Can you have beautiful buff boy fatigue?
Beautiful, buff, hairless chest, pretty young white boy fatigue?
Beautiful, buff, hairless chest, a hint of sensitivity in the expression, pretty young white boy fatigue?
Beautiful buff, hairless chest, a hint of sensitivity in the expression, homogenous homoerotics pretty young white boy fatigue?
Beautiful buff, hairless chest, a hint of sensitivity in the expression, homogenous homoerotics, perfectly coiffed, designer stubble, pretty young white boy fatigue?
Because I do.
h/t @homo_superior http://bigbutchmuscle.com/post/5049552865/cigar
Quiet Riot Girl 
I don’t. Not yet. Not quite. I’ll let you know when I’m there….
when you’re there, he is in big trouble, that beautiful buff young boy. I’ll be ready with the shovel.
(He can lose the cigar and the stubble anytime he fancies though.)
You have a bit of a Nazi Gayze Herr Simpson. But this is what is being cultivated by these visions of perfection!
It’s the standard issue square jaw I’m bored of.
yes me too!
but also the chests. Too big for me. Too big for his head!
😀
it’s a pathetic standard, like girls page 3 or big tits.
women can’t get rid of this slavery to stereotypes and men go for it.
there is something sad about the way male beauty standards mirror the worst of women’s. I agree Paolo. And I am sure you are very beautiful! 😀
The image disowns, alienates and abandons you almost in the same way the lips carelessly drop the cigar. Ugly mirror and it feels like a mirror. I’m starting to hate all this aloof iconography that in its expression asks me to disown others to the extent that it disowns and distances itself from me. Nothing open, nothing generous, just cold muscle, chisled jaw, inaccessible as your own reflection or a sculpture of glass or ice.
nicely put.
Very comical!!!!! As long as the topic is the more corporeal state of being . . .
My reaction is, first, hey, wow, that’s a good looking guy!!!!!! Second, hey, if I looked like that I could have practically any girl I wanted!!!
I don’t know. All this ‘objectification’, rape culture, etc. just makes me mad that male fantasies/representations are dangerous, but female fantasies/representations are not dangerous.
I should say, it WOULD make me mad if I were required to spend any time sloshing through the rape culture topic.
agreed Gs. BUt this guy is probably everyone’s fantasy. and he knows it. That’s what is so annoying about him!
The reference to page 3 girls is baffling. This model is naturally a 9.5, while page 3 girls are 5s at best who’ve undergone an Extreme Porn Makeover (bad tan, bleached hair, fake tits) to give them a fool’s gold version of sexiness. The woman who sorta reminds me of him facially would be Jennifer Garner.
He’s a picture of healthy, youthful gorgeousness. And pleasantly androgynous: deep set eyes, the aforementioned square jaw, the plump narrow mouth, and short, dainty nose. But not a timeless beauty. A timeless beauty always has a good amount of poetic flaw integrated within the bland perfection.
I don’t know about ‘healthy’ – I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were steroids involved. The beauty horizon certainly encourages that sort of self-destructive activity in the same way the beauty horizon of women does encourages their own brand of self-destruction.
Also, I worry about the psychic life of such a body – all that preening and care-taking. Ronaldo has to be one of the ugliest men – spiritually (and I’d say physically too) – on god’s green… It’s all hell if you ask me. Getting lost in who has it worst, males or females looks like a dull distraction form the fact that the world of dreams are becoming more and more featureless and homogenous. I look at him or look at the page 3 and i just see an endless coma. As Brother Theodore would have it: ‘The boredom of perfection’.
Can you explain what you means exactly to be homogeneous and featureless, because it’s literally impossible for a human being to be either.
I also find it odd that people would single out people who spend a lot of time on their looks as being particularly soulless. There are people who spend an equal amount of time on meaningless hobbies like fishing. Are they soulless?
And he’s a model; it’s his job to maintain his looks. Are you saying that no one should be a model?
I agree arctic jay, with Inegative. You do not know how ‘healthy’ a person is by looking at them, unless you can tell they are sick.
All these numbers 5 -9.5. are ridiculous. Certain physical types are more popular in certain cultures, and some in many cultures. But there is no objective standard of beauty.
I find this man’s face attractive, but not his chest.I guess I could cut out his face. He obviously doesn’t mind being objectified!
Yes, looks can be deceiving, but there are physical traits that correlate with health. If you have those traits, you are more likely to actually have health. He *looks* healthy.
“But there is no objective standard of beauty.”
I think you’re way overestimating the variance of cultural beauty standards, but I never implied that my standards are objective. But standards are also shared. The page 3 girls obviously think they’re naturally 5s as well, which is why they’ve gone through such lengths to alter their looks.
do you rate yourself on this scale a-jay? what are you? a 7? 8? … 😀
also Innegative I know what you mean about Ronaldo. I find him ‘ugly’ in many ways but he has a body it is hard not to admire.
I think he’s a lot more innocent(or, potentially, dumb) then he’s letting on.
Actually I think that’s what turns me off. He looks like a dumb man pretending to be cocky.
I like smart men pretending to be dumb. Or cocky.
I find it amusing that people are being hyper-pedantic about my claim that he looks healthy yet they don’t seem to have a problem with you claiming that he’s both innocent and dumb.
Physical appearance does give clues about health. How can you possibly know his intelligence and experiences?
Eeeeeeh…. something about his energy.
Quiet Riot Girl:
A challenge.
Can you take on Roissy’s posts on female beauty standards?
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/even-blind-men-prefer-the-optimal-0-7-waist-to-hip-ratio/
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/science-continues-validating-roissy-reductionism/
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/which-is-harder-on-a-womans-looks-fat-or-aging/
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/the-myth-of-the-medieval-bbw/
The fourth one down takes you on the most, I suppose. Now I’d be impressed if you outargue him. Very impressed. As it is, I was changed from a lifelong believer of “beauty is mostly subjective” to “beauty is mostly objective” by his posts and the polls on his site.
Well, for starters…
Goya was just painting a nude; The nudity in Ruben’s work could be defended as inspired by classical themes.
If that’s the only argument Roissy has against differing beauty standards in history, I think it’s pretty flimsy.
Look at the Venus de Milo or any of the other depictions of Venus in ancient sculpture.
I am afraid I won’t take on the mighty alpha male Roissy. I think he’s a bit of a dick.
Wuss.
I’m disappointed.
That being said, yeah, Roissy is a dick -in the bad way in which that word is used. You are not wrong about that. There’s a reason they call him the Dark Lord of game (even though there are *a few* more sexist misogynistic douchy game instuctors/bloggers out there).
I still loves you QRG, but I really thought you would be up for a good argument. You certainly don’t have to take him on on his moderated snarky blog. I thought you might do some posts about it here, but if that’s not your thing, that’s not your thing.
I’m not scared to take on Roissy in an argument. I just dont find that a very interesting one. Beauty is not ‘objective’ and that’s all I have to say. I can’t prove it, but neither can he!
typhon:
I don’t know how you missed Roissy’s argument, but it appears you did.
He’s arguing that its nearly impossible to find a classical or other society where downright fat chicks were considered sexually attractive, and that Reubens, often put up as an example of middle age beauty standard malleability is anything but.
That’s not the only post he did about Reubans, I think I’m going to go back and find his first one.
anyway clarence my point is that whilst certain standards of ‘beauty’ are presented as ideal in societies, this is not objective it just shows cultural norms/values. Not what actual people find beautiful on a day to day basis.
I didn’t miss it.
He’s positing that Rubens wasn’t considered lewd by the church because the female figure in it couldn’t be considered ‘jack off’ material whereas Goya’s nude could.
However, Ruben’s nudes had allegorical meaning and mythical themes. Goya’s nude did not. That’s why it was persecuted by the church for being profane.
Typhon:
Yes, but you are focusing on that contention and ignoring all the other painters and paintings he linked to. There really wasn’t as much “big art” during the middle ages as a casual reader would be lead to believe, in fact, then as now, slim nudes were the vast majority of paintings. As I said, he did an earlier (and more extensive post) just on Reubens and I’m going to find that and post it later.
That some parts of beauty are subjective and vary among men and races (blacks seem to prefer a small amount more “junk in the trunk” on average than Asians and whites) is not in dispute. But surprisingly this variation among cultures and times is nowhere near as extreme as the variation among individuals -although the variation among individuals isn’t that much unless you only focus on extreme outliars. And yet, even among individuals it’s surprising how often people from cultures all over the world converge at beauty norms. 0.7 hip to waist and symmetrical facial features seem to be two that hold up among time and place, as is the preference for youth over age. I’m sure there are probably similar standards for men probably genetically encoded into the majority of women and gay men.
QRG:
You are correct in that what is held up as “ideal” is often subjective, however, there’s a large possibility that some of the “ideal” stuff is held because it very closely correlates with either sexual fecundity,individual survival, or the survival of the tribe/nation. Our ancestors did not have the freedom to make personal and societal mistakes that our advanced technology enables us to.
Typhon:
Two things:
A. I suspect we agree more than we disagree on things, despite the disagreements we have over sexual fluidity. Many of my arguments can still stand even if most men are bisexual, for example.
B. I really enjoy arguing with you because you can be very challenging.
I also wish to state that even if Roissy and most reductionists are right :
A. There are probably reasons -good , sound evolutionary reasons for the persistance of gay and bisexual people and I do not regard their births as any type of genetic mistake. Same thing for many intergendered people and asexual people. They probably carry genes which help the human race as a whole survive even without reproducing themselves.
B. There are men who prefer fat women -genuine fat women, not “25 or 50 extra pounds “. There are men who prefer older women, bald women, and the same way all the way through both gay and straight sexualities. There’s someone for pretty much everyone, though some are born so unusual that its not easy to find their partner. Averages are just that, averages. As a cis straight man I am not ashamed of my sexuality nor am I the type that thinks other people should be ashamed of theirs.
If there is some ‘objective’ aspect to beauty, then I think it’s a mistake to emphasize it. Given that the brain develops with regard to stimulus; given that different parts of the brain’s development are emphasized by different cultural structures – say a visual culture may emphasize visual brain systems and aural cultures will emphasize aural systems – you can’t really deny the significance of impossible subjective bias.
It’s probably a mistake even to break the brain down into ‘visual systems’ and ‘aural systems’ and more apt to talk about how amorphous systems are emphasized and blended to create ideas about visual or aural beauty. The very idea we have any handle on what is objective is already biased by cultural and organic organisation to the extent you are wasting your time by trying to argue in this way.
For example, most of the above relates to paintings and pictures, which already contain an extraordinary visual bias. So the question being considered might be something more like – “is slimness an objective componant of visual beauty”? To answer that, you’d have to answer whether a bias towards slimness was in-built into the medium of painting itself, how the history of various media led to painting etc. I’d wish Roissy well with all that, but it takes a good deal more than just saying ‘there are no fat birds in art’.
Also, the painting is already a degraded notion of beauty set inside an overly simplified theatre – it portrays only visual cues and given its static silence makes for a very uncomplicated pattern of beauty. If slimness is necessary to visual beauty, then that’s all it is – an objective componant of visual beauty, not beauty entire and it could disappear from sight as easily as it appeared.
My feeling too is that we are moving away from this visual emphasis in defining beauty and towards something more akin to narrative and complex nervous, non-physical integration. I’ll write that up in a blog post at some point.
Read ‘impossible subjective bias’ as ‘an impossibly significant subjective bias’. I mean even if there are objective componants, the subjective factor is massive in making those componants present.
And, to example how slimness might be built into the act of painting: painting, from a painter’s perspective relies as much on tactile beauty notions as it does visual. The slim girl as a visual image may simply have been an extension of the sensual touch. Because tenderness is associated with lightness, perhaps it made more tactiles sense to paint that way? I suspect the ‘objective’ argument for many is more about violence than about the truth of the matter. Seems impossible to put anything but a question mark over what is and isn’t objective. Generally, to argue for the subjective seems like the more sensitive and fluid position.
innegative:
Then you could perhaps explain the first study I linked to which found that blind men have pretty much the same hip to waist ratio preferences as sighted ones?
Egads. What’s the big deal about admitting that certain aspects of what we call beauty probably are more or less objective because they are markers of fertility and/or health?
“The study involved men who had been sightless from birth. ”
What does that actually mean? How many? 3%? 94% of them? A curious way of phrasing the findings if you are confident about what you found.
“Karremans chose the lower ratio as an ideal, a slim yet curvy paragon, at least among Western populations. […] Karremans sent his mannequins around the Netherlands. ”
We remain then very much west centric – a culture that confesses it idealises a preference for the 0.7 ratio. At best, the study shows only that visual stimuli are maybe not the whole story behind formulating these prejudices. When you take into account too the various brain studies that have suggested that the eye isn’t the only thing involved with visual perception – like blind people being able to tell what colour certain things are etc, the study means significantly less.
“The breasts on both figures were the same, in case the men reached too high.”
The breasts being the same on both dolls creates a different relational sensation given the hip ratios were different. Maybe the 0.7 dolls had a better breast to hip ration and if you enlarged the breasts on the 0.8 doll proportionally, you’d have the same results.
“And though the blind had almost surely grown up hearing attractiveness described, perhaps even in terms of hourglass shapes, it was improbable, he writes in his forthcoming journal paper, that they had heard descriptions amounting to, “The more hourglass shaped, the more attractive,” which would be necessary to favor the curvier mannequin over the figure that was only somewhat less so.”
That’s just bullshit and I find it incredible that any scientifically minded fellow would even say it. The implication is already there in the term ‘hour-glass figure’ and moreover it’s interesting the studdy only did one small ratio and one larger ration. id like to have seen a range. 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8 etc. You may find more ambiguity there in that the blind just go for ‘smaller’ over ‘larger’. It’s absurd to pick a sighted ideal and a slightly fatter one and then say ‘the ideal is proved! They went for the ideal!!’
The experiment strikes me mostly as a pretty poor one. I expect too that if you took your doll to cultures that didn’t understand dolls and didn’t understand how to make sense of associating lust and desire with plastic, they’d look at you in bewilderment and disbelief. “This isn’t woman”, they would say. You would say ‘yes, but let’s pretend’. ‘Pretend? What the hell are you talking about? You may as well ask me which type of tree I’d bone if i could!!”
“Egads. What’s the big deal about admitting that certain aspects of what we call beauty probably are more or less objective because they are markers of fertility and/or health?”
As for this, the first problem is this word ‘admitting’. There’s nothing to admit – there may or may not be an objective componant. It’s not been proved either way as the ‘more or less’ in your remark implies. Is it more objective or less objective?
Moreover, in what ways does such a figure imply ‘fertility’ or ‘health’? And are fertility and health objectively valuable? I’m assuming you are looking toward some evolutionary explanation, but isn’t evolution itself a theory of environmental preference? As you change the environment, you change the preferences – for example, in an over-populated world of diminishing resources, it may very well be more evolutionarily beneficial to survival to lose any interest in health or fertility. This too may well be happening. Evolving a static Objective fact doesn’t really make a lot of sense, does it?
Innegative:
That doesn’t even make sense. Evolution doesn’t magically know the state of the world, nor does the individual, and the sole “goal” of the process is reproduction. What constitutes “fitness” might change, but the fact that this fitness will be on the order of getting genes propagated will not.
I’m afraid you need a course in evolutionary biology. Evolution doesn’t even make sense as a concept without sex and differential reproduction.
Innegative:
Your first sentence is retarded. You know very well I meant that ALL THE MEN INVOLVED were sightless, and had been sightless at birth.
Here’s the paper:
Karremans, J. C., Frankenhuis, W. E., & Arons, S. (2010). Blind men prefer a low female Waist-to-Ratio. Evolution and Human Behavior.
The guy has many other published papers in reputable journals.
Here’s his contact information:
ohan Karremans
Room A.09.28
Associate Professor
Department of Social and Cultural Psychology
Radboud University Nijmegen
P.O. Box 9104
6500 HE Nijmegen
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 (0)24 36 12742
Fax: +31 (0)24 36 12677
E-mail: j.karremans@bsi.ru.nl
I suggest you might contact this guy with your brilliant critiques, being that I am sure you are a Professor or assistant professor of psychology and surely he could never have controlled for or even been aware of your brilliant critiques.
For instance, I did a search for blind people “seeing” color. So far, the only things I’ve come up with are studies that are done on people who are legally blind, but not totally blind, but I keep searching. After all, it’s not my area of expertise. Perhaps it’s yours, and you’d like to hook me up with this research where they conclude that people who are totally blind have a “color sense”?
“Your first sentence is retarded. You know very well I meant that ALL THE MEN INVOLVED were sightless, and had been sightless at birth.”
That wasn’t your sentence. It was taken from the Roissy article and I it was part of whoever was discussing the paper’s findings.
“For instance, I did a search for blind people “seeing” color. So far, the only things I’ve come up with are studies that are done on people who are legally blind, but not totally blind, but I keep searching. After all, it’s not my area of expertise. Perhaps it’s yours, and you’d like to hook me up with this research where they conclude that people who are totally blind have a “color sense”?”
Had a feeling you’d call me out on this. I may try to dig out the thing I was thinking of. It wasn’t blind people seeing colours, it was a more complex experiment than that, but it did give the impression that there was more to visual perception that what comes to a person via the eye. The blind seeing colours could well have been a legal blindness study as back when I read that I wasn’t clear there was a difference between legal blind and hardcore blind.
Clarence please dont call people’s sentences ‘retarded’ thanks.
Quiet Riot Girl:
If I suspect this person isn’t being intellectually honest, I’m not going to treat him as if he is. Attacking MY sentence for grammatical reasons when the study was linked right there was obnoxious to say the least.
I most certainly don’t need a course in biological evolution. I understand the model fine and dandy. As is the way with the social sciences, the model seems to adapt to reflect the findings – like for instance when it is observed that the sex drives and serotonin levels of certain over-populated species with limited access to food resources begin to diminish. In this regard, it has indeed been suggested that there is a genetic predisposition for species to self-regulate their survival instincts.
And the essential point still stands – I don’t see why the concept of ‘health’ or ‘fertility’ should be conveyed by an hour-glass figure. If we all ran round after fat-birds, the theory of evolution would just go: ‘because pregnant women have large stomachs and no hip to waist ratio, we prefer fat ones. Plus, the abundant flesh gives the impression of plentiful food resources’. It’s a pretty arbitrary preference and i reckon mine makes more sense than the hour-glass hypothosis.
I’ll repost this here at the bottom just to make sure you read it:
“Your first sentence is retarded. You know very well I meant that ALL THE MEN INVOLVED were sightless, and had been sightless at birth.”
That wasn’t your sentence. It was taken from the Roissy article and I it was part of whoever was discussing the paper’s findings.
Can’t find that study I was after, but I’m thinking I may have been referring to ‘blindsight’, which is generally a feature of those with damaged brains but functioning eyes. Though they have no actual vision, they are still able to detect certain details about objects which is put down to parts of the brain still working to interpret parts of the received data.
Sight is a mosaic of light and colour on the eye that the brain has to organise, distinguish objects from and create depth perceptiion etc. I reckon it would be fair to assume that our culture has a profound effect on the way we organise this stuff.
Which came first, culture or biology?
I’d say biology puts limits on culture.
This does not mean that I think culture has no impact, but I think that culture cannot and will not go against biology, at least not if that culture is going to propogate for any length of time. Even “free will ” doesn’t impact this as much as you’d think because even if you assert true free will, I’ve never heard that free will could shape our preferences. It merely allows us to choose between options.
Roissy is saying that the 0.7 is an ideal hip to waist ratio as objective, biological fact and claims that report prooves it. It does no such thing. Cultural structure for sure remains a powerful potential influence on that ideal.
I agree with much of what you say there above – that there does appear to be an immutable ‘facticity’ as Sartre called it that free will only plays in and around. However, facticity does not confer objective static truth. In any cultural arrangement of things, there will inevitably be some set of norms that supervene on that arrangement. To argue though that they are cross-cultural objective facts is going to be a very arduous thing to proove and quite frankly, I didn’t get the impression that Roissy was interseted in that anyway. His interests lie somewhere other than in rigorous truth seeking.
Also, you say that culture may not go against biology. I’m not so sure about that. For instance, changes in medicine and law may allow certain genes to become prevalent that would previously have been wiped out – certain genetic disorders become more prevalent for instance. In this, such disordered folks aquire the means to speak through technological advance – blogs, mass media etc. They produce their own language – the passage of the homosexual from sick sexual aberrant to Graham Norton, for example.
Another thing, language like feminist language, it questions the 0.7 ideal norm and makes it shameful to talk about fat birds. It changes the nature of the game that men have to play to get laid; it changes the language of allowable signs. No longer does a painter translate the sensitive touch into the form of a delicate girl, he sets himself the challenge of making beauty from abnormal and conventionally ugly patterns. Your culture begins to challenge the norm and given that evolution is by nature fluid (monkeys became men through environmental and cultural pressure) you constantly change the rules of survival and adaptation.
Even technology is tied into biology: whatever factors make up intelligence have been proven to be over 50 percent genetic. If you don’t have enough smart people being born, and you don’t have enough automation to take up the slack, your culture loses its technology. And this is but one example.
And why would your culture want to “challenge the norm”? Seriously, if I don’t find something worthy of painting, I ain’t painting it, esp not as some sort of ridiculous political project. Feminism (specifically the western adherents of feminist doctrine) is not reproducing itself. Let me ask you this, using the US as an example: Do you know which groups are driving the slow increase of the US population and which demographic groups are not reproducing at “replacement” levels?
You talk about how Roissy is not interested in the truth, yet your critique of that study was on the level of a bright high schooler. Did you really think that Professor Karremans was unaware of any of the prior studies done on the 0.7 ideal and their limitations ? See, here’s the thing: over the years I’ve noticed that as studies have been done at earlier ages (including infants) and with better equipment and methods including real time monitoring of brain activity, and this research has almost (but not quite ) unanimously pointed to biological bases for behavior, the proponents of the dominant 20th century paradigm of cultural constructivism have kept raising the experimental bar more and more in terms of what they will consider a successful demonstration against their simplistic world-view.
Feminism (and it’s not the only culprit, I’m just picking on it because it is the subject of this blog) was remarkably intellectually arrogant. And still is. Purporting to change society for the better without understanding the biological constraints on such a process is idiotic.
Now yes, in the future evolution will continue, whether we have technology to control it or not.So in that sense Roissy is just as wrong as you’ve been. But this will occur because babies will be born, genes will flow and ebb (poetic, aren’t I?) , the environment, both social and physical will change. Thus there is no universal standard of beauty -obviously what the Cro Magnons called a beautiful lady, or what the Xyrglings of Planet X consider beautiful in their females will not be precisely the same as what the vast majority of homo sapiens sapiens believe is an ideal hip/waist ratio at the beginning of the 21st century. But what I am willing to bet is this:
Sexual beauty will continue to be (and is also linked elsewhere in the universe) linked to physical and reproductive health and will vary in part by how the environment interacts with those variables. It will be this way, until sex itself is transcended. Maybe if cyborgs and cheap cloning become the norm.
As far as I can see, the above was an elaborate agreement with me. All you’ve said above is that it’s very difficult to separate the structural from the biological, which is essentially what I’ve been arguing throughout. My point about the professor was that that research was no proof of anything as Roissy claimed it was. However deep my critique, the points raised remain far more damning than Roissy’s uncritical acceptance of the findings on the grounds someone was labouring under the title of a professsor of science.
And if you want to complicate matters still further – look at the fun they are having in quantum physics at present, relating the observable universe with what is believed. Take that seriously enough, you might as well see the whole universe in terms of a collective solipsism.
No, me and you do not agree, at least not if I’m reading your earlier posts right.
My contention is that human beauty standards haven’t changed much across cultures and time over the past few thousand years. Thin has almost universally been “in”, youth has been “in”, and symmetrical facial features have been “in”. My farther contention is that this is far more biological than social and will not change for the vast majority of men unless and until:
A. Biological engineering is performed OR
B. The environment changes enough to evolve new quantifiers of reproductive fitness and thus changes the sexual standards that way
I sincerely doubt I’ve misunderstood you so much and you agree with my post above.
We have to deal with the “societal genome” as it is now, not as we’d like it to be.
It’s not that I disagree with you. I just don’t believe you have provided me with proof enough to justify such a hard line view. I’m not at all convinced that it is necessary, that even if there were a fundamental standard for measuring visual beauty, that all cultures adhere to that standard; I’m not at all convinced that you can measure beauty by isolating one sense – vision – and then searching for rules and mathmatic ratios that proove a beauty standard; I’m not at all convinced health and symmetry and the whole Platonic system of perfect form is adequate to measure the inconsistencies of beauty.
Your notion of beauty leads us to a world filled with the man above, who is simply not beautiful – at all. He is mathematical, sterile, featureless, but not beautiful and it’s a sort of perfection that ruins that beauty. Real beauty requires distortion and your system doesn’t really account for that; it requires disease and disorder and may supervene on perfection’s corruption.
Ahh!
Now we enter the “Uncanny Valley” as applied to human forms, eh?
I will say that my first ever kiss was of a model-quality 21 year old , who had one small pimple -just one! on her face. She so much hated it, and wanted to remove it, so that she would have “perfect” skin. I loved it. It humanized her for me. This isn’t a brag – I only went on two dates with her, and I didn’t have my first sex with her, though we did remain friends for about a year. It’s just an explanation that I agree that absolute perfection isn’t necessarily absolute perfection in human beauty.
Then in this, there may well be some room for movement in you. For instance, let’s assume there is a bedrock of perfection and the 0.7 hip to waist is part of that bedrock. ‘Beauty’ is far more complex than just the distillation of that perfection (which may or may not be set in biological stone itself). ‘Beauty’ simply must relate to dissonance, accident, chaos, cultural forms, the mixing up of the varius senses and the ways culture mixes those senses etc. There is no formua for this and no evolutionary simplification accounts for it. Tori Amos becomes more beautiful in her ‘funny little shape’ for having referred to it thus. That is an example of language and sound changing the physical. If you focus on perfection, you will only ever create monstrosities and if you isolate one sense forsaking all others, likewise.
I think you’re only saying that Innegative because you’re a man.
Yes I think you’re right Innegative with regards to the validity of the findings. Hour glass figures are indeed attractive but so are all shapes. My own preference is not for the stick like insects of the Middleton variety but those of the more voluptuous vampires of height and big bones.
Which bit? I said a fair amount…
@innegative I think Asif meant the bit where you said ‘If we all ran after fat birds …’. I mean that was a pretty blokey thing to say.
I’d say ‘post-blokey’ (does that make me a postman? – ho ho). ‘Twas brimming enough with ironic scorn for the attitude it mocked to escape being a blokey I thought.
Perhaps you ironic scorn isn’t so easy to pick up on. Does this mean you are not a bloke?