Re: OT - on beauty

In article <JGMpMp.EMF@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:

In article <46245f9c$0$21929$157c6196@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Peter Knutsen <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
Tony Williams <Tony.Williams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
Now I would have expected that such a face would look completely
ordinary, the kind you would pass in the street without noticing.
Instead, I was startled to see that these faces were very attractive,
even beautiful. Now there is of course a lot more to attractiveness
and beauty than simply the regularity of features, but that is usually
an important basic element. That got me thinking about the nature and
purpose of beauty (with apologies if this is entirely unoriginal, but
it's the first time it's occurred to me).

It has been known for a long time -- back when composite
photographs were being made by exposing the same film briefly to
lots of different faces -- that composite faces look very
beautiful.

In spite of which "sexually"[1] attractive faces often are not ordinary,
but instead deviate quite a lot from the average in several regards.

[1] For lack of a better word.

But sexually attractive isn't the same as beautiful. People use
the word loosely, inaccurately. If a man says a tree, a sunset,
or a waterfall is beautiful, he doesn't mean the same thing as
when he says a woman is beautiful. He isn't interesting in
taking the tree, sunset, or waterfall to bed.

More specifically, sexually attractive (in a woman anyway)
corresponds to what the man's primitive ancestor would have
thought umpteen generations ago: lots of extra flesh on her
bones, indicating that she could bring his kids to term.
Beautiful things by today's aesthetic standards, on the other
hand, are long and lean and full of straight or slightly curving
lines, and in order even to approximate that kind of esthetic,
people (female or otherwise) have to look over-slender to the
point of ill-health and/or infertility. The primitive ancestor
would not understand.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx

There's an article in last Sunday's Times (in a fashion
supplement) about how modern standards of feminine
beauty in the West have become extremely peculiar, the
body becoming emaciated and the face more and more
child-like (big round forehead, huge eyes low on the
face, pouty lips, nearly vanished nose, long thin neck
that makes the head look bigger, weak and fragile body
with hardly any definition). No connection was made
to the feminist observation that the more rights and
freedoms Western women have achieved, the more
the iconic images of them have been regressed to a
highly sexualized but physically pre-pubescent (no
breasts, no hips, long but shapeless legs) look, as if
males need reassurance that women are *not*
autonomous adults after all, only seductive babies
existing only to attract, charm, and obey males. Not
that real women look like this, but they must strive
for this eteliolated look in order to attract men
instead of frightening them away by any appearance
of adulthood.

Reproduction has pretty much nothing to do with it
at this level. In the US, at any rate, I'm talking
about the cossetted children of whatever we're calling
the middle class now, raised to be children themselves
all their lives. They don't acknowledge the aging process
itself, let alone the inevitability of personal death (why
bother with kids if you're sure you're going to hang on
until the docs make that immortality breakthrough?).
It's not the world, of course; it's not even America,
where the majority goes on as before (knowing
perfectly well that even if the live-forever pill appears
it's not going to make its way down to them any time
soon). But there is this immensely strange, deliberately
constructed ideal of *fashionable* beauty (constructed
at base to help sell expensive "beauty" accessories and
processes to women) that this culture has developed
and is trying hard to sell to the rest of the world as
well.

Just musing right back at you . . . in an SFnal vein, of
course.

SMC
.

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