Deborah Bee Body Language
Is beauty an advantage? Does it make the beautiful individual powerful? Does it, as researchers at London Guildhall University revealed recently, result in substantially better pay and opportunities in the workplace? “Looks are always talked about as if they’re power, when what it is of course is that power has to be about action, and beauty rests on other people’s reactions,” said domestic goddess Nigella Lawson in a recent interview. “One has no control over other people’s reactions, therefore it seems to me to be wrong to talk about power.”
It is 10 years since feminist author Naomi Wolf pronounced on the beauty myth. “Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard,” she wrote. “Like any economy, it is determined by politics and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.”
Wolf decried society’s obsession with female beauty and challenged us to place more value on intelligence, complexity, empathy and humour. However television, newspapers and magazines are as beauty-obsessed as ever. Across the board the visual diversity of women’s looks is under-represented. How often do you see grey-haired women presenters? How often are they bigger than a size 12? How often have they got a big nose?
The media may not be entirely to blame. True, the constant bombardment of images of flawless models creates unrealistic expectations of women, but according to an evolutionary psychological analysis, we are only behaving as we always have. David Buss, of the University of Texas, believes women’s desire for beauty stems from men’s mate preference. The results of his and other studies into this area have led Buss to believe that, over evolutionary history, men have imposed their desire for attractiveness on women because physical attractiveness provides a set of proximate clues to health and youth, and therefore fertility.
How we actually judge what is beautiful, though, is the subject of other important scientific research. We know that babies respond more to “pretty” than not so pretty faces. But further studies have revealed that the more regular and symmetrical the features, the more likely we are at any age to judge a face to be beautiful. Model good looks, then, are all about averageness equalling attractiveness.
But do those model good looks bring other advantages? My model agent friend Helena is equivocal. “People outside of the modelling industry think that somehow the very fact of being a model will bring you instant self-esteem. We generally pluck these girls from relative obscurity. We pop them on a headsheet next to 59 other beautiful girls and sometimes the competition becomes too much. Even some of our most well-known, successful girls are paranoid about their weight, their spots, their cellulite. The real joke is that while the general public are busy trying to look like the girls in the ads, the girls in the ads are busy trying to look like another girl in another ad. Being beautiful actually makes them miserable.”
It’s doubtless the same feeling Cindy Crawford will be suffering, now she’s been dropped from her Revlon cosmetics contract. It was alleged that her image was considered “too boring” to shift products, though it was hard to ignore the implication that at 34 she was also too old. It has since been rumoured that Este Lauder may now consider dropping 35-year-old Liz Hurley as their main model, having already hired the younger Uma Thurman to assist their fight for a bigger market share.
But surely that’s just the crazy world of cosmetics. I spoke to my friend who works in publishing, very lovely Rosemary. Without the bizarre aesthetics of the fashion industry to deal with, perhaps she would have found her beauty an advantage?
“The men around here are easy,” she tells me. “If I want to get my own way, I pretty much know what will make them respond positively.”
Should we approve of such tactics? “I’m not doing anyone any harm,” Rosemary insists. “If they’re daft enough to fall for it, they deserve it. I don’t consider myself to be any great shakes but there are women who took a dislike to me on sight. My immediate boss, who’s not as attractive as me, brings me into meetings with male colleagues with the words: ‘Ah, Rosemary there you are, looking beautiful as ever.’ She may as well hold a placard over my head, saying: ‘Pretty? Yes, but don’t ask her anything.’ Women don’t like beautiful women, particularly not as their subordinates. It’s a predatory thing.”
Nancy Etcoff would agree. In her book Survival of the Prettiest, she said that beauty is no asset to an ambitious woman. “There is an assumption that beautiful women are too flaky, too sexual and unable to lead the troops. For women wanting to climb the corporate ladder, there is evidence that they must conceal their beauty in order to get ahead.”
Meanwhile, scientists maintain that feminism will never achieve any great success in eliminating our obsession with female beauty. While Buss believes Wolf may have altered our values to a small degree, those changes will only cause women to compete with each other in a different way. “If all men were suddenly persuaded to value physical strength in a mate,” he has said, “then women would, over time, compete with one another to build muscles.”
The fashion industry, by its very existence, perpetuates an idealised image. But, perhaps surprisingly, it is also the best place to learn the true value of beauty. As you stand by and watch another 19-year-old having her 15 minutes, you realise that although we are seduced by it, beauty has a very limited value in the real world.
So if, by any chance, there’s a boring TV genre left after cooking, gardening or home improvement that needs a bit of sex interest, I’d like to offer myself up to it. Maybe we could do a programme that extolled the virtues of housework. We could call it How to be a Domestic Slave and I’d get to wear a French maid’s outfit. If nothing else, it may mean a few more men would discover where the Hoover is kept.