Beauty: nature vs nurture

The news that  documentary film Timeless Beauty which I  mentioned in an earlier post  is about to come out has made me think again about beauty. Let me clarify: I only have a very small role in this film.  I was interviewed for it together with fellow model Stefanie Lange and Rebecca Valentine, owner and MD of Grey Model Agency, which represents me. I have not yet seen the film in its entirety, I only know what I said in my interview and I await, with trepidation, the final edit, so I cannot really comment on this film at all. All I will say at this point in time is that the documentary is a worthy initiative and it will definitely stimulate debate, especially so because it has a strong international cast of models who perform as themselves, as this is a documentary.
Discussions of beauty, especially of the social and cultural construct of beauty, seem to be back in fashion.  But we have been talking about beauty for decades.  In 1990 Chatto & Windus published the book by Naomi Wolf The Beauty Myth better known in its 2002 version published by HarperPerennial, with a new introduction by Wolf. It has been one of the most influential books of the past three decades, cogently arguing that ideas of beauty are manipulated by the fashion and beauty industry, that they can be identified as a way to oppress women, and also that they are subject to change. For Wolf beauty does not really exist, precisely because it is posited as a construct. It is, as the title of the book says, a myth.

The Beauty Myth is linked to the rise of third-wave feminism. It has received accolades but it has also been criticised, most famously  by Camille Paglia, for not  having been rigorously researched and for presenting inconsistencies in its analysis. Paglia's critique is scathing: "Look at The Beauty Myth, that book by Naomi Wolf. This is a woman who graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a Rhodes scholar, and cannot write a coherent paragraph...She has a case to make. She cannot make it. She's full of paranoid fantasies about the world. Her education was completely removed from reality". Typically,  Paglia does not mince words!
If you believe, like many do, that Wolf has dealt with the issue of beauty once and for all, think again. After reading The Beauty Myth you must also read Nancy Etcoff's Survival of the Prettiest. The title may already make you feel uncomfortable, especially if you are a staunch Wolf's supporter.  But Etcoff's work  must be  acknowledged because beauty is extremely complex and very, very controversial and Etcoff really probes into it.
Written in 1999, the book benefits from Etcoff's expertise as a cognitive neuro-scientist, with impeccable research credentials. She brings biology back into the equation, arguing that beauty is not solely a social construct. As she says "''What was biologically advantageous became an esthetic preference... Individual tastes, historical periods and, most especially, particular cultures have certainly influenced -- and, in the case of cultures, exploited -- these preferences, but they didn't create them, any more than Coca-Cola or McDonald's created our cravings for sweet or fatty foods.''
Etcoff maintains that, like it or not, there is a genetic instinct for beauty which is universal and is linked with sex: "beauty is a universal part of human experience, and ... it provokes pleasure, rivets attention, and impels actions that help ensure the survival of our genes". It affects women and men, not just women. With Etcoff we are back to Darwinian evolution, with beauty being part and parcel of the survival of the fittest. 

I am partly troubled by Etcoff's thesis, I had not considered the possibility of a universal instinct for beauty but I welcome further discussion of the issues involved and in truth, I have to admit that am not convinced beauty does not exist. There is so much evidence to the contrary, which Etcoff garners and which has also been presented by others  before her. As she says "Turning a cold eye to beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or responding with indifference to a baby's 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."
I am not denying the strong influence of culture and society (the nurture) on prevalent ideas of beauty but it would be not be an intelligent reaction to refuse to look at arguments proposed by biologists and cognitive neuro-scientists (the nature)..
As Etcoff says "there is a core reality to beauty that exists buried within the cultural constructs and the myths". It is time to delve into it, rather than denying its existence, uncomfortable though it might seem to be.