themselves. The ability to appreciate beauty in others is a prerequisite to express it in oneself [8].
I might concede that Bianchi's critics are wrong about his work, but Bianchi has his own "mistake in perception." He assumes that the kind of men who populate his photographs -- gym queens, in a nutshell -- are beautiful, with "the most perfect bodies," members of an elite. He defines "beauty" to mean such men, and only such men.
Now, I disagree that his models are beautiful, let alone "too beautiful." I don't think that these overmuscled bodies are beautiful or perfect, and their faces (which to me are at least as important as the body below the neck) are quite unattractive, either grimly serious or with tight, anxious grins. This is of course a matter of taste, but that's the point: there is no universal standard of male (or female) beauty. Bianchi relies, I believe, on the ancient Hellenic model, which is fine, but other cultures had very different ideas about the beauty of men. In East Asia, for example, sculpted muscles were of no interest, though the advent of European imperialism changed that to a great extent.
Bianchi would probably charge me with "find[ing] fault with beauty," with "trivializ[ing] it by assuming a negative quality in it." I would deny it, because physical beauty is very important to me, though it's not the only human quality that matters. I just find beauty in people whose beauty Bianchi would deny, because he lacks the ability to appreciate them. We could agree to disagree, but Bianchi's stance leaves him no room for greater inclusivity. Beauty is what he says it is, and nothing else; it doesn't seem to occur to him that it could be otherwise. He's entitled to his taste, of course, but it seems impoverished to me.
I'm reminded here of the far-right Christian pundit Rod Dreher, who has complained that modern Americans, especially the young, "have more generally lost our receptive capabilities to things numinous." It would be more accurate to say that Dreher is unreceptive to things numinous from any tradition other than the one he has chosen. Likewise, I'm not not hostile to beauty, only to a narrow conception of beauty. But I have to admit that I'm not receptive to the beauty of Bianchi's models either; the difference is that I'll recognize that he and other people find them so. The eye of the beholder, anyone?
