Etcoff - Survival of the prettiest: the science of beauty

ACCLAIM FOR Survival of the Prettiest

[A] sprightly, spunky, well-written treatise on the Darwinian science of looking good.

Entertainment Weekly

[Etcoffs] writing is a spirited blend of scientific analysis and cultural observation, mixing findings from cutting-edge social research, passages from literature and gossipy tidbits worthy of People magazine.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

In Survival of the Prettiest, Ms. Etcoff digs through a mountain of scientific research, anecdotal illustrations and sharp observations to find the true meaning of beauty.

Washington Times

By drawing widely from anthropological, psychological, biological, and archeological literature, Etcoff discerns surprising similarities in the ways humans have responded to beauty across diverse cultures throughout the millennia.

Publishers Weekly

Survival of the Prettiest synthesizes much recent research and will convince all but the most ideologically rigid that sensitivity to beauty is to a very large extent hard-wired in the human brain.

The Wall Street Journal

NANCY ETCOFF
Survival of the Prettiest

Nancy Etcoff has an M.Ed. from Harvard, a Ph.D. in psychology from Boston University, and has held a post-doctoral fellowship in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. She is currently a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2000

Copyright 1999 by Nancy Etcoff

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Etcoff, Nancy L., 1955
Survival of the prettiest : the science of beauty / Nancy Etcoff.
p. cm.
1. Beauty, PersonalSocial aspects. 2. Sexual attraction. 3. Natural selection. I. Title.
GT499.E85 1999
391.6dc21 98-41332

eISBN: 978-0-307-77911-3

Author photograph by Ken Schles

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

To My Mother and To
the Memory of My Father

The three wishes of every man: to be healthy, to be rich by honest means, and to be beautiful.

PLATO

There must be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

(Yes, I know. You havent the slightest idea what Im talking about. Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.)

MILAN KUNDERA

P hilosophers ponder it and pornographers proffer it. Asked why people desire physical beauty, Aristotle said, No one that is not blind could ask that question. Beauty ensnares hearts, captures minds, and stirs up emotional wildfires. From Plato to pinups, images of human beauty have catered to a limitless desire to see and imagine an ideal human form.

But we live in the age of ugly beauty, when beauty is morally suspect and ugliness has a gritty allure. Beauty is equal parts flesh and imagination: we imbue it with our dreams, saturate it with our longings. But to spin this another way, reverence for beauty is just an escape from reality, it is the perpetual adolescent in us refusing to accept a flawed world. We wave it away with a clich, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, meaning that beauty is whatever pleases us (with the subtext that it is inexplicable). But defined this way, beauty is meaninglessas Gertrude Stein once said about her childhood home, Oakland, California, There is no there there.

In 1991, Naomi Wolf set aside centuries of speculation when she said that beauty as an objective and universal entity does not exist. Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. 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. According to Wolf, the images we see around us are based on a myth. Their beauty is like the tales of Aphrodite, the judgment of Paris, and the apple of discord: made up. Beauty is a convenient fiction used by multibillion-dollar industries that create images of beauty and peddle them as opium for the female masses. Beauty ushers women to a place where men want them, out of the power structure. Capitalism and the patriarchy define beauty for cultural consumption, and plaster images of beauty everywhere to stir up envy and desire. The covetousness they inspire serves their twin goals of making money and preserving the status quo.

Many intellectuals would have us believe that beauty is inconsequential. Since it explains nothing, solves nothing, and teaches us nothing, it should not have a place in intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has become an embarrassment.

But there is something wrong with this picture. Outside the realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking at it, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight. Turning a cold eye to beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or responding with indifference to a babys cry. We can say that beauty is dead, but all that does is widen the chasm between the real world and our understanding of it.

Before beauty sinks any deeper, let me reel it in for closer examination. Suggesting that men on Madison Avenue have Svengali-like powers to dictate womens behavior and preferences, and can define their sense of beauty, is tantamount to saying that women are not only powerless but mindless. On the contrary, isnt it possible that women cultivate beauty and use the beauty industry to optimize the power beauty brings? Isnt the problem that women often lack the opportunity to cultivate their other assets, not that they can cultivate beauty?

As we will see, Madison Avenue cleverly exploits universal preferences but it does not create them, any more than Walt Disney created our fondness for creatures with big eyes and little limbs, or Coca-Cola or McDonalds created our cravings for sweet or fatty foods. Advertisers and businessmen help to define what adornments we wear and find beautiful, but I will show that this belongs to our sense of fashion, which is not the same thing as our sense of beauty. Fashion is what Charles Baudelaire described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, not the cake itself.