Beauty And The Labcoat

The obsession modern human society has with beauty is an outgrowth of the need for the species to procreate, which is an evolutionary imperative enforced through natural selection to drive the continued diversification of the species, to allow for its success in adapting to changes in environment. A rudimentary system to ensure the survival of our species, dragged along into the modern era through the auspices of our DNA, we have taken it, expanded it, "codified" it, and then attempted to enforce it, through media and opinion. Beauty has gone from a primitive device to the bane of human society.

Nowhere is that more evident than in a remarkably troubling event that took place this week, when Psychology Today -- a magazine loosely dedicated to the dissemination of useful knowledge in the field of psychology -- printed a tract by Satoshi Kanazawa that was entitled “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?” It was another in a series of diatribes dressed as science by the author, seeking to apply a veneer of scientific legitimacy to sexist and racist ideas in the disreputable field of "evolutionary psychology." It was attempting to paint a picture of black women as "undesirable" compared to "social norms"; instead, it painted a picture of a bigoted author trying to justify that bigotry, an all too common practice over the centuries. Science has now usurped scripture as the medium by which nonsensical, biased, and backward ideas are perpetuated and reinforced.

Who Are You?

What matters most to people? How much money you have? The kind of house you own? What you do? How you look? Your IQ?

Right now, society has a case of weight sensitization, which is taking on proportions that would have it seem that issues such as war, poverty, and global climate change are mere bagatelles. The chatter about what is healthy, what you should eat, how much you should eat, how large you are, how fat you are, how skinny you are, ad infinitum, is such that people are being reduced from feeling beings to sacks of proteins, fats, amino acids, and other chemicals.

This goes beyond the divisive and elusive ideal of beauty, to a fundamental conception that, like intelligence, health can be boiled down to a single characteristic, trait, or even number. That soon, we may be nothing more than a set of numbers like IQ, weight, BMI, etc., is both frightening and perverse. It is the modern reflection of inherent classicism that continues to plague us. We feel a need to place people into convenient, calibrated categories and to organize them on a continuum that allows us to determine exactly where we stand in relation to "them."

It is no longer enough to judge people on the scale of "beauty," but to break down and quantify the qualities that make them "less beautiful" or "less attractive" than someone else, or even less "like us." A person must conform or be condemned.

This rush to judgment, this desire to force society into some absolutism of type, feeds on our more destructive impulses, those dark demons of our ancestry that marked different things as threats, to be avoided, shunned, or killed. Given our evolved state, where we have the mental horsepower to override our baser instincts, it is sad to see how easily we are seduced by them, turned from reasoning individuals into fanatical mob. Even as we strive for greater tolerance of race, sexual orientation, gender, et. al., we turn inward and succumb to the intolerance of our animal brain, chopping people down rather than reaching out to pull them up.

In the end, the success and survival of human society is predicated on our ability to throw off the shackles of our evolutionary past and reach beyond our instincts. We must look past the face, the body, the eyes, and see what is inside people. And not just see, but learn to tolerate the differences, no matter how radical. This will prove to be a far greater struggle than the switch from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society, but the rewards for success will be immeasurable, compared to the possibility of our species becoming nothing more than a cosmic footnote.

Pretty's Pervasive Evil

If it is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the society's eyesight must be atrocious. I say this as the father of a 4-year-old daughter, who is frightened by the idea that society will be the arbiter of my daughter's worth, the self-same society which cannot avoid the perils of war, poverty, and disease, despite the wherewithal it possesses.

My daughter is beautiful to me, just as any child is beautiful to a parent. I daresay others have found her attractive since her birth, as people never fail to remark on it when we are out in public. And while, when she was a baby, that a source of pride for me, as she grows older, I wonder what these people are really driving at. I'm sure they see her and apply their standard of "beauty" and it concurs with mine to some degree. Yet, at what point does this go beyond the good-natured acknowledgement of "beauty" and enter the realm of impropriety? When, as she grows older, will what is said or not said impact her self-worth? When will she begin to see her father's adoration of her beauty as just "Daddy being Daddy" and place more importance on the opinions of strangers?

I see the toll that the modern concept of "beauty" takes on women every day. The physical "ideal" of womanhood shrinks further as seasons pass, forcing women into making compromises in order to keep up with what society deems appropriate for a "beautiful" woman. Such is the constant cacophony and clamoring, that a woman cannot know from one second to the next if she is beautiful. Advertisements and fashion magazine covers tell her that she is not good enough as she is, but must become thinner, taller, more voluptuous. She is told that she must go beyond the physical gifts she was born with if she is ever to be society's ideal woman.

How else to explain a disease where a woman allows herself to waste away to a condition which a concentration camp survivor would consider svelte? That she would eat food willingly, only to vomit it back up, as if it were poison? Or worse, simply not eat at all? How does a society that rails at the idea of innocents dying in wars, children going malnourished, or babies not being born justify the undue pressure it places squarely upon the shoulders of women, telling them they need to "be more beautiful?"

Worse yet, the messages this idiotic roller coaster ride imparts on young girls, who are inculcated with the same weird and twisted ideas at an age where they should be allowed to be free from the weight of the world. Instead, they too are made to feel they are inadequate, and not just academically or socially. The evil is incubated and bred in the teenage girl, to be borne by the woman she becomes, who feels she cannot fulfill each person's expectations adequately, and seeks solace in driving herself to the knife's edge of health, determined to be "beautiful." The ride careens toward self-destruction, and only a unguarded moment or the love of others can drag her back from the precipice. Too often, it is too late.

Vanity is not the sole province of the woman though, for Narcissus was a man who thought himself so beautiful that he could not tear himself away from his reflection. Unlike a woman, a man is driven to be taller, stronger, beefier. He must build himself into a mass of chiseled flesh, to do combat with his fellow men on any field called for. Modern Samson's, men are rendered impotent should their heads not be covered in a thick mane of hair. And so men are just as easily poisoned by society's ruinous conception of beauty.

We will not truly evolve until we can put aside the outmoded belief that there is a template to desirability, a pattern that states unequivocally that a person is worthy of our affection. Until we do, we are no better than many of our animal brethren, who put on elaborate displays for the sole purpose of mating. We must look past the beauty without, which is ephemeral, and look to the beauty within, which is ageless.