I am reading Nancy Etcoff's "Survival of The Prettiest: The Science of Beauty" for the second time. The argument of this book is that beauty is not so much the product of cultural constructs and social imprinting as it is a biological given. Beauty as hardware, not software. Etcoff writes, "A pursuit so ardent, so passionate, so risk-filled, so unquenchable reflects the workings of a basic instinct. To tell people not to take pleasure in beauty is like telling them to stop enjoying food or sex or novelty or love." I could easily state that I had not known I was waiting for someone of authority to tell me what had been unavoidably true all along, but I would be discrediting my own wisdom. The fact is that I always had known. But like many of us I have been swept by the intellectual ebb and flow of the times. Beauty as bait. Beauty as commodity controlled by misogynistic men in the highest positions. Beauty as suspect. 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder'.I am not beautiful. In admission I have turned the heads of both women and men. But this, I argue, is not because they have noticed me as 'beautiful'. It is because I have caught their scanning eyes as someone who simply looks strange. My features deviate ambitiously from what is considered average, even within my own ethnic group (I am Filipino, with a shaved head). To start, my head is too big in proportion to my body. Then as a man I am considerably below the average height for men in this country, which is anywhere from five feet, eight inches to five feet, eleven inches. I stand at five feet, four inches. Finally, I am not 'buff'. Although my weight is respective of my height I am still thin, waifish. Which is not so advantageous for a man. Yet besides these idiosyncrasies I would probably be perceived as a shrunken version of the average, slim, well-proportioned male.
I have been called many things in regards to my looks. People have made fun of my ethnic features, often erroneously. I have been called 'chinaman' and 'spade'. I have also been bullied or simply overlooked because of my evident lack of stature, especially when I was younger, when I was a very tiny and skinny little boy, the one who always sat it out in gym class. I have also had words from the other end of the spectrum attributed to me. I've been described as cute, good looking, attractive, sexy, even pretty. But the two words that discomfit me the most are 'handsome' and, yes, 'beautiful'. Whenever someone uses either adjective to describe me it doesn't so much please or unease me as it does bemuse me, and afterwards I am left with a question: "What is it that he sees in me?"
A few years ago when I was living in Los Angeles, a friend and I were driving around West Hollywood. We stopped at a light, and just before it turned green and we went on I happened to look out the passenger side, just in time to catch two men sitting in the window of a cafe. By circumstance one of them looked over and saw me, and his eyes immediately grew wide and his jaw dropped. His companion noticed this reaction and quickly looked over, but by then I was gone. From then on I was completely awestruck by that man's reaction to me, as well as bewildered, because I instantly recognized that reaction for what it was. It was the exact same reaction I've had when I had happened upon a beautiful face. Even now when I think about how that man had reacted to my looks I am dumbfounded.
After reading Nancy Etcoff's book I discovered that beauty can be, and is, both objective and subjective. As a clothing designer I deal with the workings of beauty practically on an everyday basis. Whenever I work with fashion models during fittings and showings I am dealing with them as manifestations of the apex of human beauty: perfection incarnate. As a writer I try to interpret the experience of beauty, be it rare and dramatic, or small and epiphanous, or painfully earned. And as a normal person walking down the street I am sometimes aware of the possibility of suddenly stumbling upon beauty candidly as I turn the corner. What fascinates me most is how I can possess both the ability to home in on something or someone who is beautiful, and the receptiveness to find beauty in so many different forms.
I was once briefly involved with someone whom I already knew was beautiful. We were out on an evening stroll and decided to go into a bookstore. I went down one aisle and he another. Several minutes later, as I was browsing through the shelves, I happened to look up, and I saw him across the room. Later I recorded the experience in my diary:
"The force, the goddamned magnitude of the impact. Had I not been strong enough, had I not been solidly of myself...I would not have survived such an epiphanous collision. It lasted a second, yet it was all the time needed to suck in all the sublime gradations, all the pastel tinted moments of the universe, to converge all the brilliance into a fixed point of light standing across the room from me and browsing through the new titles in hardback. He exploded before my eyes. Blinding sparks of past pain, present ecstasies, future promises struck me and permeated my clothes, my skin, burning my lips, arms, my sex, and shooting into my body and ricocheting off my bones. His explosion cast the room and everyone in it in a dangerously brilliant spectrum of colours far too advanced for science to identify, yet comfortably at home in the nucleus of human experience...I weakened with the awareness that I was with this explosion, this fixed point of light, that I was chosen by him."
Beauty may have an infinite number of variables but the experience of beauty is absolutely singular. No one can deny this experience, because it works on an instinctual level, not an intellectual one. The argument that beauty is simply a myth, a cultural influence, falls apart when one asks where culture originated. It originated from people, and people are undeniably hardwired to detect beauty in their world. For evidence just simply observe babies and small children, and watch how their eyes travel and settle on beautiful faces much faster and for a longer amount of time than any other face. At such a young age they have not yet been 'trained' by culture and society to discern beauty, but there they are, already scanning the world like seasoned aesthetes.
I still may not consider myself a 'looker', but I shouldn't dismiss the reactions others have had to my looks, either. I must trust their gut responses, because they are just as valid as my own instinctive reactions to beauty. According to Nancy Etcoff's research, there is an underlying canon to everyone's reactions to beauty, a sort of ballpark paradigm of what is pleasurable to look at and to experience. But ultimately and truthfully, the kind of beauty I want -- and strive for -- is that which amalgamates some of the physical features universally considered attractive with some of the features that are far more difficult to attain than cosmetic surgery or four days a week at the gym. And that is the beauty of individuality, inner strength, wisdom, and experience.
