From the Notebook

About Beauty

blogqz01 | 30 November, 2009 17:56

It is human nature that people are drawn to beauty. In fact, the humanists that led the movement had hailed “Truth, Goodness, and Beauty” as foundation of humanism.

But just as pursuing truth and goodness often leads to problematic results due to the tendency of absoluteness, so is the pursuing of beauty. Particularly, people often view beauty too narrowly and too broad at the same time.

When we think of beauty, first and foremost, we think of something visual. But visual beauty is the expression of something beyond visual. There are constant attempt to find formula to define beauty, from the golden rule, to the S shape, and to most recently computer programs to calculate attractiveness of human face. But following the rules do not necessarily produce beauty, and things could be beautiful even significantly deviate from the rules.

When people are talking about beauty, natural beauty often is highly valued. Mostly it is because that it does not necessary follow the rules, yet manages to be beautiful in its own right, so it often teach us more about beauty. The unpredictable nature of beauty certainly is one of the joys of life, without it, life will be too predictable thus the sense of adventure will often be lost.

Although beauty cannot be tightly bound by the rules, beauty is not entirely instinctive. It is true that different people will view things differently, people will often repeating the famous phrase “beauty is in the eyes of beholders”, but the sense of beauty can be learned, often can be influenced, and changes from time to time.

Not only people like to see beauty, they also want to be beautiful. If being beautiful has its advantage before, it has more advantage now. But as no rules can be relied on to pursue beauty, and there is disagreement as what is beauty, pursuing beauty is often on a bumpy road.

There is a term that is loosely related to beauty which further confuses the understanding about beauty, which is sexy. But analyzing it might shine some light on the meaning of beauty. While the word beauty in general are not intended to be related to specific purpose, sexy clearly is related to specific purpose, it is the appeal and attractiveness of the person to the others related to sexual activities.

For a person, being beautiful is more related to social effects, while being sexy is more related to personal effects. But as the society of people more focus on sexual activities, being sexy often takes the place of being beautiful.

In fact, as the word sexy become more and more mainstream, the difference between beautiful and sexy becomes smaller and smaller. In short, being sexy is not just being sexual, it seems to relate more to the overall personality of the person.

Beauty first and foremost is a visual thing, so a person’s physical attributes certainly carry important weight in deciding what is beautiful. But beauty is the overall impression of something in the view of a person, so it is not as static as one might think, actions and interactions do count, so personalities do come into play.

To be honest rare beauty is just that, rare. But most of us with some help and adjustment could be acceptably presentable. So the talk about beauty is not pure academic discussion. We would want to know what to do.

Just like great art is not purely in the form of craftsmanship, great beauty is not purely in the form of visual appeals. It ought to be embodiment of certain ideal, and at least an overall presentation. Just like an artist who works on a painting, when we try to put something together (makeup, clothing etc.), there ought to be a purpose or overall effect that we intend to achieve. When we comment on it, taste or style is often mentioned. The new golden rule seems to be: “less is more”.

Personally, I am a fan of minimalism but I believe the rule of “less is more” can be applied more broadly, meaning not trying too hard. I think by now most of the people that paying attention about fashion know about not to be too over the top on using makeup, clothing etc. But many in the attempt of trying to be perfect falling into the trap of lack of originality and breath of life, thus although the results of their attempt might look good in a gleam, but not beautiful in the end.

The word “fashion” is the result of commercial influences. But for me, putting personal distinctive features and interests aside and remaking themselves under the same ideas is a very disturbing idea. Perhaps having a trendy bag or something like it is more of status symbol than pure attempt on beauty (similar to the indigent people putting on decorative articles).

Although beauty and attraction are mostly instinctive, social conscious does and will influence our sense of beauty. The worrying trend of social influence now is the obsessions with youth and being thin, and the obsessions about beauty.

This a theory surfaced in recent years that linked men’s sexual behaviors with animal instincts related to nature selection, stating that men want to be with as much sexual partners as possible so that to spread the seeds. But the same animal instinct theory would contradict the trend of obsession with beauty, and with youth and being thin.

People had been saying that beautiful people may have biologically superior genes, thus sexual attractions to beautiful people will likely to lead to better off-springs. But the theory is lack of factual support. There are plenty of cases where beautiful couples will have plain children, and plain couples might have beautiful children. Does this means that their genes are all of sudden degraded or upgraded?

We cannot deny that while young women might be more fertile, they are also the least experienced, so that they might not be able to provide better care for the children (several studies on mammal animals seem to suggest that their selections of mating are not based on ages). And, being too thin might actually hurt the health of their further offspring. All these indicated that the social trends are not necessarily evolutionary behaviors that carries internal justifications, in my opinions, many of the trends are the results of chances and narrow minded obsessions.

There will be negative social impacts of emphasizing beauty, youth and being thin. While everyone wants to look good, it still is an absolute insult to say that a woman is plain, or just not beautiful. We can hear many comments about women not being beautiful, the underlining meaning seems to suggest that they would be considered worthless or useless. It clearly indicated that in the society, women are constantly being objectified. It is not only harmful, it does not actually reflect the truth.

There are many attempts to educate young girls not to be over obsessed with physical beauty. While the attempt is noble, in my opinion the emphasis is still misplaced. There are many talks about inner beauty or true beauty. But this kind of talk is confusing, thus are still misleading.

First, beauty has visual elements. Although a person (or in this case a girl) could have all the good natures and personalities in her, she could still not be beautiful. Ignoring this fact will only make the argument non-persuasive.

I think the right approach is not to call good nature, good personality and good behavior, superb abilities etc. as inner beauty, true beauty or anything related to beauty. We ought to realize that there are more important things in life than beauty (remember, that truth and goodness are placed prior to beauty in humanism movement, and the beauty is not just referring to physical beauty).

Throughout history and especially in modern day, there are plenty of example of women enjoy fulfillment in life, happiness and success without being beautiful. In fact, there are many beautiful women who had tragic lives. Beauty often becomes commodity so that the human factor is often ignored.

The emphasis on beauty is often related to fantasy. When in fantasy, everything ought to be perfect, thus first the outside will be beautiful. But when people transferring fantasy to reality, many would end up focusing on the outside alone, and assume that rest of the good things would also be true.

If people are not misled by this assumption, they will focus more on other features of the person that they will have contact on. Paying more attention on their personalities and behaviors would help people to choose the right people to be associated with, and improve the quality of life for them.

If most people can focus more on the substance, personality and behavior, it will provide more incentive for people to focus on their own development, personality and behavior. This will provide a healthy mechanism for social and personal happiness.

It is true that most people cannot be called beautiful, but most of us don’t need to be beautiful to feel fulfilled, happy, and successful. It is important for women, especially young girl to know it.