Michael:

I just got back from lunch at the mall, where I was musing about human beauty. My thoughts seemed to resolve themselves into a series of questions. I thought I’d share them with you and our readers just to see how opinions fall out on these issues:

#1. Would notions of who is beautiful and who isn’t change if we all went around naked?
a. Yes
b. No

#2. How radically would notions of who is beautiful and who isn’t change in a clothing-optional world?
a. Greatly
b. Slightly

#3. Which combination would you consider more beautiful:
a. More attractive face, less attractive body?
b. Less attractive face, more attractive body?

#4. Does how a person moves play
a. A large role in their attractivenss?
b. A small role in their attractiveness?

#5. Which plays a bigger role in making someone seem attractive:
a. A consistency, or a sense of correspondence, among a person’s attributes?
b. A surprising dissimilarity among their attributes?

#6. Is it true that “there is no great beauty without some strangeness in the proportions?”
a. Yes
b. No

#7. Which would you consider more unconventional:
a. Your ‘standards of beauty’ for the opposite sex
b. Your ‘standards of beauty’ for your own sex?

My own answers? #1: a. #2: a. #3 That’s a hard one, but probably: a. #4: a. #5 Again, a hard one, but probably: b. #6: a. #7: b.

So how would you come out on all this?

Cheers,

Friedrich