A Brief Meditation on Overcoming our Pronounced Excess of Imaginary Hot Women
The girl on the cover of your magazine? Hot. The woman on the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing Box? Unusually good looking. The model crying on the stock photo image on the fraying "Human Rights for North Korea" poster in the corner of my office? She, too: decidedly attractive.
I will likely never meet them. Even if I did,various videos and New Yorker pieces indicate they would likely look nothing like their lovingly Photoshopped avatars.
Basically, these women are imaginary. And they're everywhere. I want to believe my brain knows an imaginary hot woman when it sees one. But...
To back that up, let's take a quick look at one of my favorite studies of all time, as detailed in this lovely article from Psychology Today, lovingly titled Why I Hate Beauty:
Gutierres and Kenrick asked male college dormitory residents to rate the photo of a potential blind date. (The photos had been previously rated by other males to be of average attractiveness.) If the men were watching an episode of Charlie's Angels when shown the photo, the blind date was rated less desirable than she was by males watching a different show.
This is called the contrast effect, which basically says: If you see a bunch of bad things, average things suddenly look great. And, unfortunately, vice versa.
So, Charlie's Angels makes girls look bad, and all the man-keeping tips in Cosmo might go straight out the window if one's man accidentally, you know, looks at that Cosmo.
The Obvious
Which leads folks to suggestions to help keep your head straight:
- No porn. Not because it's immoral, but because it gives your reptile brain stupid ideas about naked people
- Surf with images turned off (option right up there on your menu), throw in Flashblock
- Ditch TV
- Etc.
All good, and recommended, but really, that's not going to get you far enough, is it? The subway posters. The supermarket aisle boxes. The hip flyers for your local mega-church: pervasive and all chock full of The Imaginary Hot.
How can you ....
STEP IT UP A NOTCH?
Perhaps flip the contrast effect in your favor? The classic hot-girl-rallying-less-attractive-friends-to-the-club, but taken large scale?
Might you:
Engage in anti-photoshopping (did I just coin a phrase? not sure):
You may not have the glorious skill of The Decapitator but perhaps you could add a zit or two to a subway poster.
Here, I'll get you started:
Be creative: Does that Chanel girl need a moustache? The top model some tooth gappiness? That millionaire heiress need some Equidae appendages?
BONUS:
A mass effort of this kind would actually make famous people better looking in person. Instead of the constant disappointment of spotting a star's flaws when you bump into them, imagine: "I just saw Paris downtown, she looked great, much less donkey ears than I had expected."
DOUBLE BONUS:
A super cutout pack at the bottom of this page!
Decorate your apartment with photos of people and that you find unbearably hideous? and um, oh, I dunno...
Okay, I'm opening it up. Any ideas? (Serious, absurd, silly, all good; being mean, rather discouraged).
To get you started:
From a friend who has spent a very large amount of time volunteering abroad:
If you're a little heavier, consider moving to a developing world country. They still have some of the same food/resource constraints that made big the original beautiful, and tend to still find larger people more attractive. And if you really go out in the middle of nowhere you'll have the added advantage of no exposure to modern media images. (Possible negative side-effect: getting too skinny too quick due to massive, uncontrollable poopings. But then you can just move back to the US as a model of waifdom.)
From a sports fan:
Don't let your girlfriend watch soccer or basketball. Only football (because they got helmets on and don't look human) and baseball (because half of them are just plain average ugly dudes). When watching NFL, only watch Colts games, no Patriots games. Peyton Manning = OK. No Tom Brady.
...and as promised:
Disclaimer: Yeah, the above is all heterosexual man point-of-view. Feel free to trash me in the comments for that. Better yet, chime in with some opinions.
comments
In my time in both South Africa and Japan I have been pleasantly surprised at how much more "real" their models/actors/people in the media are. Ok, so both have a small crop of that airbrushed crew you were talking about, but all the ads and media still seem more realistic than the ones back home (USA). And in terms of shapes, South Africa was a wonderfully refreshing place to go for a healthy body image so I definitely have to agree with your friend's point. Add SA's love of curves with the "bald is beautiful" trend there and you have every woman's body-image bootcamp!
What I returned home from SA, it was difficult to readjust to being force fed all those perfect images. So, I I took a small step that has made a huge impact on my life. I made a vow to stop buying traditional beauty magazines. I no longer spend my money supporting the mostly fluff and ad-stuffed Cosmos and Allures. Especially when nowadays, there are so many healthier substitutes. Magazines like "Natural Health" and "Whole Living" and, for me "Yoga Journal" feature more meaningful articles and even though they still have a lot of ads, the ads cater more toward women who are happy just to be real, and aren't striving for unattainable ideals. And yeah, sometimes I miss the stupid celeb columns about who is wearing what standing next to whom...but in the end, I know how little relevance that information holds in my life.
Thanks for writing this Saleem!
Oh! Oh! I just had another tip. Learn Photoshop (or any photo editing software) and learn how easy it is to manipulate images to "manufacture" beauty. I did that, and now when I see these images, I have a more trained and analytical (read:skeptical) eye.
Fun. :-)
From a different perspective, this reminds me of a study I saw that was featured on, I think, The Discovery Channel. This study seemed to proved that in real life, women are far harder on themselves and their own gender than on men or than men are on women. That was tangled, but it goes like this:
Looking at lineups of "real" women or photos of "real" women, folks are asked to rate the person's attractiveness on a scale. Women never gave top marks to another woman, which could be construed as women waiting for Salma Hayek etc. to show up in their lineup. Top marks seemed to be reserved for a type of woman who never showed up in the lineup. Women were also asked to rate themselves on the scale and the marks were low.
Looking at the same lineup of "real" women, men rated women at least two marks higher per person on average than the women did. Many women received top marks from men, whereas women did not give high marks in the study as a rule. The women who self-rated that were included in the lineups got marks on average two or three points higher on the attractiveness scale from the men than they gave themselves.
Interestingly, women and men rated MEN (including men rating themselves) much more similarly - those marks were very close, suggesting that the group, and by extension the rest of us, have a better agreement on men's looks than we do on women's. And: men aren't nearly as critical about themselves as women are of themselves.
In other words, that magazine cover is much tougher on us than on heterosexual men. ;-)