These are not uplifting times for those who believe that, all things
considered, it would be nice if looks weren't absolutely everything. The
tidal wave of analysis about Madame Sarkozy's Dior (air hostessy or not air
hostessy?), Madame's cheekbones (natural or enhanced?), Madame's nude
portrait (arty or tarty?) was merely a sand-marker. This level of debate is
played out weekly in the celebitchy magazines, and hourly on countless
websites such as thesartorialist.com, an almost elegiacally earnest and
tastefully laid-out pictorial blog dedicated to what stylish members of the
public are wearing, or the slightly less tastefully laid-out forums with
names such as rate-my-rack.org.
“Looks,” as the novelist Fay Weldon says briskly, “are still the most
important thing for women.” This from Fay, who was brought up in New Zealand
with one wonky mirror on the veranda and a mother who never told her that
she was goodlooking, although she was, and is.
It's a long way from today's teens who, perpetually photographing their own
gestures and grimaces on their mobile phones, make Narcissus look like a
slob with image issues, or the thousands of eight-year-olds logging on to to
missbimbo.com to order virtual pills and discuss boob jobs.
“Nowadays,” offers Weldon, “all little girls are told that they're beautiful
by their mothers, even when they're not. We're terribly conflicted. We don't
want appearance to be important, but almost everything we do reinforces that
they are. Awful? Yes, if you think that there's such a thing as justice or
people being born equal.
“But there are lots of things that are unfair about birth. Every small girl
has to come to terms with the way she looks. In a way it's better now,
because everyone can make themselves look better with cosmetics and surgery,
but that in turn leads to an obsession that's becoming almost dystopian.
Look how aspirational the WAG lifestyle has become - a lifestyle that's
entirely predicated on how good women look and their ability to snare a man.
They're the Becky Sharpes of the 21st century. We are in a moment of severe
backlash against everything that feminists fought for.”
If you were a raging optimist, you might interpret the tireless investigative
chronicling of Posh's nail extensions and Hermès bag collection as a victory
against those doom-mongers who claim that these days we all have the
attention span of a pair of hotpants. Not when it comes to arguing the case
for and against the ones that Britney Spears recently wore we don't. You
would dismiss theories that the media's saturation coverage - and the
public's devouring - of the McCanns was partly a result of their being
photogenic.
In an equally rhapsodic reading, the willingness of some sections of the
public to post pictures of almost every region of their body for general
inspection could be seen to hammer the final nail into the coffin of
repressed, hidebound Britain. Confidence surely hath no greater
manifestation than to download a picture of its nipples so that someone with
a moment or two of downtime in an otherwise pressurised working day can mark
them out of ten.
There is absolutely nothing new about “lookist” societies. Certainly since
Chaucer, who wasn't exactly backwards about coming forwards with scathing
descriptions of people's appearances, British literature has teemed with the
pulchritudinous. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, written in 1722, leaves us in
no doubt as to the physical attributes of its heroine. “I had often heard
the ladies say I was pretty,” says Moll, “and would be a very handsome
woman.” Indeed, her prettiness is why Moll is able to become a gentlewoman -
gentlewoman being a euphemism for prostitute, and prostitute being shorthand
for a character likely to make for a compelling 400-page romp, something a
plainer girl would, in 1722, be hard-pressed to do, being generally confined
to cleaning out chamber pots.
Beauty was the only currency a woman could call her own. Hence this 140 years
later, from George Eliot (a woman who was definitely more of a thinker than
a looker) on Dorothea Brooke on the first page - in the first sentence! - of
Middlemarch: “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown
into relief by poor dress.” Or this - from the first line - of Jane Austen's
Emma: “Handsome, clever and rich.” Where the plain are allowed to exist
(Jane Eyre, Northanger Abbey) there is, alas, often a whiff of disingenous
Ugly Betty-itis. It's implicitly clear that Jane and Mr Rochester's unflashy
looks are a manifestation of some kind of moral superiority. Either way,
looks have become a battleground.
We do not need Desmond Morris to tell us that good looks are a biological
preference, denoting as they did - and perhaps still do - good health and a
gene pool that is generally innocent of cross-pollinating brothers and
sisters. We also don't need me, a fashion editor who has done her share of
critiquing other women's appearance (only those, I hope, who were fair game,
although occasionally I have done the Devil's work) to tell us that
henceforth we should repent our superficial ways and never speak harshly of
Carol Vorderman again.
And the reason we don't need me or Dr Morris to point this out is because we
have our Better Natures, which for centuries have been engaged in a duel
with our instincts on this very subject. Better Nature advises you not to go
for a man who looks like Brad Pitt but has the brains of a flower pot.
Instinct says what glorious looking children you will have together. Better
Nature tells you not to be distracted by whether pregnancy is making Natasha
Kaplinsky's neck look puffy because she is an intelligent newsreader who is
trying to explain the impact of the credit crunch on UK economic growth in
2009. Instinct is telling you that's all very well, but why does she have
such terrible taste in eye shadow?
Better Nature is Baroness Kingsmill calling for an industry watch dog to
curtail the amount of airbrushing in magazines in an attempt to present
women with more realistic images. Instinct means that a woman with even
mildly unconventional looks on the cover of a glossy magazine can have a
deleterious impact on sales. Better Nature is society placing gags on itself
under the aegis of political correctness. As Fay Weldon points out: “In
polite company it is becoming increasingly déclassé to make nasty remarks
about how people look. You can get sued for calling someone fat - so
celebrity magazines act as a pressure valve for all the nasty things that
one's thinking.” Truly, we are a society that goes to enormous lengths to
delude ourselves into thinking that We Do Not Care About Looks.
If a balance is more or less achieved between these conflicting impulses, then
that, arguably, is the best we can hope for. Let's not forget, as Michael
Herz, the head of design at Aquascutum, says, “the huge enjoyment to be
derived from taking an interest in how you and people around you look.
Fashion [a business generating £47 billion a year in the UK] and make-up
[£16 billion a year] can be power tools. The problem is that everything is
increasingly bound up with appearance.”
One only has to see the Daily Mail's “Woman in parka shocker!” caption that
accompanied a picture of Tessa Jowell on Monday to see how applying exacting
sartorial standards across the board has become a habit. It's one thing to
hold Madonna or Kate Moss up to scrutiny, or even to have fun with Carla
Bruni, who is playing up to her new role sensationally - as befits a former
supermodel. Inevitably, Sarah Brown got swept up in the forensic dissection
of the French First Lady's outfits - and (hands up) The Times, along with
other papers, ran unfavourable comments on the former's appearance. The
entire female flank of the French Cabinet has recently had their wardrobes
pored over as if they were auditioning to fill in for Cate Blanchett on the
red carpet while she takes a spot of maternity leave.
In fairness, some of them looked as though they were auditioning. What's
puzzling is the derisory tone of some of the commentary and the degree to
which jibes about a woman's taste in footwear become a form of covert
sniping about her character (the derision, by the way, doesn't generally
come from fashion writers). Increasingly, looks are used to define women who
never set out to compete by those rules.
“The fact that women are seemingly colluding doesn't make it harmless,” argues
Sheila Jeffreys, the feminist author of Beauty And Misogyny: Harmful
Cultural Practices in the West. “Sitting around bitching about how bad other
women look won't ultimately make you feel better. Today's emphasis on looks
- and the scorn heaped on anyone who doesn't conform - is incredibly
unhealthy because it normalises painful and sometimes dangerous cosmetic
procedures, promotes uncomfortable and immobilising clothes, fosters an
epidemic of eating disorders and creates a tyranny of youth, under which no
one is allowed to age.
“The principles of beauty have always been part of the mating ritual, but
they're now routinely practised in the workplace. We're seeing that, even in
politics, women are required to look a certain way: high heels,
tighter-fitting clothes, lipstick. It's a free world, but in reality there's
very little choice involved. There's virtually no challenge to the wall of
thin, youthful images. The definition of what's attractive is becoming
narrower.”
And while Western women are under pressure to show more and more of their
bodies, Muslim women are increasingly veiling themselves. “It's a different
manifestation of the same condition. I don't see either as empowering,” says
Jeffreys.
Therein lies what seems to be the mother of paradoxes. More than 30 years
after bra-burning and lipstick-abstaining, most Western women earn their own
money, many work in worlds previously closed to them and a few occupy the
top slots. Male babies outnumber females by 104 to 100 - so in theory women
have never been more powerful. So why perpetuate, and even inflate, criteria
that seem more relevant to women living in a harem?
Jeffreys believes that the answer may lie in the progress made in other areas.
“To be successful in the public world, maybe this is the bargain women feel
that they had to strike. It's as if we're saying ‘OK, we might be in the
boardroom, but we are still sexually servicing you and aiming to please you
aesthetically'.”
Or perhaps, as Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at
Oxford, suggests, there is no contradiction in emancipated women apparently
abiding by millennia-old ideas that value their looks above everything else.
“In the evolutionary process, animals and humans are constantly evaluating
the status of potential mates. One very potent display of status is
conspicuous consumption. Beauty is now a purchasable commodity. A woman who
is apparently conforming to a demeaning Barbie-doll figure or having all
signs of character erased from her face may actually be flaunting her
earning power and her ability to pay for fake breasts and Botox. The one
thing that we can't as yet buy is height, which is why it's still fine for a
woman to be short.”
If capitalism explains the present crescendo of narcissism, Nature explains
the rest. According to Dunbar, a recent study of facial symmetry in all the
British general elections since the Second World War showed that the more
symmetrical a candidate's face, the higher the votes polled, while every US
presidential election in the 20th century was won by the taller of the two
rivals.
“Taller men are more likely to be married and have children,” says Dunbar. “In
industrial societies where food is plentiful, women with hourglass figures
are more fertile and therefore an aesthetic ideal. People who think looks
don't matter are, I'm afraid, kidding themselves.”
