Asians believe that the whiter, the prettier and spend huge amounts of money each year on skin products that whiten the skin. Despite the sometimes 95-100 degree weather, Taiwanese women will wear gloves, long-sleeve shirts and the face-masks to keep their skin white. Then they see the Americans on TV lying out on the beaches and have no idea why they would do such a thing. American's with their white skin spend time and money doing the exact opposite thing from most people from Asia: Getting tan.
Hypothetical situation:
A girl who has beautiful skin in Taiwan is suddenly moved to the US. Is her skin still beautiful because it's white? Why should it change, after all she is the same girl...is it evolutionary forces that are forcing humans in two different directions? Now, what about if she moved to Africa, which also favors light skin? Is everybody looking for a perfect color then? Or is it a spectrum thing where you try and just go towards one side? Because the "beautiful" white skinned Asian was born probably lighter than any native African can become, does that count? Is she more beautiful because she's whiter than those around her...or less? Finally...what about guys? If this scenario were girls looking for a guy, what would happen...do girls even care bout skin color in a guy haha?
-jh
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6 comments:
interesting. well as you said, she's the same girl. what matters is on the inside. it's not your skin color that defines you and it's not skin color that should give you certain privileges.
haha that's true louisa, but what i was thinking was that physical attraction in humans can be seen as extremely similar to that in animals where the healthier genes are passed on. In the case of the Taiwanese, the sun is brutal and the longer your exposure to the sun...obviously the tanner you get. Therefore dark skin has traditionally meant a few different things:
1.) Long exposure to the blazing sun means a high risk of skin cancer
2.) That you are forced to work outside and choose not to cover yourself up.
Implication: Generally blue-collar jobs as well as you aren't as concerned about the state of your body.
So, in this case, darker skin has traditionally meant poorer and less healthy. The same thing is happening in America. Now, because almost everybody has a white collar job, being tan means that you have leisure time to go outside and "tan". It also has a correlation to if you exercise or not (although not perfect because of indoor gyms). But in essence, the tone of your skin may indicate social status and health.
Here's my opinion
What we see as "beautiful" is part instinct, and part cultured into us. As children, our opinion of beauty is pretty much all instinct. Asked to choose their favorite landscape picture, the vast majority of children pick the landscapes of our ancestral origins: savannahs. But while adults still like savannahs, they prefer landscapes similar to the ones they've grown up in.
In a similar way, people of different cultures prefer different looks. Imperial China preferred girls with tiny, malformed feet. Ye Olde Europe was all about the bootayyy, which is why their dresses had an enormous emphasis on the posterior. Vikings liked fierce, warrior women (their idea of heaven, called "Valhalla," was warrior women angels and constant warfare). I'd like to think there's some kind of rhyme or reason, but I really don't think there is any. A single individual can be rational, but when you put lots of people together, rationality gets thrown out the window.
i think that your three examples show how evolution works through "beauty":
Starting with the vikings.
As a warrior people that constantly travelled, in order to have families, the women must have travelled with the men. The harsh weather of the North where they explored in addition to the constant warfare made life harsh. Women who were "soft" and unaccustomed to harsh life would find it extremely hard to prosper in this type of environment. Instead, warrior-like women could actually aid their men in battle and survive the tough lifestly. They would fit right into the very temporal lifestyle that the Vikings led.
Imperial China was all about showing off how their women did not need to work. Rich men could provide for the whole family single-handedly leaving their wives to not need to do hard labor. Women were also supposed to be bound to the home. Hence, the binding of the feet was simply forcing well-to-do women to fit into the role that had been carved for them. With tiny feet, they would not be able to go very far from the house. It also made manual labor hard, because it was supposed to be unneccessary for them. What started as a custom for families to show how their daughter was molded exactly into what society expected gradually became seen as beauty itself. Hence, while beauty may be tempered by culture, culture still molds it according to the influences of health and social status (specifically: leisure time (indicative of well-to do parental generation), wealth).
And I have no idea what the big "bootayy" would mean for Europeans.
big bootay = fertile
therefore more offspring and potential elite ones. hehe.
lol ann...how come other cultures aren't big fans of the big booty?
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