Nancy Etcoff

«حجم الوهم القائل أن الجمال يعني الخير هو أمر مذهل حقاً» – ليو تولستوي

بحث في موضوع الجَمال بجوانبه الإيجابية والسلبية على اعتباره ميزة تطورية من جهة، وتركيب مجتمعي كبير التأثير في الحياة اليومية من جهة أخرى.

الجمال هو من المفاهيم المجردة صعبة التعريف والقياس. كما أنه نسبي، تختلف معاييره باختلاف البيئة والعصر ومن شخص لآخر. فالجمال، في الحقيقة، هو في عين الناظر.… (altro)

Well, you can’t judge a book by its cover. Author Nancy Etcoff indirectly suggests she wrote Survival of the Prettiest as a response to Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, in which Ms. Wolf claims (reportedly; I have not read her book) “beauty” is entirely socially constructed and is used to keep women subjected to the Patriarchy. Ms. Etcoff does an excellent job of explaining that although there are some learned and environmental components to beauty it is mostly a product of natural selection – like just about every other component of human behavior.


The explanation is systematic and tinged with humor. You appearance (including scent, sound, and interactions with other senses as well as vision) is a way of convincing a potential mate that you are a good draw in the natural selection sweepstakes. For humans traditional standards of beauty are all things related to youth and health (humans are admittedly a little unique here – in most species that use visual clues for mate selection it’s the female that does the selecting and the male that displays). Etcoff has interesting answers to the classic question – if beauty is not socially constructed, why do different cultures have different standards of beauty? There are several components:


* To a large extent, different cultures don’t have different standards of beauty. There are some extremes – the one usually cited is Ubangi women’s lips – but people from all over (even tribal groups with little or no access to “Western” television or magazines) tend to rank pictures of women according to beauty the same way.


* There is an instinctive component – babies as young as three days old spend more time looking at pictures of beautiful people when presented with an assortment. (I admit I would like to know a little more about how these experiments were done. Could there be a “Clever Hans” effect here, with the baby picking up clues from a person presenting the pictures, not the pictures themselves?)


* There’s also a learned component, and it works in an interesting way. Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin) attempted to prove that there are “criminal physiognomies” by averaging photographs of prison inmates (I wonder how that was done in the days before morphing?) To Galton’s surprise, the “average” criminal turned out to be a pretty handsome fellow. Further studies show that people’s beauty rankings tend to reflect the distance between the target and the average for that particular culture. Thus it seems that people don’t have an instinctive beauty template, but they do have an instinctive “average”. In the West, as the faces people see on the streets and in the media become more racially and ethnically diverse, the “average” also shifts; and thus people today are more likely to judge racially different faces as “beautiful” than they were 50 years ago (again, this is another one where I’d like to look at the experiments. Were (for example) whites ranking blacks more beautiful in 1990 than they did in 1940 a result of a genuine change in standards or the fear of seeming politically incorrect? A properly blinded experiment would prevent this.)


* Actual attempts to “construct” beauty haven’t been very successful. A lot of Renaissance mathematicians devoted considerable effort to describing the ideal face in terms of proportions and ratios – nose width to lip height, distance from chin to eyebrows, etc. However, the mathematics didn’t end up conforming to what artists of the time (or now) actually portrayed as beautiful.


It’s clear that beauty has rewards. Men presented with a selection of pictures generally picked the most beautiful one (based on previous rankings by other men) as the one they would be the most likely to ask out or offer a ride or help if stranded or protect from a mad dog. (Interestingly, the one thing men were less likely to do for a beautiful woman than an ugly one is loan her money. There is probably a library worth of further studies that could be done on that). Women’s response to handsome men is still there, but much less pronounced.


Ms. Etcoff discusses beauty modifiers – makeup, plastic surgery, clothes – and other components – scent, voice, body hair – at some length. It was interesting but there were no great surprises. All claims are documented in endnotes, and there’s an extensive bibliography. The book (copyright 1999) is a little dated; I wonder if there’s a second edition planned. And based on her photograph in the front matter, Ms. Etcoff is hot.… (altro)