--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, grate.swan <no_re...@...> wrote: > > I have always wondered what beauty is. Why are we attracted to > something beautiful and less to something plain. What are the > attribute of beauty and its inner essence? Why is one particular > woman in Home Depot or Nordstroms attactive and another not so > much. > > Genetic markers promoting evolutionary sustainability may give insight > to men's (perhaps odd) obsessions with breasts and behinds -- and > other markers that make women breath deeply when one man passes and > cringe at another. Perfectly symmetrical faces and proportions has > been shown to tie to perceptions of beauty. Cultural and media > conditioning is another element. But these things hardly capture the > totality of all the factors of attraction -- they barely scratch the > surface of defining beauty. > > Is beuaty simply and ultimately arbitrary? or does it have an eternal > form and attributes?
I wish that I remembered the name of a public TV series I saw once that dealt with this very issue, but I do not. It was great, because it examined the issue of "What do we consider attractive in a human being?" *across cultures*. What I remember is that in specifics it isn't the same. In the West (possibly as a result of decades of waif-like supermodels), "thin is in," but in Eastern Europe or the Middle East or India, thin is not seen as attractive at all. Wide hips and a big butt are seen as attractive in some cultures because they (historically) indicate less potential problems with childbirth. The characteristics that I remember from the series that ARE the same in every culture are the following: * Symmetry of features -- the more symmetrical the face or body, the more we find it attractive. And the opposite. * Long hair in women -- physically, an indicator of good health (not all women can even grow their hair really long), and again a "positive flag" in terms of childbirth and "passing along one's genes." * A V-shaped torso -- both in men and women, more important in men. * Good skin -- again, an indicator of health. There were more such agreements across cultures, but after only half a cup of coffee I can't remember the others right now. One interesting point made was that the size of women's breasts is seen biologically as *purely* an "attract males" phenomenon. There is no biological reason for big boobs; small breasts pro- duce just as much milk as big ones. But even in apes, big breasts attract more males. (Not me, whatever it's worth.) > And beauty clearly does not stop with humans. Design and art, > manifest in many processes and things, can be beautiful. And > nature can be so breathtakingly beautiful. I would suggest that the perception of "What is beauty?" would vary across cultures with regard to art, just as it does with potential mates. But I can suggest a reason (also from one of these PBS specials) for why we find vistas and landscapes beautiful. It's purely physical. The muscles of your eyes (which are very close to the brain and are important to the brain as an indicator of stress or lack of stress) are "at rest" (un-tensed) only when the eyes are focused on infinity. Thus if you are indoors, or on a city street surrounded by buildings, the eye muscles are always tensed. But go to the seaside or stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and look out, and the eye muscles relax. Thus your brain assumes that your whole body is more relaxed, thus the perception of "beauty." > Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fariest of them all? > > Is a beautiful woman more beautiful than a sunset on a gorgeous > beach Given the above, it may depend on how far away she is. :-) Here's a commentary on beauty that I found a while back, and have been waiting for an appropriate moment to post here. It's called, "Why I don't drink tequila any more." http://i41.tinypic.com/2yorcc2.jpg :-)
