Re: Dejah Thoris

On Jun 17, 10:50 pm, Tina_H...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Tina Hall) wrote:
Nyrath the nearly wise <nyr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip context; I'm going to digress>

 From A PRINCESS OF MARS:
[...] Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every
feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large [...]

See, that's what doesn't work with descriptions:

Hrmm.

First it says her  
face is oval, then that it's beautiful in the extreme, and then it  
says her eyes are large. One thing contradicting just what came  
before it; plain, beautiful, dead ugly.

Right, really, because how many women in the world are there with oval
faces and large eyes who are widely seen as beautiful?

That just doesn't work out.

It's probably not a good business model, writing books for Temple
Grandin.
 
And no way can you force anyone to agree with what someone perceives  
as beautiful,

Well, maybe, but you could play the percentages. Also, POM is told
first person, so we just have to assume Carter is, you know, like most
other people in terms of what he believes is beautiful.

so why do authors ruin their claim with details that  
say the opposite?

They weren't writing with you in mind, specifically.

"It's widely assumed that ideals of beauty vary from era to era and
from culture to culture. But a harvest of new research is confounding
that idea. Studies have established that people everywhere --
regardless of race, class or age -- share a sense of what's
attractive. And though no one knows just how our minds translate the
sight of a face or a body into rapture, new studies suggest that we
judge each other by rules we're not even aware of. We may consciously
admire Kate Moss's legs or Arnold's biceps, but we're also viscerally
attuned to small variations in the size and symmetry of facial bones
and the placement of weight on the body.

This isn't to say that our preferences are purely innate -- or that
beauty is all that matters in life. Most of us manage to find jobs,
attract mates and bear offspring despite our physical imperfections.
Nor should anyone assume that the new beauty research justifies the
biases it illuminates. Our beautylust is often better suited to the
Stone Age than to the Information Age; the qualities we find alluring
may be powerful emblems of health, fertility and resistance to
disease, but they say nothing about people's moral worth. The human
weakness for what Thornhill calls "biological quality" causes no end
of pain and injustice. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less
real.

NO ONE SUGGESTS THAT points of attraction never vary. Rolls of fat can
signal high status in a poor society or low status in a rich one, and
lip plugs go over better in the Kalahari than they do in Kansas. But
local fashions seem to rest on a bedrock of shared preferences. You
don't have to be Italian to find Michelangelo's David better looking
than, say, Alfonse D'Amato. When British researchers asked women from
England, China and India to rate pictures of Greek men, the women
responded as if working from the same crib ***. And when researchers
at the University of Louisville showed a diverse collection of faces
to whites, Asians and Latinos from 13 countries, the subjects' ethnic
background scarcely affected their preferences.

To a skeptic, those findings suggest only that Western movies and
magazines have overrun the world. But scientists have found at least
one group that hasn't been exposed to this bias. In a series of
groundbreaking experiments, psychologist Judith Langlois of the
University of Texas, Austin, has shown that even infants share a sense
of what's attractive. In the late '80s, Langlois started placing 3-
and 6-month-old babies in front of a screen and showing them pairs of
facial photographs. Each pair included one considered attractive by
adult judges and one considered unattractive. In the first study, she
found that the infants gazed significantly longer at "attractive"
white female faces than at "unattractive" ones. Since then, she has
repeated the drill using white male faces, black female faces, even
the faces of other babies, and the same pattern always emerges. "These
kids don't read Vogue or watch TV," Langlois says. "They haven't been
touched by the media. Yet they make the same judgments as adults."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/102350

""Beauty is in the phi of the beholder."
It has long been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and
thought that beauty varies by race, culture or era. The evidence,
however, shows that our perception of physical beauty is hard wired
into our being and based on how closely one's features reflect phi in
their proportions. Take another look at beauty through the eyes of
medical science.

A template for human beauty is found in phi and the pentagon
Dr. Stephen Marquardt has studied human beauty for years in his
practice of oral and maxillofacial surgery. Dr. Marquardt performed
cross-cultural surveys on beauty and found that all groups had the
same perceptions of facial beauty. He also analyzed the human face
from ancient times to the modern day. Through his research, he
discovered that beauty is not only related to phi, but can be defined
for both genders and for all races, cultures and eras with the beauty
mask which he developed and patented. This mask uses the pentagon and
decagon as its foundation, which embody phi in all their dimensions.
For more information and other examples, see his site at Marquardt
Beauty Analysis."

http://goldennumber.net/beauty.htm
.