The Theory of Nothing

What is beauty?

What is beauty?

The old adage goes: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This supposedly appeared in 3rd century BC in Greek. Many writers, including Shakespeare, alluded to this idiom, but Margaret Wolfe Hungerford made it famous.

The question to ask here is: is beauty an intrinsic quality or is it a subjective opinion? A common definition is that beauty is the characteristic of a person, object or whatever that instills pleasure or satisfaction in one who perceives it. That sounds sexual to me.

We already know that most perceptions of the world around us are learned or acquired. In other words we form our opinions about things we see from our parents, our peers, our teachers, and from so-called expert opinions, many of which are distorted to sell us something.

The most often discussed beauty rating system is applied to women, although it's also beginning to be applied to men in this women's-rights era. The truth is that beauty has undergone changes down through the centuries.

The classical ancient Greek or Roman periods equated beauty to the idea of perfection of form or quality. Thus, only young, fit (some muscular definition) women could fit these criteria. The Greek idea of classical female (and male) beauty is reflected in sculptures. Go to a museum to see these and you'll get the idea. What these sculptures display are not people who sit around watching TV all day.

By the so-called Age of Reason (or Enlightenment) when culture and science began to take hold in the early 17th century beauty became more of a philosophical concept that carried over to the Romantic period, where female beauty is portrayed in many different aspects, some of which seem odd by today's standards. For example: in many paintings of nude women, it's obvious that artists thought that a fuller figure was beautiful. As a matter of fact, it's only in modern times that female beauty is expressed as being very thin, as in fashion models. Again, go to an art museum to see this. A good example of an artist that preferred fuller figured women is Peter Paul Rubens, but even Renoir and Rembrandt adhered to this fleshier preference.

The reason that the fashion-model-thin concept of female beauty exists is because of self-serving clothing manufactures and designers. Thin models have been used to portray this ideal body shape as a means of promoting them as being suave and debonair, a travesty that perpetrates a distorted perception of the female body. Thin, gaunt and starving models are not the epitome of female beauty. They are obscene perversions of crazy designers who see a female form as merely something to hang cloth on in a patently erotic fashion. The clothing industry is beginning to move away from nearly starving models trotting the runways of fashion houses.

The ideal female form, according to experts (I use this term loosely), is immersed in a concept of physical attractiveness. I would assume that there is an aspect of sexual attraction involved in this. Many studies have been conducted across cultural lines to determine ideal female beauty. Some of these studies are very subjective. The most quoted attribute is the WHR or Waist to Hip Ratio. This should be an ideal 0.7, according to experts. Of course this number varies: China likes 0.6 and South America favors 0.9, according to Wiki. I assume that this means that Chinese men prefer thinner hipped women and South American men prefer wider.

Then, we still have leg-to-body ratio, height, hair quality, skin tone, eyes, facial features, youthfulness, breasts, buttocks, and body mass. I'm not going to discuss these because it would require a book. I would say that breasts and buttocks are probably the most noted aspect of the female form, and this is definitely sexual in nature. Whatever the ideal criteria for these qualities are, they are certainly subjective. All that these studies do is make females apprehensive and overly concerned about their appearances, sometimes resorting to suicide, cutting and depression because they think they're ugly. That's ridiculous. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder better be more objective.

I say forget about physical beauty. It's what's in the soul that counts.

Thanks for reading.