Thoughts on "Impossible" Beauty Standards and Their Origin

Photo subject:  @steemed-open

Disclaimer:  In this essay I'm once again going to discuss males and females "on the average".  I completely understand that not all women are stereotypically feminine, that not all men are stereotypically masculine, that genes produces great diversity of outcomes and that gender identity can be fluid.  However, what variation exists between men and women tends to cluster around two different means--one for men and another for women--usually in the shape of a "bell curve" in each case.  The average male is therefore different from the average female, and those differences become increasingly obvious the further one moves toward the tails of the bell curve and away from each's respective mean.  Denying that these gender differences exist "on average" is untrue, unhelpful and unwise.     

Anthropologists, biologists, geneticists and evolutionary psychologists generally agree that most gender roles and gender preferences are not strictly societally-imposed but rather often genetically determined. Many roles and preferences are observed even at the earliest of ages and before conditioning could have affected outcomes.  

This means that traditional or stereotypical expressions of masculinity or femininity are NOT a consequence of the improper or differing socialization of males and females.  Consequently, stereotypical men and women can't be "fixed" simply by changing how we educate or socialize them.   Men are not just poorly-socialized women and shouldn't be treated as such, and vice versa.  

For instance, men are not socialized for competition and dominance.  Rather, they are (on average and subject to degrees of genetic variation and environmental influence) more or less hard-wired for it (testosterone levels being a proxy for interest in both competition and dominance). Gentlemen don't prefer blondes because culture, but rather because genes (light hair having historically been a genetic indicator of youthfulness and therefore female fertility). Men don't prefer that females have a certain waist-to-hip ratio because Madison Avenue, but because such was an ancient indicator of a female's fitness and her ability to carry and produce healthy offspring.  Men do not pursue women because of some vestiges of societal "male privilege" or "rape culture" but because the less-than-monogamous male (prior to birth control) almost always passed on more of his genes than his more monogamous friend. 

Likewise, females are not simply poorly-socialized males.  Females of a certain age do not pine for babies because men have conditioned them to be baby factories, but because their bodies call them.  Women don't assume more of the responsibilities for raising children because of the preferences of a male patriarchy or a conscious rejection of stereotypically male pursuits.  Rather, most do so because they feel biologically compelled to do so.  Females do not play to society's "beauty standards" (that is, to male sexual preferences) in their dress, hairstyles or hair color, or desire for a "better" body because culture demands they do so, but because their genes demand they do so.  Females are not societally-conditioned to crave and even compete for the attention of dominant men.  Rather, they are genetically programmed for it.  

In short, as evolutionary psychologists Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa have noted, "men and women are not different because they are socialized differently; they are socialized differently because they are different."  Most everyone who has parented both a boy and a girl knows from experience that this difference is real.  It is often evident from the first moments after birth. 

My point?  Just this:  Neither "society" nor the "patriarchy" hold people in general, or women in particular, to unrealistic or impossible beauty standards.  Evolution does so.  

Traditional feminists seem to "get" this fact when we move out to the tails of the bell curve but curiously deny that it applies near the mean.  For instance, most feminists would argue strongly that homosexuality isn't a choice, nor is it socialized into us.  Rather, homosexuals are simply "born this way" (with an innate and almost compulsive desire to be wanted by, and be found appealing to, the same sex) and, as a result, homosexuals deserve as much deference and respect as anyone else.   

And yet these same feminists irrationally insist that the "average" heterosexual woman's desire to be wanted by the opposite sex, and to compulsively appeal to its sexual preferences (that is, to male society's "beauty standards"), is NOT a genetic predisposition but is instead a product of cultural conditioning and male dominance--of the "patriarchy" or "rape culture".  Consequently, they often encourage women to reject these "impossible standards" as externally imposed restraints on female freedom designed to fetishize and diminish women for the pleasure of males.    

Well, perhaps the "beauty standards" in question do seem impossible at times (especially as we age)--after all, evolution cares not one wit about our egos.  But men's attraction to them, and women's pursuit of them, are not cultural, nor are they externally imposed.  They are innate.  They (on average) come with the bodies we are born with.    

Consequently, by insisting (often hostilely) that women should reject their own innate sense of beauty standards by actively refusing to pursue them, and that men should be ashamed of their innate beauty preferences (as somehow demeaning or limiting women), feminists create conflict between our bodies (our conscious or unconscious urges) and our judgmental minds.  This internal conflict is the source of incredible personal angst and societal stress.  

Both society and the individuals that comprise it would experience far more peace if they lived in harmony with their innate nature--that is, if they didn't feel shamed by politics or religion into living other than as their natures call them.  Again, that does NOT mean that every male would express stereotypically masculine traits and every female stereotypically feminine ones, though each sex would certainly do so on average.  

I realize that mindless pursuit of evolution's "impossible" standards can likewise cause great stress and angst.  But the solution to that more natural stress isn't to deny evolutionary truth, the influence of genes or to blame "male" culture (as traditional feminist often do) but rather to make peace with what is.  I wrote extensively on the importance of making peace with reality, especially in the context of beauty standards, here.  

In favoring the natural over the political or religious, I'm not committing the "naturalistic fallacy".  I'm not claiming that the natural is superior because it's natural.  I'm claiming that the natural is superior to the preferred feminist narrative because the former is true, and coming to terms with truth is ever the only way for egos to experience peace and personal liberation.