What We Talk About When We Talk About Beauty
The image above is taken from beneath the waves, a slideshow of underwater photographing featuring female surfers "duck diving" beneath incoming waves. The shots are compelling and beautiful and if I could get away with it at work I'd set up a 32" LCD screen that did nothing but display the slideshow over and over again, just to keep me on a stable emotional keel during the occasional rage-filled day.
The question I've been pondering for an hour or so, however, is this: "Would it be just as interesting if it featured male surfers?"
That's really a couple of different questions rolled into one, so let's expand a little bit. Would men find the same set of photographs with a male surfer just as compelling? The obvious answer, the answering of which requires no consideration on most peoples' part, is "No." The next question: "Would women find the male surfer shots more compelling, less so, or equally so?" I'm willing to bet that most women would find them less compelling, even though they have a stronger sexual interest in men than they do women.
The end result of my hour of thought was this: at its heart, human appreciation of beauty is a direct evolutionary adaptation to produce the healthiest possible children. That seems like a pretty big leap from question to answer so I'll take a couple of steps back and drag you along my process with me.
I'll start by describing some universal and near-universal characteristics of beautiful objects:
They are symmetrical. Most "beautiful" things are symmetrical from at least one perspective. This is one of the first principles of beauty that children can be observed to understand. Lopsided things are not pretty.
They are sleek, which is to say that they are considerably longer than they are wide, or vice versa. Compact cars aren't pretty. Why? Why did cars keep getting longer, lower, and wider for no reason, right up to the point that the economics of the marketplace intervened? Why is most artwork painted on a rectangular canvas? Why do people make vases that are so tall they almost obscure the flowers they are supposed to be showcasing?
They are curved, or possess curves. We understand instinctively that a circle is more "artistic" than a square. The majority of artists don't paint, sculpt, or otherwise create objects that are entirely right-angled. The word "boxy", when applied to a designed object, is never a compliment.
I could go on, but let's retain those three principles. They're universal. There is no culture so primitive that it does not adhere to them. It stands to reason, therefore, that they are derived from some aspect of humanity that predates civilization. Which allow us to take a few steps down on Maslow's pyramid and examine the baser needs of Homo whatever. Our appreciation of beauty is an evolved trait, which means that it served some purpose before, say, the arrival of the Jaguar E-Type or Jayne Mansfield. At some point in the distant past, your ancestor survived because he appreciated beauty and his neighbor/fellow tribesman did not.
When we examine humanity before the arrival of farming or cities or Candy Crush Saga, we find that they have a fairly brutal and monotonous life. They needed to find shelter. Most of the time, this was a natural shelter. We might ascribe the beauty impulse to some sort of shelter-judging situation, but given that the most magnificent cave and the least compelling thatched hut all serve the same purposes pretty well, I'm thinking that wasn't it. They needed to find food. While some food animals, like the deer, are quite graceful and beautiful, others, like the wild boar, aren't. And there's no correlation between food value and the beauty of the source animal. Nobody would call a mammoth "beautiful" but if your tribe could bring one of 'em down you'd eat until the meat spoiled. So forget that, too.
That leaves only sex. Women, who are "K-selectors" by nature, might have had more positive outcomes when choosing beautiful men. Stronger kids, higher fetal survival rate, better position within a tribe, that sort of thing. Yet history tells us that's false. Women in prehistoric tribes selected men based on their social status and their ability to provide for them while protecting them from the men of other tribes who would cheerfully rape them. Rape, incidentally, is a major prehistoric driver of population. You're probably descended from a rapist. If you are one of Genghis Khan's sixteen million direct descendants, you absolutely are.
Male beauty is entirely useless in the face of those needs. While the occasional handsome alpha male exists in society, they are rare. My friend Melisa pines for Channing Tatum day and night but if she were in a prehistoric society she'd be much better off picking The Hound. The competitors in the World's Strongest Man events are almost universally ugly, misshapen men. I would say that I am probably in the bottom 25% of men, looks-wise, but when I spent some time in the modern equivalent of prehistoric society --- the county jail --- I was quite successful and I got plenty of phone time and meals and un-bothered sleep. This is because when you remove the apparatus of society it's better to be six foot two and hideous than five foot eight and handsome. So forget male beauty as an evolutionary driver.
That leaves female beauty. The guys over at Chateau Heartiste work night and day to prove that female beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but that it is a series of scientific judgments related to fertility. Men prefer younger women --- as young as the rules of their society will allow --- because they are more fertile. Let's apply my Three Universal Ideas as stated above to women.
They are symmetrical. In human beings, symmetrical development is an indicator of health and luck. If you can make it to the age of sixteen and you're symmetrical, chances are you've been eating well and making sound choices. You're a good bet for reproduction. That's hot.
They are sleek, which is to say that they are considerably longer than they are wide, or vice versa As long as we've had a media to show us beautiful women, they've been relatively tall, but not too tall, and they're been relatively fit. The fashion for chunky women in the Renaissance was probably a scarcity thing: if you were fat, it was because you were rich. Just like being thin is a sign of leisure and wealth now. But in general, men like women who are a little shorter than they are and fairly lean.
They are curved, or possess curves. The advantages of broad (but not fat) hips and substantial breasts for reproductive health are obvious. Little girls with narrow hips die in childbirth. And while breast size isn't an indicator of nursing prowess per se, it's an indicator of strong female hormones and an ability to eat an above-sustenance diet, both of which are good news for prospective papas.
So, if you're raiding a village and you only get to rape one woman, you rape the symmetrical, average height, curvy-but-not-fat girl. And from the perspective of your DNA, if you have to fight a bit to get her, it's worth your time. Our ancestors who consistently recognized and selected a certain female beauty archetype had a successful generation of children and the guys who ran in the village and immediately grabbed the lopsided midget or the starving sixty-year-old didn't.
Since this choice is important, it's hardwired into our brains at a fairly basic level. And since it's important, it exists in everyone's brain, not just the brains of men. Which is why women are much more interested in female beauty than men are in male beauty, I'd guess. (On the flipside, the female selection algorithms, equally important and deep, are probably why men find themselves so fascinated by successful alpha males, from LeBron James to Robert Plant.)
It goes without saying that the Jaguar E-Type and the Supermarine Spitfire and the Gibson Les Paul didn't exist when our ancestors were busy hardwiring our brains for us. Therefore, when we see a manufactured object, or when we evaluate a situation, we have to use pre-existing portions of our brains to do it. Since the beauty-evaluation part of the brain has good, solid, fast access to visual information, it stands almost first in line to help us judge what we see. Therefore, it isn't too crazy to say that we initially judge everything from airliners to mobile phones as if they were women.
I can provide all sorts of anecdotes to prove this (911 Carrera 3.2 vs. Turbo, anyone?) but you can do it on your own. And when you do it, you'll see. To be completely mentally healthy, we need to see beauty. Without the presence beauty, our minds will search for it. It's why public housing, with its concrete cadence and chunky squareness, is so repugnant. It's why people buy Alfa Romeos and fountain pens and Chihuly Studio Series glass and certain "designer" personal-computer towers.
And, of course, it's why the "beneath the waves" photos are so compelling. They are majestic and natural and beautiful and curvy and lithe and untroubled. Men need to see things like this. Women, too. Keats said, "Some shape of beauty moves away the pall / From our dark spirits." So even those of us who are dominated by our dark spirits require it. Maybe we need it most of all.