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The aristocracy of the beautiful is becoming increasingly pronounced in the Western world, with looks and figure trumping talent and effort in the professional marketplace. Even in such serious professions as broadcast journalism, appearance has become more important than substance. Just try to find a new female TV anchor who doesn't look like a Nordic goddess or, if she has to be a brunette, isn't glamorous, thin and beautiful. The practice of valuing a woman based on her high cheekbones instead of her intelligence reached its zenith when CNN advertised its new anchor, Paula Zahn as, "just a little bit sexy."
Why shouldn't reading the news be like playing sports? Shouldn't it be the best qualified, instead of the best looking? But newswomen are not primarily valued for their minds and the intellectual contributions they can make, but for the images they project.
When we were kids, our parents told us we were beautiful, even if the world did not agree. Their emotions colored their appraisal. That is what love is: the inability to be objective about the object of one's love. To be in love is to be rendered incapable of rendering a rational evaluation. If you love your house, then you prefer it to a palace. If you love yourself, then you would not be dressing up to look like someone else.
But I know very few women today who are in love with themselves and who would not radically reconstruct their faces and bodies with plastic surgery if they had the money. Just tune into the reality hit Extreme Makeover to witness how this kind of transformation has become a fairytale dream for many American women with faltering self-esteem. Each week, the show focuses on two people who are so distraught with their looks that they undergo radical plastic surgery to look like the plastic Barbie dolls they played with as children.
Once upon a time when a man fell in love with a woman, he was supposed to stop comparing her to all the other women he could potentially date. He was to become subjective in his appraisal of her. Even as they aged together and the world saw her wrinkles, he remained fixated on her sparkling eyes.
But the constant bombardment of beautiful faces, and the portrayal of women as the lewd man's plaything through every conceivable medium, has rendered us incapable of being subjective about beauty. We have all become experts in objective standards of attractiveness; those five or six standardized models of beauty that have become the only acceptable images to which all women are meant to conform. These usually include a round face, blue eyes, blonde hair and being wafer-thin like a scarecrow which would normally be in a field scaring off buzzards.
Forget that Marilyn Monroe was a size 14, or that the great art masters never painted a single skinny woman. Television and glossy magazines have changed all that. Visual media caters to the eye's need to reduce everything to a series of lines, and hence, stick figures reign. A hundred years ago, people made love with their hands and "meat was neat." Today, they make love, much less artfully, with their eyes, and "thin is in."
Undoubtedly, the beautiful people get ahead faster, and this is a long-standing reality. Beautiful people even have a miraculous ability to part us from our money. In a misogynistic culture where women are trained to disparage themselves and look up to supermodels as examples of women who are really blessed, it becomes a privilege to hand our credit card over to someone we wish we could look like. Firms like Abercrombie & Fitch, which admits to targeting sales assistants who "look great," have learned that the beautiful people can motivate "regular" people to try to impress them.
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