What Is It With Beauty?

What is it for men that makes them find a woman to be beautiful?

Famously for those women who revell in obesity, some african and polynesian societies set a large price on rotund women, as being the beautiful ones, most attractive and sought after. However not all men in these societies agree. There is then a degree of cultural stereotyping and social norms to be conformed to. Is the reverse true, were western men brainwashed and normalised to prefer the 'anorexic' look?

Once again we fall into what societal impressions are made in the media and the 'tri-via' of every day banter. On the one hand there are 'leadership' messages trying to normalise that which is not actually normal or healthy. For the fashion industry, it was the unobtainable clothes rail figure which on the one hand makes the job of the designer's seamstresses easier, cylinders being catered for instead of horizontal curvature, and it helps the industry sell a concept that you are never good enough so buy more. On the other hand, the tribal elders know that a fatty will survive a famine better than a skinny-me-links.

The fashion industry could own the print media for decades and perpetuate the impression that these 'twiggy' like women's bodies were the height of beauty in society. Now of course there was another quite different print media than Vogue and that genre, there was the men's 'interest' magazines and later the Lads mags. Curves a plenty and no cup size smaller than C on view. And bottoms started to get bigger.

Social media burst on the scene which was a new platform to rebel against the old print media and give a voice to the hoi palloi, the feminist and the male. And bottoms got bigger. Much biggerr. We went from the kate moss waif look being in all images people consumer in paper days, to the Beyonce Jay-Lo big and beautiful. Waistlines are still a little too wasp like then for the fat-is-a-statement fringe in feminism, and there is a focus on good health and physical training. I noticed this on one of my intermittant returns to my homeland, where the shock of so many obese teenage girls in the late naughties turned within halkf a decade to the surprise of how many well trained young women there were around. Social media creates a new peeer pressure you could say, but also it inspires a viral type of discussion on good health and what is really normal for humanity - that we are physcial creatures forced into sedentary lifestyles by the economics of modern times.

Beauty though is not just a pretty bum. What is facial beauty ? Is there for us in the west a set of characteristics which we in the majority would recoginise or rank as beautiful? How does individual taste vary in this ? Do we maybe rate a pretty face but accept and love a different face as being beautiful to us every day when we live or work with someone?

Computing has brought us the average face algorythm. There is an averagely beautiful face you can find, and it isn't all that beautiful and obviously it depends on where the faces are from in the world and who did the initial choosing before the aggregate face merge was run in the programme. Average faces across nations of ethnicities are more interesting, and in fact you can always find beauty in them. However they too are taken from young adults it seems.

There are some features which many seem to agree on and are represented in the averagely beautiful cyborg face.   Relatively large eyes, full lips, a defined jaw line and defined cheek bones for us in the west at least. If we think of this statistically in terms of ranking or some way of saying is your partner or object of affection beautiful, we will probably find that there is a nice statisitical bell curve which may be quite  tight when being asked to rank faces or choose the single most beautiful of five images  say, or if being asked to rank many or consider their own experiences and actual feelings then we could expect a flatter bell curve. It is socially influenced, with people most likely ranking the feautres of the love of their life or forlorn object of girl next door desire higher.

For me the ultimate beauty is Jenna Coleman, who many might think is a bit cutsey or a soft little brunette. She has features which remind me most of my kind of most beautiful girlfriend in my life, who was also a very compatible type for me I can see in retrospect, us meeting though in a time of personal turmoil for us both. So do we then colour our choices by our own experiences ? Yes of course, a deep emotional trigger is in there, either to be adverse or attrtacted. There is the pretty girl in the night club syndrome. She attracts only the cockiest because the more modest personality types consider her out-of-their-league. Her personality is by in large going to be around the average yet she attracts domineering, daring and crass personality types most. After perhaps rejection or being dumped for another, we men quite likely find some features bite a little and rank them lower in a test, and in real life, avoid perhaps girls with those sets of features.

Perhaps we are conditioned and manipulated by society and the media, but most of all we are conditioned to behaviours by our own experience and some of our own innate senses for attraction to the opposite sex. I know that I had a good sense that I was heterosexual by age 5 and liked the prettier girls then in my class. These as I remember aged 5 to about 12 were blondes. Later into my teens I grew a strong preference for pretty brunettes, and this was later focused towards petite brunettes at Uni and throughout life, with only 2 or three blondes in my history of 25 dating girlfreinds. I have had interest from some blondes and sandy haired but  it is brunettes who catch my motivation to act. This is a learnt response. Petite brunettes like me, a tall auburn man quite well built, and it is a kind of mutual thing through life that I show a certain confidence and perhaps a blush too.

So love #3 in my life, is a story. We had that love-at-first sight PING of the pupil dilation and the kind of body language and her shyness was broken by a common friend in hand. It showed that our biological instincts and programming through life had made a match and the social context was conjusive to a potential partnership. I am glad in a way we didnt marry, she was 95% sweet and lovely but 5% vitriolic bitch. Maybe I would have tamed that last shrew percent into something better, but she wanted a rich boy in her cerebral choices which would have been troublesome.

It's no coincidence I write this as the 20th anniversary of meeting the greatest, brightest flash-in-the-pan I ever had back in june 1997. I am seperated and middle aged and find myself on the brink of being in the market again. I met up with my own Jenna Coleman a few times after,and we hit it off of course, I was a bit once bitten of course. On leaving she admitted it was just a bad time and perhaps later (when I had calmed down a bit from a stressful lifestyle) .I certainly don't have the same tastes as my friends, and don't want to go back to my twice bitten period after love #3 and love #4 in the late nineties, whereafter I became an opportunist happy to take what landed at my feet, being a young man in his prime. It wasnt a waste of time, although I think economics could have played a bigger roll now in retrospect either way of getting a professional partner or a good house wife so I could work more. 

Our programming by genes and by experience then I beleive counts for more of what we of both sexes find instantly attractive. We seek queues which are obvious and some more subtle in our peri-conscious judgements, but of course we are prejudiced by our social learning experiences and cerebral filters.