This is a tough one to deal with. Many people — not just women, but mostly — do suffer a great deal emotionally because, well, they aren't physically attractive. You can say, "they aren't attractive because of images in the media" or "our culture has stereotyped images of attractiveness," etc. until you're blue in the face, but cultural history offers pretty convincing testimony that standards of beauty are reasonably consistent down the centuries within broad cultures.

If you look at the history of Western art, the surprising thing is not that there are occasional variations according to fashion, but that the idea of beauty has changed surprisingly little. A Roman beauty, based on what little evidence we have from wall painting and sculpture, is a Renaissance beauty, is a Gainsborough beauty, is a Romantic beauty, is a 1920s beauty. Of course the clothing and hair styles change, but it's possible to make period films because you can take a contemporary knockout and dress her in the styles of Jane Austen's era and she is still radiant.

There is some inner imprint of beauty that no ideology or rationalization can touch. True, as I mentioned, it isn't the same in all cultures — but even cross-culturally there is a surprising agreement; Japanese and Chinese women movie stars look to me, a non-Asian, more beautiful than the average Japanese and Chinese.

So what do you say to comfort someone who is not beautiful? To begin with, you don't lie. You acknowledge the unfairness of the genetic lottery, like the unfairness of many other things in life. You recognize that there are other qualities that may be more important for most people most of the time than physical beauty (which, as poets and philosophers through the centuries have reminded us, is a flower soon to fade).

You don't have to resort to wet lines like "A good personality counts," although of course it does. So do intelligence, creativity, kindness, humor, spirituality and many other aspects of character. Generally, as people age they recognize non-esthetic virtues in others more readily.

Does that eliminate the suffering? No. But now we are in a different realm, where we must ask ourselves the meaning of suffering and whether it can ultimately be for good. It is a question that no one, whatever their degree of beauty, can avoid confronting sooner or later.

Posted by: Rick Darby on February 15, 2007 5:09 PM

Dove doesn't actually believe this, they want to sell soap by appealing to women's insecurities. (Just like SUVs...but that's another story.) They're just going about it slightly differently than usual, trying to make the women who don't feel they're pretty enough (which is a lot of them) feel Dove is on their side.

I do wonder if it's a bigger problem in the modern era when we see supermodels all the time than in the Middle Ages when the biggest thing you had to worry about was Jane the plowman's wife over there who still had all her teeth and hadn't had smallpox yet.

Posted by: SFG on February 19, 2007 8:59 AM






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