The Popular But False Conception of Beauty

I too agree that darker haired women are more attractive, but you have to be of a certain complexion to carry it off. I'm naturally very pale soif I had dark hair I'd looklike a goth! Whereas most skin types can carry off lighter shades of hair well.

As for skinny women - I think thats more of a townie issue! I live in the country, and most country girls are a bit on the plump side as it is so far to get anywhere so we tend to go everywhere by car. Personally, I'd like a flatter belly and thinner thighs but I think if I dropped below, say, 10 stone I wouldn't be attractive. I've had many many copmpliments as a size 12-14 and I'm happy eating what I eat and how my clothes look.

Maybe its a self esteem thing. Maybe the media is just bullying women into thinking that way because all women want to be beautiful. We're subjected the moment we start reading teen magazines at about the age of 12-13. Is it any wonder we're all insecure?

Thanks for the comment.

I would've thought that people who live in the country would be fitter because there's less access to high-fat supermarket-bought food, and less public transport. I can see arguments for both sides though.

Thanks for another thoughtful, thorough post.

In my opinion the difference between appeal of naturally alluring women and the thin aesthetic promoted by fashion is that the former is instinctive and natural and the later is a commodification. We are suseptible to this commodification because of the role the media plays as a surrogate, extended social group.

In modelling for physical beauty to be made into a product a particular aesthetic must be seperated off and isolated. We see more and more obscure, elitist aesthetics occuring in all the 'finest' arts. For example in cooking; how about eating the pate of the liver of a duck that has been force fed corn? Thats the delicacy of 'foie gras'.

A very interesting article although there is one thing I'll like to argue--- instead of a western culture, I think it is a global one.
I live in Taiwan which is in the opposite side, but this phenomenon still exist. In my opinion, this might contribute to the technology and globalisation thing: you know, with all the information flowing synchronally without almost any trouble, people tend to receive their first-hand inform on mass media, and consequently, the mass media become their opinion leader.
I don't see this issue as an aesthetic problem, it's just people don't want to be isolated by the world they live in.

whatever lily cole has an unusal but nice face it's different and most people like it. You just get kicks about insulting others and yer kate moss isn't the best person in the world, but who are you to judge. And if men only went for brown hair then people won't dye thier hair blonde. Any hair colour is nice aslong as it suites the person. The only thing i agree with you is the fact about sick thin isn't pretty. And also tends to kill. They obbisally have emotioal issues, the pressure to be the best. And yes i come back to the top part certian models are very very very ugly, but not lily cole or Sienna Miller she is very pretty and you have obbisally being asking the wrong guys about these lot.

Im sorry if i sound a bitch, but all im saying is think before you write, for instance don't judge a book by it's cover. That is whats happing here you don't know them, you don't know what kind of person they are you just see them and contatly go on about them. For instance would you just go up to a girl in the street and call her a alien or ugly for that matter. NO and just stop being mean.

I don't really care about these people's personalities. I'm not judging them on their personalities but only on their appearance. Not once do I make any sort of claim that they are bad people.

I wouldn't go up to anybody in the street and call them ugly. These people are good examples of the kind that you can do that to. What would they care anyway? Going up to Kate Moss and telling her she's ugly would be like going up to Damien Hirst and telling him he's a bad artist. He is a bad artist! He probably knows he's a bad artist. But it won't bother him that somebody else believes that because he gets paid millions for his art, and so the insult will mean nothing to him: it may even comfort him that not the whole world is insane enough to buy his rubbish "art".

Men only prefer blondes because traditionally, women with lighter hair are younger. That is the same reason why they like women with large breasts. Traditionally, women with firm large breasts are younger, so it's just a way of telling how young a woman is. It is not an indicator of their beauty, especially not in the modern age where both blonde hair and large breasts are found in abundance amongst older women.

I think what you're trying to say here originally is that beauty is entirely subjective but that we're all enticed by the desire for status into accepting someone else's subjective idea of beauty as 'objective'. The someone else being the industries that make money out of our status driven insecurity and dissatisfaction.

You ask:

"Why do women think it is beautiful to be extremely thin?"

Because they are coerced into it by a society that keeps them in a childlike state of external referencing. Instead of growing up and becoming adults who use their own internal intelligence they are persuaded to become image obsessed and insecure at adolescence and they continue, like a child looking to its parents for what's right or wrong or how to behave, to look to external references for everything asking: Tell me what I should be wearing. Tell me what I should look like. Tell me what I should say. Tell me who I am.

Men are victims of this too - which you show by going into a dialogue about your own subjective view of which women are beautiful but expecting us to see your opinion as objective. The evidence you give that Kate Moss is ugly is that you think it and you have asked some men around you.

The truth is that some men will find Kate Moss very appealing and some will find her unappealing. Some will be indifferent.

This is only based on your subjective definition of beauty. My definition is as follows:

Beauty, without the fears and worries about status, is actually nothing at all to do with hair colour or body size or shape. Beauty is seen in the moment and it comes from a quality that isn't measurable or describable in terms of image. Beauty gives you a feeling of being awestruck and it makes you draw breath.

I have seen many stunningly beautiful people who don't physically conform to any 'standard ideal'.

Men and women are lucky that this social and media manipulation of their desires only affects those who are shallow enough and insecure enough to really need their choice to be approved of by the general population (which in my opinion is far uglier a quality than any physical defect can ever be) or else those millions of people who don't conform physically would be left unable to experience romantic and sexual relationships. This is, obviously, not the case.

As for your own subjective view, as a big breasted blonde myself, I find I can't possibly agree with you on that. And luckily for me, I could find you plenty of men whos subjective view differs entirely from yours about what constitutes beauty. :-)

I just read this:

"Men only prefer blondes because traditionally, women with lighter hair are younger."

Ok. I'm glad you've got an objective stance on this and are confident enough to state it as a true fact.

That is the same reason why they like women with large breasts.

Again I like your confidence that your subjective beliefs (whether received information or internally generated thought) are fundamental truth. I wish I could be so sure about other people in this way. I envy you your security.

"Traditionally, women with firm large breasts are younger, so it's just a way of telling how young a woman is. It is not an indicator of their beauty, especially not in the modern age where both blonde hair and large breasts are found in abundance amongst older women."

I don't really get this. You say that large breasts are a way of telling how young a woman is - not how beautiful she is.

Then you say you can't judge how young a woman is (I think) by this because these days large breasts occur in older women.

You contradict yourself here. Can you explain?

I find your conservatism fascinating. That a student of philosophy can be so dogmatic in his opinion is unusual to say the least.

Yes my position here is that beauty is subjective. But at the same time, there are some people who say that beauty is objective and it is the properties XYZ. The point of my post is to say that most people, as far as I know, actually believe the properties of beauty are not X, Y or Z, regardless of whether they are subjective or objective.

I quote:

You ask:
"Why do women think it is beautiful to be extremely thin?"
Because they are coerced into it by a society that keeps them in a childlike state of external referencing. Instead of growing up and becoming adults who use their own internal intelligence they are persuaded to become image obsessed and insecure at adolescence and they continue, like a child looking to its parents for what's right or wrong or how to behave, to look to external references for everything asking: Tell me what I should be wearing. Tell me what I should look like. Tell me what I should say. Tell me who I am.

I agree with everything you say here. Your tone suggests that you think that this aspect of society should be changed because of the negative consequences you mention. I disagree because I believe that there are more positive consequences as a result. I think that in normal societies, for example, British society until the end of the 2nd World War, it would have been good for any child to embrace society’s image of what is beautiful, because that will increase their chances of reproducing which for most of them is their sole life ambition, and ensures the society continues to grow.

I think something strange happened after the war. Before then there was fashion, but it was fashion designed to get women married and reproducing. I think three factors have contributed to the way fashion is today. Firstly, capitalism has led to the dissolution of the peasant class. Everybody nowadays has money: everybody can afford to be fashionable and so the fashion economy is much bigger than it once was. Secondly, since the end of the war women have been able to break out of their gender roles, make their own money and so the fashions that they demand aren’t necessarily designed to increase their level of Darwinian fitness (i.e. make them more attractive to men). Thirdly, the fashion industry is now run by gay men. Even if they are designing something to make a woman more attractive, in my opinion they don’t have the right ideas, and they don’t share the same opinions about beauty as the heterosexual men who are supposed to determine whether something counts as beautiful or not. Of course I believe that the benefits of capitalism and female emancipation far outweigh the costs, which are relatively minor.

My definition [of beauty] is as follows:
Beauty, without the fears and worries about status, is actually nothing at all to do with hair colour or body size or shape. Beauty is seen in the moment and it comes from a quality that isn't measurable or describable in terms of image. Beauty gives you a feeling of being awestruck and it makes you draw breath.
This sounds like you are defining inner beauty, or even virtue (the classical Greek concept, not the Victorian concept). Beauty really is a vague concept though. Either that or the term “Beauty” is used to refer to many non-identical concepts. In the whole of my post I was referring to Beauty with the connotations of lust and aesthetic pleasure, not so much Beauty with the connotations of meaning and goodness, which is how you are using it.

In reply to your second comment, the facts that I state about female beauty I have learned from reading about Evolutionary Psychology, which I refer to in quite a few of my posts on this blog. All I know about it I have read from this book.

The theory goes that humans evolved until the Stone Age, with the function of every part of a human to increase their fitness, either by prolonging their life or making it more likely that they will reproduce. The species, like all others, occasionally developed mutations, and the ones that were optimal got passed on and the ones that were not left the gene pool. It is said that women began to develop larger breasts because the firmness of a woman’s breasts was a good indicator of their youth and therefore their fertility. It’s far easier to tell whether large breasts are firm compared to small breasts so men evolved to find women with larger breasts more beautiful. Likewise with blonde hair. Light hair is an indicator of youth so the women who were reaching the end of their fertile stages who still had light hair were at an advantage to those who had dark hair then. The evolutionary psychologists believe that humans have virtually stopped evolving, simply because since the stone age our environments have changed so frequently that we haven’t had time to develop new standards of fitness or ways to get ahead of our competitors in the gene pool. Life is vastly different now but they say that humans born today still have stone age brains. Nowadays the size of a woman’s chest or the colour of her hair is almost no indicator at all to how fertile she is, but men still find those attributes beautiful, and they will for a long time.

If there are any objective standards of beauty, those are they. In the past 50 years the fashion industry has perpetuated the myth that being ultra-thin is actually being beautiful, but really I suspect being ultra-thin is just the property that makes the clothes designed by gay men look better. I’m sure some of these designers would rather see their clothes modeled on mannequins than on people. But these views have trickled down to the women of modern society and they have ended up striving to achieve a standard that men don’t even find attractive.

You contradict yourself so much and really don't think very clearly. All of your opinions appear to be received and im my view you're a victim of the downloading of information into your brain without really questioning what you're learning.

It's like you passively accept everything you're taught without measuring them with your own experience of life.

Your comments about receiving a false objective idea of beauty (that is forever narrowing to a single 'image') being a good thing because it "will increase chances of reproducing which for most of them is their sole life ambition, and ensures the society continues to grow," is bizarre and it doesn't make any sense.

If only a small percentage of 'thin ideal' women are considered beautiful then how can this mean that the 90 per cent of people outside of this ideal have more chance of reproducing?

You even then go on to back up the opposite view even further. I don't understand your mind at all. There doesn't seem to be any rationality to your thinking at all.


I'm astounded that someone who is studying such a beautiful and wide ranging subject can be so narrow minded.

I can agree about the stone age brain thing entirely!

Do try thinking for yourself once in a while.

I'm not sorry that you feel that way.

Of course it's a good thing that a society has standards of beauty, because otherwise there wouldn't be very much competition in the gene pool, and that society would end up being defeated by some society that does have standards of beauty correlated with degree of fertility and a few other factors.

My point in making this post is that a few meddlesome fashionistas have begun perpetuating the myth that beauty is now having some other characteristics. Their position is so obtuse that as far as I know, some paragons of beauty according to them would actually be unable to conceive or give birth to a child, because they are so thin and weak. Their concept of what beauty is will never really challenge the Darwinian concept because men will still desire the same women they always desired, and will consider what fashion has to say about beauty just a bit strange. But there are many women who have been fooled into thinking that what fashion has to say about beauty is correct, and this deceit is costing them their Darwinian fitness.

I wouldn't try to be objective on this subject. I like the colour blue, you may like the colour blue, but your blue may be my orange!

I'm a photographer and I'd rather shoot lily Cole over Andrea Corr any day of the year. Most models are naturally thin, they can eat and eat and still won't put on weight, some people like Lily were born to be models. If the modeling industry used girls of an average beauty that men found sexually appealing then the photo shoots would be horribly bad, some kinda of max power magazine, I'm surprised you haven't done an article about women who just get their freakishly large breast out for money. Normal women don't have the right structure to carry of the shades of light, also their height is not good for the clothing. I see uniqueness as an attractive quality, some thing normal girls should admire and stop following trends. I believe that article is just stupid mainly because it's not just models that die of anorexia, there is normal people too. I can spot a model form a normal girl from a mile off! They may not be a normal beauty but they are a modeling beauty...obviously some thing you know nothing about.

I admit I don't know anything about such a thing as modeling beauty, because such a concept does not exist as far as I can see. You say that normal women don't have the right structure to carry the shades of light. But isn't the point of the modeling to advertise the clothing to prospective buyers? So shouldn't they use normal women to model them so that prospective buyers know what those clothes look like on normal women, and those shades of light rightfully consigned to the rare occasions a Lily Cole comes along and puts those clothes on? Or are the prospective buyers all like Lily Cole? That doesn't sound right to me because the industry is so large that they couldn't possibly be only appealing to a tiny market of Lily Cole-alikes. If the product wasn't aimed at as large a market as possible then I don't think there would be many models or photographers or fashion designers simply because a massive market is required to keep them all in work.

Hi, I came by this article by accident and was intrigued.

Now, I don't exactly think that our generation is much worse than others, because all centuries take an ideal of beauty to an extreme point in which the woman must practically mutate her body. Whether it be wasp-waists, white skin, dilated pupils or thinness, it's something that will always be around. Because food is so accessible and cheap food is fattening, it's a sign of prestige almost to be fit and/or very thin because then you can afford healthy food and have the time to exercise, etc. etc. Whatever look is hardest to achieve naturally for a society is what's 'in vogue'.

I am a fan of 1920's movies and the whole child-like heroine, so I adore the looks of Lily Cole - almost ethereal. Not a fan of Moss though. I like women who have a unique look - there's unique pretty and generic pretty in my mind.

Lastly, I find women like Keira Knightly and Angelina Jolie pretty sure, but they weigh MAYBE 5 lbs more than your typical model. Models have to weigh 100lbs at least since 5 years or so ago, and the weight of most female stars is no more than 123 lbs on average. If you want a girl with a figure after all the clothing and belts etc. are gone, go with someone 128-135 (yes yes height must be considered).

Nice article. I found it by coincidence. We have this phenomenon in Holland (Europe) too. The gossip about celebrity's is luckily not as extreme as in America, it's still in it's childshoe's.

What I make out of this article is that media is manipulation (oh, really? lol) and I see some connections with the NWO in it.

I find this part the most interesting:

"Why do women think it is beautiful to be extremely thin? The desire to be thin is thought of as a disease, it is so extreme. I think it has even been suggested that as well as killing you, extreme dieting to the point where one looks like the above supermodels will also make a woman unable to bear children. How could that ever be considered a variable of fitness? It clearly is the largest factor in being unfit. Perhaps there is some link between the fashion industry and the diet industry? Both are worth billions of dollars. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that shareholders in corporations like Vogue and Gucci also have invested in corporations that sell dieting advice and paraphenalia."

Thanks for posting and have a nice life! o/