Beauty and inflated value (15 July 2010)

I'm skeptical about transcendental beauty, if only because the nature of the beautiful seems to change with time. Of course, that itself may just be an illusion. That all I can see is unceasing change in beauty could be the unfortunate effect of my being socialized as a consumer, trained to recognize value primarily in novelty. Beauty descends to the level of fashion, and though timeless is a commonplace in fashion-industry marketing copy, fashion cycles themselves seem much more salient than the specifics of any given trend.

Fashion is no proxy for beauty; it aspires to supplant it. But fashion cycles make explicit the logic that has long underwritten the cultural power of what has gone under the name of beauty. The power to dictate fashion as a series of apparent discoveries is akin to the authority to credibly assign beauty and shape the contours of social perception, to define the aesthetic. The particular usefulness of beauty as a category is that it serves to posit an eternal, elemental value. It connotes a transcendence even when it's nonexistant, so its privileges seem unquestionable.

Ashley Mears, in this essay for 3 Quarks Daily, examines why certain fashion models become ubiquitous and iconic when, for all practical purposes, they are interchangeable. Using Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha as an example, Mears asks, "how, among the thousands of wannabe models worldwide, is any one 14-year-old able to rise from the pack? What makes Coco Rocha more valuable than the thousands of similar contestants?" Mears argues that "there is very little intrinsic value in Coco’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly-built teens," suggesting that her beauty-value is instead "bequeathed" to her by nature of the "unstable market" in which that value is realized.

Does the process of her elevation to fashion-industry fame somehow link beauty and value, allowing each to define the other for the rest of us?

The experts responsible for choosing models "don’t know what makes one model a better choice than another," Mears notes, which means that the process is ruled by the inarticulate whims of fashion's managerial class:

Like dozens of fashion producers I spoke with, Russell doesn’t really know what it is about a kid like Coco Rocha that excites him. He “just knows” if a model is right for him, and further, he “knows it when he sees it.”

But what Russell "just knows" is not some ineffable movement of his own sensitive spirit but a collective understanding of what image his industry has legitimized, something that is not set down explicitly but communicated instead through reciprocal patterns of protective imitation. Mears points out the importance of the social network to this project: "producers talk. They hang out throughout the week at lunches, dinners, parties.... They talk constantly, facebooking, texting, and drinking; they even date each other. They share social and cultural space, and they pick up on the gossip, or 'the buzz,' this way." This particular social network produces a time-specific ideal of beauty, reconstituted as the height of fashion -- an ideal which in turn authenticates the exclusivity of the network, whose members conserve the power of naming the beautiful. [herding and information cascades and the problem of arbitrary value with real social impact]

Beauty seems more an ideological effect than an intrinsic quality of things, a residue of the process of power that decides who should reap beauty's associated benefits. It's an expression of cultural capital, albeit one that strikes us with immediacy, as though it were a natural intuition. Beauty allows to grasp power in a glance as pleasure -- the hard, protracted work that went into establishing a particular hegemonic ideal vanishes into the instant, leaving behind only a sense of compulsory approval and attraction. We feel as though we are glimpsing both what we want to have and want to be, or what we are supposed to, at any rate, but also something far more insidious. In that moment of perceiving beauty, being and having are inseparably blended so that identity can seem a matter of owning things and seeing becomes a mode of possession.

"A finance market, like a fashion market, consists of speculators chasing each other’s tails in disregard for what things are really worth." But there may be no "real worth" to be ascertained, only ideology.

Beauty is our heart volunteering us for the gentlest form of domination.

Terry Eagleton, in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, argues that these cultural beauty myths serve the purpose of persuading us to recognize the premises of the prevailing social order as the spontaneous movement of our hearts

Of course there is a different way to commune with beauty --get metaphysical in conclusion.

Useless beauty, etc., etc. (26 March 2010)

Can beauty be separated from domination? That's what this essay about "superbeauty" by Julie Lansky (via Rob Walker) left me wondering. Not that her essay is about that -- it's more of a defense of designing for jouissance rather than for functionality or posturing: "Reclaiming beauty from irony, reclaiming beauty from kitsch — this has been a project of early-21st-century design."

I kept waiting to get mad at the essay -- I have no love for deisgny-ness, and figured it was only a matter of time before I'd want to break out Alfred Loos's Ornament and Crime -- but I was strangely indifferent, largely agreeing with her while pursuing my own tangential thoughts. For example, what does Lansky mean by beauty? That can't be taken for granted, because that is the whole of the ideological stake. Beauty and aesthetics are the time-honored alibi for hierarchical oppression; it is the velvet medium of hegemony. Beauty is defined so as to protect the interest of elites, their cultural and physical capital. Labeling something beautiful is an expression of power; then it's a matter of getting others to either agree or suffer for their disagreement. Lansky comes closest to a definition, I think, in this statement: "Answering the capitalist economy’s call to create and fulfill desire in every corner of life, designers have even entered an age of superbeauty." That is, to assure consumer capitalism's viability and ideological underpinnings, designers assert beauty in novelty, variety and ubiquity, traits suitable to the mandate of continual capital accumulation, and constant expansion of consumer demand. Superbeauty refers to applying aesthetics to mundane objects once considered beneath such attention. That means the logic of distinction, under the pressures of capitalism, is spreading itself over a broader and broader domain. Hierarchy must be articulated in every last corner of the culture; everything must announce "desire," the lack that testifies to the material reality of status, makes it seem a physical inevitability as undeniable as yearning. Nothing can be innocent, nothing can promise a glimpse into an alternative to the logic of capital, and capitalist desire. So I guess I disagree that superbeauty is for "personal delectation" as Lansky argues. That's the classic mystification, that tastes can be personal.

Beauty as prisoner's dilemma (24 Dec 2008)

Here's another contender for the recession's silver lining: the end of the plastic-surgery arms race. Or as the Economist's Free Exchange blog calls it, "Breaking the Botox equilibrium." Responding to a NYT report that expenditure on plastic surgery is dropping, the Economist blogger writes:

The increased demand for plastic surgery during the past few decades may have changed our cultural definition of beauty. Attractiveness in women has historically been associated with fertility. Yet, sometimes cultural norms confound that look—for example, the trend toward narrow, boyish hips, but large breasts. This look is often only achievable through surgical enhancement. If clusters of women undertake certain beauty rituals it can change the standard of beauty.
It could be argued that the plastic-surgery race became a coordination failure. It created an equilibrium where some women felt plastic surgery was necessary to feel attractive. If you were enmeshed in a Botox culture, it was hard to deviate. But if every woman abstained from Botox and breast implants, another welfare-enhancing equilibrium might emerge. Breaking out of the Botox equilibrium could be the upshot of the recession.

Refreshingly, this analysis posits beauty as the product of social relations -- it's not objective or transcendent, and it's not purely subjective either; rather it's an expression of class and social power and luxury and leisure and how these work on our genetic makeup. What is recognized as beautiful depends on social conditions, so surgical intervention brings you closer to current ideas about what is distinctive, not some eternal ideal. (The NYT article notes how celebrities are now turning on Botox, which had perhaps become too mainstream, too accessible.) Plastic surgery is a way of turning your body into a status good; in order for it to be a truly effective status good --a limited access positional good -- the surgery has to become more and more extreme, or reversible, so that the removal of surgical enhancements can signal a higher, meta-enhancement. But beauty is never going to stand independent from money, power, and status. What we find objectively attractive will inevitably be appropriated and assimilated.

Because beauty is a social relation, it can be subjected to game theory analysis -- hence beauty becomes a prisoner's dilemma. Cooperation might yield a more democratic and inclusive standard of beauty, but where's the fun in that? Better to make it a game of strategic self-objectification, so that women can continue to make themselves into pretty prizes

No smiles (30 March 2008)

Watching Saturday Night Fever got me thinking about this. The film's usually remembered as the film that launched disco into the mainstream, but it's a pretty disturbing, dark film, full of class-inflected racism and misogyny. It climaxes with a gang rape in the backseat of a car while Travolta, thwarted in his own rape attempt, sulks in the front seat. Then the Bobby C., the kid who got a girl pregnant but doesn't want to be forced to marry her, jumps off the Verrazano Bridge, seemingly trapped by her refusal to get an abortion. The woman-hating is pretty raw and only partially redeemed by the implication of the final scene, that Travolta escapes juvenile mediocrity and working-class self-sabotage by learning to have a mature friendship with a woman, his dance partner who has already made the symbolic leap to Manhattan. The unpleasant ending all but obliterates the vicarious liberation supplied by the peerless dance sequences (now no longer kitschy but just incredible), leaving viewers feeling trapped with a bunch of narrow-minded bigots and misguided dreamers who don't have enough sense to hope for the sort of things that we watching can approve of. It's uncomfortable, but does it serve any useful purpose to confront us so starkly with the limited horizons, the doomedness, of the people it has chosen to depict and give an aura of reality to? Is it some kind of implied critique, or are we still vicariously thrilling, only to something else, something meaner, the kind of harsh reality we are happy to see inflicted on other classes (making us feel a bit immune from it)? In Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the film fits in to the late 1960s-early 1970s "discovery of the working class" by the middle class interests that control the media and have a lot at stake in fashioning a working class other to demonize and contrast themselves with. And it certainly sets up admission to the middle class as maturity, the prize for rejecting the hedonistic life of the disco and the immediate gratifications it caters to. But is there also a critique of misogyny in all the female hating throughout the film, or simply a reinforcement of its alleged inevitability, or of the hopelessness of trying to changing it?

I want to give the film the benefit of the doubt and view it as exposing underlying misogyny that most films have built into their structure. Something Shulamith Firestone points out throughout Dialectic of Sex is that sexism often manifests in forms we're trained to regard as appealing and pleasant, or as harmless fun; this is how it gets replicated and reproduced for generation after generation. For example: "Because the class oppression of women and children is couched in the phraseology of 'cute' it is much harder to fight than open oppression." Cuteness is a form of infantilization and self-trivialization, but there can still be something irresistible and fun about cataloging cute things and cooing over them. It would be curmudgeonly and false to deny their appeal, only they have become intimately connected with setting out the boundaries of gendered behavior. Firestone responds to the way men often demand smiles from women (and children) and mask their aggression with this request that seems to them innocuous, almost a favor (she'll be so much prettier if she smiles) by earnestly calling for "a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their 'pleasing' smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them." Of course, I, like most white middle-class men, have been enacting the smile boycott my entire life and never understood it to be a politically motivated action. The freedom to express one's feelings naturally is not automatically granted. In fact, it's finding out who experiences that freedom and takes it for granted is a good way to identify who has privilege in a society.

Sororities and social awkwardness (27 Feb 2007)

The Sunday NYT ran a story about a sorority house at Depauw University in Indiana that threw out most of its members in an effort to shed the chapter of its reputation of being for "socially awkward". Apparently that's code for not being white and emaciated:

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house. The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

Especially mortifying is the account of a recruiting event where "national representatives took over the house" and "asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms" -- basically because they felt the actual members would scare away new prospects. You think these members would have resigned in disgust and contempt right then.

This whole incident seems terrible and unfair and all that, but what kind of organization did these women think they were joining? We're not talking about NOW; this is a sorority, part of the Greek system, which is a cog in the machine perpetuating all the traditional entitlements and conventional arrangements that have been passed down through the upper middle classes. The Greek system? Biased? Of course it is; that's it's raison d'etre by and large. By entering in to the system you confess your wish to have your social life bureaucratically arranged and subjected to conformist codes.

"Socially awkward sorority" is thus an oxymoron -- sororities are about purging awkwardness and making social life work mechanically. You are looking for official sanction on your choice of friends and activities, so by consenting to that, you have to admit of the possibility that the officials in charge might withdraw their blessing, otherwise it meant nothing in the first place -- which it does for everyone outside of the system. Unfortunately, the social networks the Greek system sustains has real power in the world beyond college; so the whole thing is not merely submissiveness and hierarchy for its own sake, but for the sake of anchoring yourself in the broader post-collegiate hierarchy. (I chose to live in darkness, pretending that by rejecting hierarchical systems in college I could somehow deny their existence in the world beyond; this shows I learned almost nothing while in college about the real world.) Is it lame that sororities judge members by their potential attractiveness to men? Absolutely. Is this sort of thing unprecedented in the real world? Not exactly. The nice thing about the Greek system is that, unlike patriarchy at large, women are not forced to participate in it, so they need not endorse a by-and-large sexist arrangement by collaborating with it for tactical gains within a seemingly inescapable system of oppression.

Why this sad story merits coverage in the New York Times's front section is worth considering: That this particular chapter, where women were apparently giving each other solace rather than orchestrating ways to attract male attention, has been effectively shut down is presented as a representative example, though I'm not sure how much can really be concluded from one ripe example. Perhaps more significant is how the article gives us a good pretense to exercise our facility for righteous indignation as we consider the callousness of Delta Zeta's national officers and breathe a sigh of relief that our own lives are not beset by such shallowness (and then we flip to Sunday Styles). But also the story lets us experience the vicarious thrill of humiliation, our secret pleasure in seeing these kinds of codes of comparison being upheld (at a safe distance from ourselves, of course).

I was thinking about this while watching the Academy Awards show and how comfortable I was in denouncing various celebrities as "ugly", as if I really cared and as if my opinion mattered in the least. But this is the purpose of the red-carpet show, isn't it? To give people a chance to pass judgment at home? We all collude in this kind of superficiality when it seems safe to, because we have learned so well its collective power and would love to indulge the fantasy of exercising that power personally. Not to be too trite, but in those fleeting moments of judgment we become convinced that we escape observation ourselves.

Beauty and its enemies (9 Feb 2007)

In this Atlantic article, Virginia Postrel -- libertarian author of The Substance of Style, a full-throated celebration of style marketing, and the vaguely fascistic-sounding The Future and Its Enemies -- presumes to tell us the truth about beauty by way of an analysis of Dove's recent marketing campaign. While you may be one of the dopes who believes in "the crowd-pleasing notions that beauty is a media creation, that recognizing plural forms of beauty is the same as declaring every woman beautiful, and that self-esteem means ignoring imperfections," the strong among us face up bravely to the truth (if evolutionary psychologists think it's so, it must be Truth) that "Beauty exists, and it’s unevenly distributed." Postrel elaborates cheerfully, "We know beauty when we see it, and our reactions are remarkably consistent. Beauty is not just a social construct, and not every girl is beautiful just the way she is." Luckily technology exists for women to correct Nature's malfeasance in shortchanging them in respect to this eternal ideal, and that technology is not Dove soap, which Postrel seems to imply is perpetrating some fraudulant conspiracy in linking its straightforward, inexpensive product to a message of self-acceptance for those who can't afford or can't be bothered with the cultural imperative with which woman are increasingly burdened -- to perfect themselves through expensive surgical interventions (which incidentally makes beauty a better proxy for class; very useful for policing class boundaries, helping put a stop to the problem that Samuel Richardson first pinpointed in Pamela). The implication seems to be this: Women who view themselves as a being capable of doing things and seek to be judged for their actions rather than being judged as a beautiful art work (like the Venus de Milo and Nefertiti sculptures Postrel cites) are quite clearly deluded, and this malicious Dove campaign is keeping the wool pulled over their pathetic eyes.

In her conclusion Postrel notes that "Real confidence requires self-knowledge, which includes recognizing one’s shortcomings as well as one’s strengths." And to the degree that Dove's campaign occludes self-knowledge, I can see why she's bothered by it. But all ad campaigns seek to subvert self-knowledge; they work by promising to know more about you than you do yourself and to thereby help you attain some false aspiration it seeks to convince you is your own. But the "false" aspiration Dove's campaign seeks to persuade us to adopt is fairly benign compared with the opposite message undergirding virtually every other beauty-product marketing campaign, namely that you are an object to be judged, your value lies in your appearance, and you should feel mortally insecure until you do everything in your power to rectify these lapses from evolutionarily-proven good taste.

If Postrel wants only to fault Dove for choosing beautiful women and then trying to pass them off as ordinary in an especially devious fashion, that would be an astute point. If Dove was truly on a philanthropic mission to refute restrictive media peceptions of female beauty, they might have chosen plainer-looking women. But it seems that most of all Postrel can't stomach the idea that the campaign would have the temerity to try to redefine beauty as some kind of inner quality.

Another Dove ad, focusing on girls’ insecurities about their looks, concludes, “Every girl deserves to feel good about herself and see how beautiful she really is.” Here, Dove is encouraging the myth that physical beauty is a false concept, and, at the same time, falsely equating beauty with goodness and self-worth. If you don’t see perfection in the mirror, it suggests, you’ve been duped by the media and suffer from low self-esteem.
But adult women have a more realistic view. “Only two percent of women describe themselves as beautiful” trumpets the headline of Dove’s press release. Contrary to what the company wants readers to believe, however, that statistic doesn’t necessarily represent a crisis of confidence; it may simply reflect the power of the word beautiful.

If what you see in the mirror makes you feel inadequate, you are simply being honest with yourself and that has nothing to do with the media, but if you accept what you see, you've become the dupe of Dove? If the word beautiful is as powerful as Postrel thinks it is, isn't that more reason to denature it by watering it down to refer to all a person's noble qualities? Isn't it good if women can be "beautiful" for being smart, productive, engaged? If they look in a mirror and think that? Physical attractiveness exists, it just shouldn't be all-important. Media, ads inculded, are just one of the many institutions that tries to make a woman's attractiveness, or fertility (as Postrel wishes to interpret it), into the only significant quality she has to offer society.

The point is, women shouldn't have to feel tyrannized by the need to attain some level of physical attractiveness, even if evolution would seem to have conspired against them on that front. The survival of the human race no longer depends on this. But the survival of the cosmetics, fashion and plastic surgery industries do. Why is Postrel carrying their water, still?