gender: beauty

On the heels of our post about race, ideas of beauty, and the controversy about Satoshi Kanazawa’s blog post at Psychology Today claiming Black women are “objectively” less attractive than women from other races, Lisa C. sent in the 9-minute trailer for the documentary Dark Girls. In it, African American women discuss their own experiences of bias toward dark-skinned women, both in pop culture broadly and from people in their own lives. It’s a stunning and heart-breaking illustration of the personal costs of beauty standards that define dark skin as inherently and automatically problematic:

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

Melissa H.J., Lizzy F., Dmitriy T.M., Kari B., Kalani R., Lisa C., and Anna C. all sent us links about the recent blog post at Psychology Today that many of you have probably already heard about, since it caused quite the outcry. The article, by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, apparently went through multiple title revisions, starting out as “Black Women Are Ugly,” changing to “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”, and eventually becoming “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?”, before being removed from the Psychology Today website altogether. However, as we know, nothing on the internet is ever really gone, and images of the original post are widely available. I’m using one from BuzzFeed.

Kanazawa apparently specializes in claiming that there are clear, definite, “objective” differences in attractiveness (and also intelligence, and also everything else important) between different races. Also, you can tell who is a criminal and who isn’t just by the way they look (an article illustrated with an image of O.J. Simpson) and, as an added bonus, “virtually all ‘stereotypes’ are empirically true”. We know this is objective because there are graph-y science things, with numbers:

To summarize his point: Women are more attractive than men. And when one of his Add Health interviewers measures a study participant’s attractiveness on a 5-point scale, this is “objective.”  Because they are researchers, and therefore anything they say is objective. And according to objective measurements, Black women aren’t attractive at all. In fact, they’re “far less attractive” than other groups of women. See?

It turns out White women are most attractive. Man! Who would have thought?

There are a lot of other gems, such as the fact that Black women, though objectively less attractive, bizarrely rate themselves subjectively more attractive. It’s like they don’t know they’re ugly!

I’m sick of this article and will leave it to you to click over and read the whole thing if you feel so inclined. Let’s just summarize some of the major issues, and then all move on with our lives:

First, he treats race like a real, biological, meaningful entity. But race is socially constructed; there is no clear biological dividing line that would allow us to put every person on the planet into racial categories, since societies differ in the racial categories they recognize and “race” doesn’t map along unique sets of genes — there is more genetic variation among members of a so-called race as there are between members of different races.

Aside from that, the idea of measuring beauty objectively, completely separated from all cultural influence, is problematic, especially when you start looking at differences by race/ethnicity. In The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, Deborah Rhode discusses how perceptions of attractiveness have varied over time and across cultures and discusses the global history of slavery, colonialism, and race-based systems of domination that make it impossible to separate out our perceptions of what is beautiful and sexually appealing from historical ideologies that insisted that non-White peoples were unattractive (unless in an exotic way, when that was useful, and also, the Irish were hideous despite being European). Joane Nagel’s book Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersection, Forbidden Frontiers is another good source on this topic.

It is simply impossible to separate out even scientists’ ratings of attractiveness from the cultural context, one in which supposedly “Caucasian” features and light skin are repeatedly held up as the ideal of attractiveness (so even famous non-White people often find themselves lightened in media images) while dark skinned people are constructed as unattractive or even scary.

Given that history, it’s not shocking that White women would be rated most attractive and Black women least. What’s shocking is that a scholar at the London School of Economics would think you could uncritically accept those rankings as proof of objective reality, rather than the outcome of constant, long-standing cultural messages about attractiveness that resulted from efforts to legitimize and justify social and political inequalities.

UPDATE: Reader JA provided a link to another post at Psychology Today in which researchers looked at the data Kanazawa used and question his analysis and results.

UPDATE 2: The comments section has largely devolved into a flame war with lots of insults flying around, so I’m closing comments since I won’t be around to moderate them for the next week. I will go in and clean out the comments threads when I get a chance.

Esther C., Erin R., and Scott P. sent in an interesting video, “Sexy Girls Have It Easy,” showing woman testing how her physical appearance affects whether she can get free things. She asks for a number of free things — ice cream, baked goods, a cab ride, carousel rides, and so on — while dressed in two ways to see if she is treated differently when she conforms more closely to standards of feminine beauty:

Documentary : Sexy Girls Have It Easy from Examples of Film & TV work on Vimeo.

It’s a non-scientific test, obviously, since she doesn’t ask the exact same people for free things dressed each way. Some commenters at Vimeo argue that she acts more confident and positive when she’s dressed up, and thus people are reacting to her attitude, not her appearance. Yet, even if this is true, we can’t necessarily separate our perceptions of someone’s confidence from their appearance, which may influence whether we interpret behavior as “confident” or as “pushy.”

Thoughts?

A number of celebrities, including Meghan McCain — daughter of Senator John McCain of Arizona — recently posed naked (visible from the shoulders up) in a skin cancer prevention awareness ad. Meghan’s father had to have melanoma removed from his face, prompting her interest in the issue. Here’s the ad:

Christie W. sent in a segment (via The Pragmatic Progressive Forum) from Glenn Beck’s radio show in which he reacts to the video, and particularly to the image of Meghan McCain in it…by pretending to throw up violently. In this 8-minute clip from his show (audio only), Beck repeatedly pretends to puke, and someone says, at about 5:28, “Has she thought about, like, a burqa, so she’s extra safe?” and “I’m not sure that covers enough, because you can get skin cancer of the eyeballs” (I can’t distinguish all the voices, so I’m not sure who is speaking). They say she looks like “John McCain with long blonde hair” and, at 6:35, mockingly refer to her as “luscious” repeatedly:

Criticizing Glenn Beck for being mean-spirited is really a pointless task — I might as well go yell at the tree in my yard for shedding leaves — so I’m not going to expend much energy on it. But it’s a good example of policing of women’s bodies and fat-shaming (when McCain is described as “luscious,” it clearly isn’t a compliment). Who cares about the message? Never mind about skin cancer! Those women are so gross they make me sick!

Sigh.

Kristie V. let us know about a new item in Skechers’ Shape-Ups line of shoes. If you aren’t familiar with Shape-Ups, they’re the sneakers with the specially-shaped soles that supposedly firm your butt as you walk. Now Skechers has introduced a line of Shape-Ups targeted at tween girls (via Shine):

I was particularly struck by the scene at 23 seconds in, where the girl confidently bounces along in her Shape-Up, trailed by exhausted-looking boys dressed up as food:

Apparently Shape-Ups not only firm your butt, they give you the ability to reject food as well.

Though Skechers apparently claims to be targeting childhood obesity, at least two independent studies found that these types of shoes have no benefit in terms of fitness, whether measured by calories burned or level of muscle toning. But as Morning Gloria at Jezebel points out, girls are never too young to be socialized into buying products of questionable effectiveness — and avoiding food — in the hopes of “looking good and having fun,” as the ad put it.

When we talk about beauty standards on Soc Images, we’re usually discussing attempts to meet them, and impacts on those who can’t. But what about people who are considered quite attractive by other people? Katherine K. sent in the trailer for the documentary The Art of Seduction: Not Pretty, Really. In it, the director interviews men and women about the impacts of being generally defined as attractive. There are the perks, such as sometimes getting free stuff, but there are downsides, too: jealousy from others, the stereotype that attractive people (especially women) are dumb, and questioning the motives of friends:

Cassie C. sent us a vintage ad that illustrates the way that beauty standards can change dramatically over time. The ad, for products called Fat-ten-u and Corpula, promises to help you get fat, a clearly desirable state:

Available at the Library of Congress.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that the woman in the photo likely wouldn’t be considered fat by current standards, partially because of a small waist that probably resulted from corseting.

Side note: The link Cassie sent us, at Whole Health Source, has two black and white ads as well, but I haven’t been able to verify them as authentic or find any info on where they were found or originally appeared, and I’ve found some questions about their authenticity.

Said Mary Wollstonecraft:

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Inspired, perhaps, by Wollstonecraft’s words, Katie Makkai fights back against the word “pretty.”  After a childhood subject to its tyranny, she imagines telling her own daughter to reject its pull, beginning with “The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be!”  Thanks to Jake Lundwall for the tip.

(Transcript after the jump.)

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