Beauty Secrets

 

            I have long been a student of beautiful women.  I thought I would grow out of it, but I haven’t.  Curiously, I do not hesitate to admit it.  Nor am I ashamed of myself.  It largely indicates, as far as I can tell, that I am still breathing and that my brain waves are not entirely flat.  I don't think I ogle or leer, but perhaps I may occasionally tarry too long in my gaze.  Though I try to be discrete, I fear that sometimes I am not.  It is possible that I am in fact, at times, quite transparent in my admiration.  If that is so, I am contrite.  I mostly apologize.  Though I'm not entirely sure why.

 

Beauty is a curious thing.  Historically, it has led tribes and nations to war and certainly changed the course of human events time and again.  The Greek and Roman gods were all susceptible to the charms of Beauty.  They used it to bargain and manipulate and influence.  As do we.  It is bought and sold in the Marketplace.  Everyday.  All over the World.  Often at great price.  Beauty is Power.  Universally, it is money in the bank.

 

 Of course Beauty is almost exclusively feminine.  It is in this area that the sexes are really not very equal.  Masculine beauty has played a role from time to time in the course of things, but mostly in a minor way.  Handsome will get you a few votes or sell some tickets, but it's not an everyday force like Female Beauty.  Beautiful Women have doors opened for them that the rest of us are required to knock on, beat on, take tests, present resumes and pay bribes to get through.  Beautiful Women are not at all like you and I

.          

It would be naïve to think that Beauty is not linked to sex.  Of course it is.  Most everything is.  But Pretty in particular is.  We act differently around It.  We change the rules to accommodate It.  This is because there is generally some faint hope of seduction in the air.  Even for the oldest and lumpiest of us, there is some stray thought of sexual interaction.  Even if we wouldn't.  Even if we couldn't.  It is a well known fact that fantasies persist well beyond the remotest possibility of fulfillment.   But mostly it is that men just enjoy being around beautiful women.  They enjoy looking at and vaguely flirting with those women, however unattainable, whose bodies and features exemplify that which the culture deems desirable.  I don’t entirely get it.  In this case, I do it and I don’t get it.  The logic is buried in obscure parts of our animal brains.

 

All of this of course begs the question of what is Beauty.   It seems so wound up with the roots of biology and reproduction as to be indecipherable even to us.  I have read that perceived Beauty has less to do with the exceptional than the average. The fact is that we visually scan each other and look for symmetry.  Our eyes and brains make subliminal measurements, calculate angles and compare values and ratios to arrive at the absolute geometric mean, which is our measure of Beauty.  It turns out that Beauty is less about the exotic than the very ordinary.  The most perfect symmetry is how we define health and, by extension, Beauty.  It is the extreme average.

 

But what's so pretty about that?  Well, we humans are looking for the external manifestations of internal, genetic normalcy. These angles and ratios are connected to normalcy which is related to reproductive capacity.  It is thought that the typically average is attractive because the average suggests something which has adapted to its environment and is healthy.  Good looks are a sign of health and of being relatively disease-free.   Long, shiny hair, for example, is not intrinsically more beautiful than short hair.  The preference for long, shiny hair evolved because that indicated a healthy, well-nourished body.  Good teeth are important.  So you get points for a nice smile.  Evolution has so shaped our brains and minds that we find most beautiful  those faces and bodies which are most suggestive of being suitably fit for healthy reproduction. We are attracted to what works as a species.  Imagine that!

 

Age and experience, by the way, are not positive Beauty Factors.  As a rule, they do not accentuate Beauty.  Age, in fact, obscures Beauty.  It wrinkles It, blurs It, dulls It.  Facial asymmetry tends to increase with age, as does sagging and bagging, stooping and drooping.  The natural attractors diminish.  Read ‘em and weep.  But in procreative logic, this makes perfect sense.  Younger women are more likely to conceive and bear healthy young and survive the experience.  Of course youth has the advantage. The link between Beauty and Sexual Reproduction is still a short one, even though we have been de-linked from the pressures of procreation for hundreds of generations.  We are hard-wired, biologically determined, to ensure the survival of the species.  At the end of the day, our primitive, furry brains are still looking for partners to breed with.

 

            But some elements of Beauty are highly variable.  They vary from age to age and culture to culture.  It used to be for example that heft was beautiful.  When we struggled seriously for food, women with meat on their bones were considered more desirable since they were more successful somehow in the skill of acquiring and consuming food.  Padded hips and thunder thighs were serious attractors.  Whoo-whoo!  In other ages, when almost all of us were peasant farmers, women with pale skin were thought attractive since it meant that they were successful enough to have avoided the ardure of outside labor.  Now of course, thin and tanned are the standards.  They are indicators of the current marker for success--- ceaseless self-absorption.

 

            In the present world, it strikes me that Beauty, real and apparent, has never been more paramount.  An incredible amount of time, attention and money are devoted to the end-purpose of making women more attractive.  Or less old.  In the United States, more money is spent on Beauty than on education or social services.  And that’s not counting laser technology, microsurgery and injection therapy.  From toenails to highlights, women buff and polish themselves for the purpose of being noticed.

 

This is not to say that men are not conscious of their own looks.  They are indeed.  They struggle mightily to keep their hair, and they fuel a highly profitable steroid trade to get those real showy abs.  But if you look at the numbers, men are just not in the same cosmetic league.  And a casual look around most any bathroom will quickly verify that.  A little Wildroot Crème Oil goes a long way.

 

Nope. No question.  In this department, Women Rule.  And further, unless I’m mistaken, the trend is to outline, accentuate, boost and generally expose the female form.  From a very early age.   My research is incomplete and based solely on visual investigation, but I’d say there are more square centimeters of exposed female flesh today than at any point in recorded history---going back to the point at which we began to wear any clothes at all.  No wonder Muslims are mad.  While boys’ shorts are pretty much indistinguishable from long pants, women’s shorts have gotten teenier.  Necklines on everyday wear go South while engineering innovations and light-weight alloys push and nudge and crowd the female breast well into the Northern Hemisphere.  And some exposed midriff is now de rigueur.  Belly buttons are objects of ornamentation, ringed and tattooed.  Even ankles and toes are bangled and bejeweled.  Yowza!  There’s sure plenty to look at.

           

Understand, this is not a trend I necessarily oppose.  Au contraire.  It’s a wonderful time to be alive.   As trends go, I pay attention to this one.  Let it be known that I support the undraping and decoration of the female form in everyday fashion.

 

Though as a student of the Art Form, I must say I am suspicious of it.  As I generally am of that which is vanity-driven.  There are aspects of the Beauty Game which are disturbing.  Primarily I suppose because it is dishonest and promotes shallow attention, which we, on most levels, profess to abhor.  Although it is true that Beauty is Power, it is often False and it’s always Temporary.

 

There are elements of the old bait-and-switch here.  Deception is a tool to influence the outcome.  But that's the way it's always been, I guess.  Nature has always used trickery for its singular purpose.  Which is Survival.  Which ultimately involves Procreation.  Which is intrinsically bound up with the attraction of Beauty---or the perception of It.  Ah, what a wonderfully woven web is this World.  Caveat emptor.  Let the buyer beware.