Standards of Beauty

At around the same time I heard that NPR segment about chic headscarves, someone posted this on Facebook:

There's so much wrong here that it's difficult to know where to begin.  I can't argue with "don't be a white supremacist," but the rest is garbage.

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?

It's Witchcraft

 

A Facebook friend, who's something of a butterball himself, shared this meme on Facebook, with the caption "No es brujería, el problema es que ustedes viven del físico."  (It's not witchcraft / sorcery, the problem is that you all live on the physical plane.) 

I think the photo is sweet, though it would have made its point better if the young woman were also overweight.  (The younger working-class Mexican men I know seem to be happy to date women who not only are heavier than they are, but taller as well.  Autre pays, autre moeurs.)  I've pointed out before that when people complain that everybody nowadays is obsessed with looks and won't look at the inner person, they generally exempt themselves: it's only other people who must look for inner beauty, they are entitled to the attention of supermodels, beauty queens, and porn stars. Anyone who looks at this photo and congratulates (or envies) the gordito for having scored such a hot girlfriend still vive del físico.

But that misses the point, because it still assumes that sexual attractiveness consists solely of a certain look, and if you miss the mark but manage to get laid anyway, it's because someone saw your inner beauty and decided to overlook your outer ugliness for some reason.  Or you bewitched them somehow.  I don't believe that, if only because so many people express attraction to a wider range of people than the official commercial model accommodates.  And there's considerable social pressure against it, which I don't put down to media brainwashing but to ordinary human narrow-mindedness and stupidity.  I've always pushed back against it, even when I was young: if I wasn't going to give in to pressure to be heterosexual, I damn sure wasn't going to give in to pressure from other gay people trying to police my attractions.

I don't know what goes on in people's minds when they select sexual or romantic partners.  Maybe some do ignore looks for the inner person, though from what I observe they often don't do any better on that basis than if they went by the physical exterior. If we could see the inner person, would we judge any better than we do the outer?  I suspect that if they claim to be looking at the inner beauty, they're deceiving themselves.  I sometimes have thought that my tastes in men were wider than most other people's, but getting onto Grindr disabused me of that notion: I was surprised to find that I was only interested in a small minority, though most of the rest were sure they were hot.  Well, fine, to each his own.

Myself, I'd be happy to smooch the gordito in the picture my friend posted.  Not because I'm free of the physical, but because his physicality appeals to me.  I don't know what his girlfriend thinks about his looks; the looks of heterosexual men notoriously are said not to matter to women, but there's ample reason to doubt that.  I'm attracted to the men I'm attracted to, not because I live on the spiritual plane, but because I like their looks.  Sometimes an attractive man turns out to be a jerk, in which case he becomes less attractive.  (Similarly, if a cute guy I'm admiring takes out a cigarette and lights up, he becomes less attractive.  But some people fetishize smokers and smoking.  Go know.)

It's good to encourage people to recognize the beauty of people who aren't movie stars, but I don't think it's good to put it in terms of inner/outer beauty.  It's a false dichotomy anyway, but I think we need to encourage them to recognize the desires they already have.  From what I see around me, it's not really that much of a stretch in practice; I just want to improve the quality of the discourse.

I Think My Biggest Problem Is Being Young and Beautiful

ARNOLD: It's my biggest problem because I've never been young and beautiful.  Oh, I've been beautiful, and God knows I've been young, but never the twain have met.

-- Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilogy

I just reread Erica Rand's Barbie's Queer Accessories (Duke, 1995), an excellent book not only about popular culture and how consumers use it, but about how to think about such matters.  It is even better than I remembered, in fact, and that's unusual.

Here's something that I thought was worth dwelling on.  Toward the end Rand quotes a poem by the late gay African-American poet Essex Hemphill which uses Barbie as a sign of white supremacy.  The lines

Barbie never told Black girls they are beautiful.
She never acknowledged their breathtaking Negritude.

are repeated several times as a refrain.

The trouble is that Barbie never told white girls they are beautiful, either.  Only Barbie is beautiful, the platonic idea of Beauty, and no human being can look like her.  Rand discusses several of the official Barbie stories, in both print and comic-book form, that Mattel licensed and produced, and this was a recurrent theme: Barbie has numerous friends who are pretty and talented, but they all come in a distant second to Her Barbieness.

That's leaving aside the fact that Barbie can't tell anybody anything: she's a doll. As an object she signifies, but as Rand shows, what she signifies is complex, and different people read her differently.  People read messages into her like a Median mage reading portents in entrails. I know, this is a poem and I shouldn't take it literally.  But granting that, and recognizing that Barbie in that couplet is a synecdoche for white America, my objection still stands, because white America throws most girls and women under the beauty bus.  Despite a few token big-boned white women in mass media, most of whom are comedians, the ideal beauty is still skinny with cheekbones you could cut yourself on, and breasts by ... Mattel, courtesy of breast implants.

Black America seems to do a little better by black women, but skinny women still stand out in music videos and film (see this video for some background), and conspicuous consumption with lots of expensive clothes and other accessories sets the standard.  Big buttocks are often fetishized, and that says it right there: a fetishized woman is not a person but a sex doll.

Rand also quotes another poem:

"No Images," written by Waring Cuney in 1926, about a woman whose does know the beauty of her brown body: 

If she could dance Naked, 
Under palm trees 
And see her image in the river 
She would know. 
But there are no palm trees 
On the street 
And dish water gives back no images.

Transpose this into a fantasy of a white woman dancing naked in an ancient forest of Teutonic Germany or looking at her reflection in an icy blue Nordic lake, and you can see it for what it is.  As for "palm trees/On the street," there are palm trees on streets in places where palm trees grow, and women are stuck with the dishes in Africa too.  I might try to find the full poem sometime so I can see if these lines are less offensive in context, but far as I can see it's another man's fetishistic fantasy about women.

My point is not that the beauty Barbie represents oppressed white girls as much as black or brown ones; it's that both Hemphill and Cuney sentimentalize "native" lifeways and models of beauty in exactly the same way white people have often done, a tendency Rand criticizes elsewhere in the book.  Would white girls be better served if they danced around trees in the ancient Teutonic forests?  Are young black African girls free from worries about being beautiful enough?  Ideals of beauty militate against the actual, quotidian beauty of real women (and men), and a politically engaged poet like Hemphill could still believe that the answer is as simple as Barbie telling black girls that they are beautiful.  Not if it just replaces constrictive white models with constrictive black or brown ones.

It's not clear how people are actually affected by the commercial media's marketing of images defined as beautiful, and Rand does a good job on that problem.  I think that many if not most people compartmentalize it: in their actual love and erotic lives they are perfectly content with people who don't look like Barbie or Ken, but somewhere in the back of their minds they feel inferior themselves, and believe that they are making do with second-best in their partners.  This, I think, makes it difficult to combat the media imagery.  But there's little doubt that some people respond in self-destructive ways, trying to make their bodies conform to what they've been told, and agree, they should look like.  Twentieth-century advertising and mass media may have made things worse, but they didn't invent the problem: cases of harmful beauty nostrums (whalebone corsets, belladonna, footbinding, etc.) are much older.

I recall a review of Carolyn Heilbrun's biography of Gloria Steinem which described adult women sighing, "She's so beautiful!" and expressing their bafflement that such a beautiful woman would be a feminist.  Myself, I have never thought that Steinem was particularly beautiful, but what I lament is that grown women should think that a woman's beauty is so overarchingly important.  I don't think that men, as guilty as we are, get all the blame for this belief; I think that women are responsible too.  And how odd that it never seems to occur to them that Steinem became a feminist because she was beautiful.

People are torn between the platitude that everyone is beautiful if you can see their inner beauty (but who cares? what people want is outer beauty), and the desire to be the most ideally, uniquely, beautiful.  This contradiction can't be resolved, and we need to get rid of both parts of it.