Thursday, April 27, 2006

The concept of beauty - 2

[part 1]
Let me analyze the factors which shape our perceptions of beauty. Firstly comes the purely personal ones, which are highly subjective in nature. A person in love with somebody will rate his love interest as the most beautiful object ever designed and surprisingly the effect is real (I needn't invoke any personal experience as anybody who has ever been in love will attest to it). Same goes for besotted parents regarding their children. But such highly personal reasons are not the object of current investigation. I want to talk about the factors which apply for a very large section of the population and which in general has a societal sanction. This societal sanction is the object of my study but before that let me discuss some (largely) biological factors.
  1. Fertility / Virility. Anything that is associated with greater mateability/parentability and/or indicates better health/genes viz symmetric faces/bodies, proper waist/hip ratio, ample breasts, smoothness of skin, etc etc ... all these only underline the primarily sexual nature of beauty perception and is obvious to all.
  2. Conformance to the Average. In any society a face/body which does not deviate too far from the average is usually considered beautiful. This has strong evolutionary underpinnings - since most of the surviving adults are likely to harbor good genes (otherwise they would have perished in womb / childhood), so large deviations from average shape/size must indicate faulty genes.
  3. Relative Rarity. This one is in some sense opposite to the 2nd factor and is more complicated. These rarities are also deviations from average but not in the direction of deformity. I am referring to biological rarity in a *small group* like most curvaceous / shapely / buxom / beautiful voice / etc. These relatively rare attributes are almost always judged beautiful as their fertility/virility is *better* than average. How do we subconsciously judge some deviations as good versus others as bad is a fascinating subject of study itself. There are other rarities like green/blue eyes whose status as *beautiful* simply flummoxes me.

Now allow me to turn the spotlight on the societal / cultural factors, which due to its ever changing dynamics are much more interesting and often reveals unknown facets of our own personality.
  1. Upbringing. Let me illustrate this with an example. In ancient Greece the golden ratio (roughly 1.618) was considered especially beautiful (can't term it anything other than a fad) and all the buildings/arenas adhered to this ratio. And all the ancient Greeks agreed that it is the most appealing ratio. Guess what our modern-age kids rate as the most appealing ratio - the rectangle corresponding to television ! That is what they are exposed day and night .. any surprizes ??? Any wonder we Indians blindly equate fair = beautiful.
  2. Fashion. This one is the most whimsical yet extremely interesting factor at work. Throughout human history we have all kinds of rational / irrational whims regarding beauty. The Chinese's foot fetish comes to my mind as a typical irrational fad just as the super-thin emaciated look of today's ramp models. At the rational end of the spectrum, we have the ancient Peruvian's penchant for fat females, (though fat is probably a wrong word to say, as in all probability their beautiful females might just be pleasingly plump) as they are likely to be better at bearing babies than the general starved human population. The archaeological extract of a obese female figurine is most certainly a exaggeration of this preference and may be used only as worship purposes (notice the super sexy bodies of our own Goddesses as depicted in ancient temples - most certainly general population were not so well-fed to achieve those luscious curves). One question comes to my mind : is the preference for thinness today the result of overabundance of food (the reasoning going like - the thinner might better be able to digest in this age of glut, and escape diseases related to over eating) ?
  3. Hierarchy of Power / Politics. This is the one factor which I find most interesting and will talk about in the next article.
Happy Reading ! [part 3]

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Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The concept of beauty - 1

I have always been mystified by the concept of beauty. Since it is necessarily a subjective concept, any objective definition of beauty must be ill-defined. Still, at any point of time, in a given society, opinions do tend to converge on what constitutes a beautiful person. I want to understand the factors which shape this convergence.

I am particularly intrigued by fairness/darkness debate. We Indians usually regard a fair face as prettier than a darker one. Innumerable times, I have heard girls lamenting their lack of fairness or being awed by a fairer girl. Even if they seem fair enough (by my judgement), they never seem to be satisfied by it. The western women on the other hand has the same fascination for tanned skin. Even if their skins screams for protection they endlessly torment themselves by sun-bathing. Lots of them have red freckles all over their bodies (and it does look unhealthy), which may not be caused by sun, but definitely gets aggravated by it. But I am getting astray ... let me stick to Indians for the moment.

I do not blame only the women for such a bias. In fact I firmly believe that the men are more to blame. In part at least, this bias has to do with our colonial legacy, but it may be older than that. It looks more like victor getting (hijacking ?) the right to impose their culture on the loser. But at a subconscious level, the loser also meekly accept the dominance of the victor. This happens in all the primates and there is no reason to believe we humans behave differently. Perhaps the subconscious argument goes like this : since they are the victor, they must be superior in all respects, their men must be stronger and more virile, their women must be more beautiful and more fertile. Ergo, the fair complexion they have must be the reason of their beauty and fertility. So the males tend to liken fairness with greater chances of having babies. This in turn has the predictable effect on the women, which we witness daily at all the conscious/subconscious levels.

On the other hand, we have never accepted blondness with the same enthusiasm. This might signal two things : one, the fairness/darkness dilemma is older than colonial past and hints at some other conquest by some other set of people, who were not blonde ; two, we associate some disability or oldness with white hairs and cannot whole-heartedly accept European idealness.

My personal conviction goes with the first one. Even in our ancient epics, fairness is given a lot of undue importance. I believe, this has to do with the Aryan occupation of Indian landmass, but I may be wrong on this one. One thing does seem beyond doubt - whatever it is, it indicates some conquest by fair-skinned people of darker previous inhabitants of the Indian land mass. Again I am going astray ... let me stick to beauty and not history ....

I will continue .... part 2

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