Caricature and Attraction

When I was young and wanted to be an archaeologist, I was fascinated at how ugly the Egyptian women’s stylized makeup was. How could anybody think it attractive?

Now I understand how it works. I’ve lived long enough to see it in action.

Apply just a little exaggeration to the features of beautiful women, and make them the standards to emulate. Advertising campaigns or being Pharaoh’s daughter both work fine.

Give people a few years to get used to it, and then, a few fashion cycles later, deepen the exaggeration just a hair’s breadth. If you can saturate the media you can make the look the new baseline. Children will pick up on the message: this is needed to make you attractive. After a few years the symbol will start to dominate. Look at some of the eye shadow used in recent ad campaigns. Just sharpen the boundaries slightly instead of feathering them out, and it’ll be almost Egyptian, although without the little tail.

Symbolism and stylization can go very far. Think of Indonesian dance, or a huge swath of Chinese painting genres. They’re unintelligible to outsiders, because they’re dominated by symbolic movements or shapes. One angry-looking Chinese mask is a monster, and the other is a beneficent defender against monsters, and the difference all comes from tiny symbols and color choices that I know nothing about.

Or, closer to home, consider the pole dance. We’ve all seen clips--one played in a show on the flight back the other day--a woman clinging to, rubbing against, and climbing around a pole on a stage. A scantily or un-clad woman is erotic, especially when in motion; but for the pole to add anything to the scene you the viewer have to come prepared to think of the pole as a stand in (symbol) for yourself, for her swinging her leg high to be a symbol of her offering herself, and so on. If you don't accept those symbols, her exaggerated motions look creepily unnatural, and for her to be wasting her caresses on a chunk of iron suggests an unattractive confusion. But the dances are popular enough to have "found their way" into other entertainment, like a TV medical show. A lot of people have been trained to accept the symbols.

I wonder how often we wind up preferring symbolic to realistic action. I know politicians rely on that, but those kind of odd choices show up in other areas of our lives too. Its not hard to notice other folk's strange decisions; I don't know a simple rule for identifying my own.