Defining Beauty
by sandi tomlin-sutker

I've been thinking a lot about beauty and fashion lately, now that my five-year-old granddaughter has begun to realize clothes are not just something you put on to keep the sand and bugs off your skin.

Yep, she has realized clothes are used to attract others (boys, especially) and I'm frustrated and fearful! Just look at the length of skirts for teen-age girls. As my daughter complained, while shopping for a friend just turning sixteen: "They won't even cover her pubic hair!"

It's hard to argue that clothing is more and more sexualized, even for young girls. Now, I'm all for freedom of expression, in clothing, in words and actions, but just what are these fashions expressing?

Ok, maybe you think I'm being extreme. If so, just take a little shopping trip to any local department store and you will see what I mean. It would be easy to blame Britney Spears' mom for allowing her young and influential daughter to dress in provocative, seductive clothing. But she is just at the end of a long line of women who have believed in "dress for success". And why do we, the consumers, feel compelled to buy these clothes? Why do we buy into certain images of beauty and style and reject others? How is it that the big designers have so much influence and power over what is available in shops, but more importantly how we view ourselves when we look into the mirror? Are they simply exploiting the natural tendency of humans to want to belong, to be an identifiable member of our tribe?

There is a theory out there in the world of arcane research that humans are attracted by characteristics that are based in biology and the drive to procreate. Women are attracted to men who appear strong and able to bring home the bacon but also able to help care for their children. Men are attracted to women who look as though they are capable of bearing and caring for healthy offspring. Several analyses have confirmed that women considered to be exceptionally attractive¡ªVenus de Milo, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe, even Barbie¡ªhave a waist-to-hip ratio of .7 or less. For you math challenged folks (like me) this means smaller waist, larger hips-the classic pear shape.

The oldest image of a woman is a 25,000 year-old cave etching in France. It is of a nude woman with a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of .58. If her waist were, say, 25¡±, then her hips would have measured 43¡± ¨C a decidedly "hippy chick"! Marilyn's ratio was .66 (we're told she wore a size 14 dress), Barbie's is .7 (that 25¡± waist would yield hips of 35.7¡±) and a 20 year study of Playboy centerfolds showed progressively thinner women with a WHR of, yes, .7.

If there is this innate, hard-wired attraction based in the biology of procreation, why this trend toward the idealized image of Woman becoming less and less womanly? Why has there been a trend, ever since Twiggy, toward thinner, hipless, even androgynous, female role models? And at the same time, the increased focus on voluptuous, highly exposed breasts?

In addition to attraction based on body shape and size, there are many studies of what is attractive in faces of women and men. Apparently, as early as two months old, humans have an "internal averaged ideal" of an attractive face. The female facial ideal is one that is more feminized: arched brows, slender nose, small chin, etc. The male ideal is the opposite in most ways: low, protruding brow, strong, squared jaw. In several studies participants looked at morphed and averaged photos of men. There was a point where increased masculinity was counter-attractive. It seems that, on the evolutionary level, women want a man whose strong jaw indicates an ability to chew lots of nutrients out of his food, but do not want the stereotypical caveman who won't be there to help nurture the offspring!

If it is true, as Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser wrote (over 400 years ago), that Beauty is the bait which, with delight, allures man to enlarge his kind¡±, what role does society play in reinforcing those images, or as seems to be happening now, contradicting our deep knowing of what is natural and vital for fertility, healthy skin, prevention of osteoporosis, etc., i.e., fat on the hips and thighs! Is it true, as Harvard Medical School psychologist Nancy Etcoff wrote in her 1999 book Survival of the Prettiest: The idea that beauty is unimportant or a cultural construct is the real beauty myth. We have to understand beauty, or we will always be enslaved by it." Or was Naomi Wolf closer to the truth when she wrote The Beauty Myth, in which she argues that women's insecurities are heightened by these unrealistic images, then exploited by the diet, cosmetic, and plastic surgery industries?

As in most things, the truth is probably somewhere in an illusive middle ground. It¡¯s difficult to discount studies such as the one in which a researcher showed line drawings of more than twelve women with different body shapes to members of one of the most primitive tribes on earth, the Shiwair of Ecuador. When asked to pick out the most attractive women, they invariably chose those with more distinction between hips and waist, women who, in the salient words on one man, would ¡°give me six, eight, ten children.¡±

If these studies are accurate, we very well might expect women and men to accentuate those characteristics in themselves in order to attract mates. And it would seem that a natural human tendency to judge attractiveness by biological, sexual criteria has created in the commercial market economy images that exploit that tendency. Yet, there is this paradox of increasingly emaciated models and actresses influencing all of us toward bodies that are the opposite of healthy procreating machines!

I don't pretend to have answers to these questions. WNC Woman will continue this dialogue with your responses to this article and to our Survey in this issue. And in the July issue we will look more deeply at body image as a part of this discussion.

Statistics about WHR and facial attractiveness from Isn't She Lovely by Brad Lemley, Discover: Vol. 21, No. 2 (Feb 1000)