"Why do Janet Napolitano, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan all look like linebackers for the New York Jets?" asks Jason Mattera, editor in chief of HumanEvents.com. Which raises my question: Why do women like Napolitano, Sotomayor, and Kagan have to put up with these comments? Even more to the point, what in our culture makes commentators like talk show host Michael Savage feel entitled to comment that Kagan "looks like she belongs in a kosher deli." Attractiveness is not exactly a qualification for judicial office. Not all the male justices on the Supreme Court are eye candy, but their confirmations didn't trigger this kind of ridicule.
These comments about Kagan are part of a long tradition of taking down uppity women. During Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign, panelists on CNN's Larry King Live described her as "fat" and "bottom heavy." And during her presidential campaign, Rush Limbaugh asked whether Americans will "want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis." Men can gain gravitas with their age. Women risk ridicule for trying too hard or not hard enough. It is a telling reflection of our cultural preoccupations and priorities that Sarah Palin's campaign paid more for her makeup artist than her foreign policy adviser.
Of course male public figures are not immune from scrutiny. The waistline of Al Gore and the $400 haircut for John Edwards earned their share of derision. But the scrutiny of women is more intense, the standards more exacting, and the diversion of attention from achievement to appearance more common. Moreover, female employees can be punished for being too attractive as well as not attractive enough. In upper level positions in historically male-dominated occupations, beautiful or sexy women are subject to what sociologists label the "bloopsy" effect. They are assumed to be less intelligent and competent than women of more normal appearance. A recent example is the woman who claims she lost a Citibank job because her male colleagues found her figure and fashion "too distracting." When Katie Couric became the first female anchor of network nighttime news, many wondered whether she was up to the job or had gotten it for the "right" reasons. After all, noted The New York Times, "Unless CBS designs a new anchor desk, Ms. Couric's well-toned legs will no longer be on prominent display."
Still, women who have all the substantive qualifications for such a position, but lack the right age, ethnicity, or "look," face even greater hurdles. Viewers will accept Walter Cronkite and Larry King, but not the female equivalent. When a female meteorologist lost her position on a weather show for appearing too "matronly" and "dowdy," television host Conan O'Brien described her problem as "partly saggy with a chance of menopause." Looks are one of the last frontiers of acceptable bigotry.
Yet pointing this out is likely to unleash the prejudices at issue. I got a recent taste after publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post. The editorial summarized themes from my just released book, The Beauty Bias, which documents the price of prejudice and proposes some legal and cultural strategies to address it. It was surprising to discover how many individuals were willing to take time from their busy day to send hate mail on the order of "I just bet that you yourself are one ugly c---." Some readers, annoyed that no author picture accompanied the article, felt strongly enough to do independent research. One explained: "knowing there had to be a reason why [you would write about bias] I looked you up in the Stanford Faculty Directory and then all the pieces fell together. I'm sure Stanford has to tie a bone around your neck to get even the campus dogs not to run away from you." Several hundred online posts following the article included more of the same. One reader proposed taking up a collection so I could "buy a burqa: This would certainly improve the aesthetics around Stanford."
The problem is not simply the price that less attractive individuals pay in hiring, promotion, and salaries even in jobs where appearance is unrelated to performance. The problem is also the price all of us pay for our cultural preoccupation with attractiveness. In financial terms, the annual global investment in appearance totals over $200 billion. Americans alone spend some $40 billion on diets. Much of this expenditure fails to deliver; 95 percent of dieters regain their weight within one to five years, and many grooming products are what dermatologists label "cosmetic hoo ha." Vast amounts are squandered on high-priced wrinkle creams although a Consumer Reports study found no correlation between price and effectiveness.
In the fantasy land of diet marketers, miracle products abound. Product claims that the Federal Trade Commission has targeted as misleading include: a seaweed "Silhouette Patch" that reportedly attacks fat deposits and causes rapid weight loss without dieting; a Chinese herbal cellulite cream that supposedly eliminates up to 95 pounds of fat with "No Will Power Required"; and a Himalayan "Diet Breakthrough" with Nepalese Mineral Pitch that asserts it yields up to 37 pounds of weight loss without diets or exercise. Such ludicrous promises persist because, according to Harris polling data, most Americans believe that companies can't make product claims without evidence to support them. Yet for thousands of products, evidence is lacking because so are budgets for enforcement. Government agencies cannot begin to keep up with the barrage of fraudulent grooming and weight reduction advertisements.
Nor do these agencies have authority to test the safety of cosmetics before marketing. As a consequence, 80 percent of the 10,000 ingredients used in makeup and personal care products have never been evaluated by the Federal Food and Drug Administration. An Environmental Working Group survey found that nearly 400 products sold in the United States contained chemicals that are prohibited in other countries, and that even more had contents considered unsafe by the American industry's own standards.
We have always known that it hurts to be beautiful, and that it hurts even more not to be beautiful. But few of us realize how much. Although our prejudice runs deep, we can do more to reduce its most unjust and unnecessary forms.
How To Escape Unwanted Fame
A girl who posted pics of her "epic boobs" and inadvertently became an Internet meme lost a lawsuit against the outlet that made her a star. It raises the question: If you become an internet meme, what should you do?
Epic Boobs Girl's lawsuit against the British titty mag Loaded over the use of a photo that originated on her Bebo profile (and was immortalized on comment boards for EPIC BOOBS) has been tossed out, quashing Epic Boobs Girl's latest attempt to end her meme. In an anarchic world of mass, fleeting fame, do the unwitting subjects of internet memes have any recourse? Here are a few tips on what to do if you turn into a meme, featuring advice from a real, live person who went through it and survived.
1. HIDE
Epic Boobs Girl may have posed for sassy, boobalicious pics with her friends, but she definitely didn't foresee having her face plastered in masturbatory magazines. Almost instantly, internet users raided her Bebo profile and saved every picture of her glorious rack. If you haven't already taken privacy-protecting precautions, it's probably too late. Besides, hiding is by far the most boring thing you can do once you've become a meme. You'd be far wiser to...
2. PROFIT
These are your 15 minutes of fame! Ride it like a Dorothy Gale on a gust of wind in a Kansas tornado! Here's what you could get out of it:
* Fame All the world's a reality TV show, all the people merely fameballs. Smacked in the face with the opportunity to stretch their fifteen minutes as long as possible, few can resist.
Tennessee twink Chris Crocker parlayed his plea to "Leave Britney Alone!" into a full-fledged multimedia career. He now lives in L.A. and earns his keep with appearances, comic books, and his ever-popular YouTube channel.
David After Dentist's dad franchised his kid's visage into tee-shirts and stickers on DavidAfterDentist.com - presumably with rapidly depleting returns on investment.
Even unwitting internet star Rick Astley - whose musical career spans far further back than his incessant appearance in rickrolls - managed to ride the zeitgeist with new tour dates and albums.
The risk, of course, is that you turn into an overexposed sell-out. But that's also how we measure success in this world, so do as you must.
* Fortune Though fame and fortune go hand in hand, if you want is money without stardom, it's doable. Take, for instance, the Numa Numa guy, whose voice most people have never heard, though they've seen his lip syncing in ads for Geico, Vizio, and others. Most people don't know this guy's real name and wouldn't recognize him if he weren't lip syncing. Ultimately all we know is that he makes a ridiculous amount of money for licensing a YouTube video with 35 million views, and performing a custom lip sync here and there.
* Something Else Did you know some people use fame for the force of good? The dad from the "You're Not a Single Lady" kept blog chronicling son Losiah's adoption from South Korea. When Losiah became a meme, Carlos Whittaker took the opportunity to "bring adoption to the forefront of the conversation." And if it helped Carlos' career as an artist, pastor, thinker, [and] experience architect, well, that's fine, too.
3. SUE YOUR MEME INTO SUBMISSION
A major meme has yet to be sued into submission (see: Streisand Effect, the) but meme subjects have certainly tried. Epic Boobs Girl's plight is among the more sympathetic ones. The fact that her suit failed suggests there is little hope for anti-meme legal action.
Likewise, Glenn Beck's plight against "Did Glenn Beck rape and murder a girl in 1990?" illuminates the bottomless pit of failure that awaits those who try to sue their memes into submission. To satirize Glenn Beck's notorious reliance on mistruths, internet users reappropriated a Gilbert Gottfried joke that demonstrates how warning against a rumor can actually start a rumor. They started asking whether Glenn Beck had raped and murdered a young girl, why he had not commented on it, and thus without ever accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering anyone, they successfully wedged the accusation into his Google results and the collective subconscious. Beck tried to sue the owner of DidGlennBeckRapeandMurderaYoungGirlin1990.com into submission. He failed. What Glenn (and almost all other memes) should have done is:
4. SHRUG, LAUGH, AND MOVE ON
The most dignified and rational option for internet memes, shrugging and moving on with your life is probably best. Approval Guy became famous when a photo of him sitting alone, looking nerdy-but-happy at a lingerie party, became a meme.
He pondered what to make of his fame, ultimately deciding to do nothing. We reached Approval Guy by email, and this is what he said:
Being posted all over the internet doesn't bother me at all, in fact, I find it hilarious. I really enjoy seeing the creativity of others and think they should continue to do as they please with my image.
I have not made a profit from "Approval Guy" and nor do I plan to. On the other hand, if the opportunity arose, I wouldn't mind taking advantage of it.
Well played, Approval Guy. If you love your fleeting fame, set it free - it'll be better as a second-date story and wryly cherished memory, anyway. Approval Guy cautions, however, that not all memes are created equal.
Becoming a meme was a positive experience and I do not mind it at all. On the other hand, if I were the Star Wars kid or that guy who sings numa numa, I wouldn't show up in public... EVER.
From The Onion - Culling Celebs
HOLLYWOOD, CA - Calling current population levels "wildly unsustainable," rangers from the Federal Bureau of Celebrity Conservation announced this week their plan to eliminate some 1,200 celebrities from the Hollywood region.
While FBCC sources said the number of indigenous celebrities in the region has been increasing steadily since the 1950s, rangers said the past decade in particular has seen an alarming spike in the population due to the rampant spawning of celebrities via the Internet and reality television, leaving the agency no recourse but targeted exterminations.
"Despite our best efforts, Hollywood star levels have been pushed far beyond what is manageable," Head Ranger Art McWane told reporters at a Monday press conference. "Every day we see more and more of them cropping up, and our safest option at this point is a drastic policy aimed at culling their numbers."
"Population control is the only humane course of action," McWane added. "If we don't intervene now, we will soon be completely overrun by celebrities."
Under the terms of the program, a corps of rangers is patrolling a 30-mile radius centered on the Sunset Strip and has begun to find and eliminate celebrities. At press time, some 20 stars, including Paul Sorvino, Billy Crudup, American Idol winner David Cook, and Khloe Karadashian had been killed and placed in special disposal bins for incineration.
Rangers said they have attempted nonlethal methods of population containment in the past, but that their efforts met with little success.
"Unfortunately, the sterilization programs of a generation ago failed to prevent Miley Cyrus, Jaden Smith, and countless other second-generation stars, so we're left with no choice now," McWane said. "But rest assured, population-thinning will be quick and efficient, while primarily targeting the sick, elderly, and C-list."
McWane then ended the press conference by fatally shooting actor Beau Bridges with a .44 hunting rifle.
To assist the overburdened federal officials, Los Angeles County has begun offering permits that will allow city residents using registered weapons to kill any current SAG or AFTRA member, with a limit of 1,000 pounds of celebrity per license. However, special restrictions on the use of automatic weapons, as well as hunting in rehab facilities, will continue to apply under the rules of the Fair Chase code.
Many Hollywood locals have called the move long overdue.
"The way things have been, even an A-lister can wait 45 minutes for a table," said Tracey Spillane, manager of Spago Beverly Hills. "And from the table chatter we overhear, there just aren't enough projects in the pipeline for the glut of celebrities that exist right now. Believe me, this is a much more compassionate approach than leaving Anson Williams to root in the Dumpster for scraps."
Ranger Paul Cummings agreed, saying few of today's celebrities have any skills other than their notoriety and, left to their own devices, will often continue to breed in a desperate, last-ditch bid to live vicariously through the fame of offspring. Cummings called the federal action an attempt to succeed at managing the population where Hollywood's countless talent agencies and PR firms have failed.
Many hunters, including Willard Byrne of Lynwood, are excited about the opportunity to bag some prize specimens.
"There's nothing I enjoy more than a good hunt, so this is a dream come true for me," Byrne said while caping and field-dressing MAD TV's Aries Spears at the corner of La Cienega and Wilshire Boulevards. "What better way to teach my son about the cycle of life than to camp out on Sunset and pick off the cast of Grey's Anatomy one by one?"
Whether the program is useful in finally bringing the star population under control remains to be seen. In the meantime, Hollywood rangers are confident that their plan to reintroduce Charles Manson to the area this fall will help maintain the natural order for the foreseeable future.
Female Prejudice - The Beauty Bias
There's a twist to the "beauty bias," the idea that physically attractive individuals are rewarded socially as well as biologically: Gorgeous women may be at a disadvantage when seeking jobs in which appearance is deemed irrelevant.
A study by Ken Podratz, of Rice University, found that while average-looking and attractive men were picked more often for jobs such as switchboard operator or tow-truck driver, beautiful women lost these same positions to less attractive females. In some jobs, an employer'sgender was a factor: Men were eager to place female beauties in jobs that emphasize appearance or interpersonal contact, such as receptionist, dietitian or public relations officer. Female employers were less willing to do so. But for "male-oriented" jobs or jobs in which appearance wasn't considered important, both men and women opted for the less attractive women.
The reason? "Physical attractiveness is correlated with perceived femininity in women," says Podratz. "If a highly attractive female applies for a hypermasculine job such as truck driver or security guard, she is likely to be seen as less capable of meeting the physical demands of the job." These results "open up a can of worms," says Podratz, who, in this study, asked 66 subjects to consider 204 headshots, all rated for attractiveness, as candidates for jobs. "Do you make adjustments for attractive women in certain professions?"
Podratz admits that he's unsure whether or not he's ready to take the next step: placing subjects in real-world job-interview situations. "You're going to have to tell people they'd be perfect for this study because they're ugly."
Higher IQ
Life really is unfair. Researchers have found that handsome men and beautiful women tend to be cleverer, with IQs averaging up to nearly 14 points above the norm.
The finding, based on studies in Britain and America, suggests the stereotype of blondes or good-looking men being dimmer than average needs to be revised.
Instead it seems that evolution favours the already blessed, rewarding attractive people with partners who are not just good-looking but intelligent too.
The research, by the London School of Economics (LSE), suggests that since both beauty and intelligence tend to be inherited, the children of such couples will end up with both qualities, building a genetic link between them.
This link then becomes reinforced with successive generations.
Both in the British and American samples, physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence, both with and without controls for social class, body size, and health, said Satoshi Kanazawa, the LSE researcher who carried out the research. The association between physical attractiveness and general intelligence is also stronger among men than among women.
Kanazawa found that in Britain men who are physically attractive have IQs an average 13.6 points above the norm, whereas physically attractive women are about 11.4 points higher than average.
Kanazawa's British findings were based on the National Child Development Study, which has followed 17,419 people across the UK since they were born in a single week of March 1958.
Throughout their childhood, adolescence and early adulthood they were given a series of tests to measure their academic progress and intelligence, and were also scored for appearance.
The American data was taken from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. This involved a similar study of about 35,000 young Americans, who were scored for both intelligence and appearance by their interviewers.
Kanazawa's paper, published in Intelligence, an academic journal, said: If more intelligent men are more likely to attain higher status, and if men of higher status are more likely to marry beautiful women, then, given that both intelligence and physical attractiveness are highly heritable, there should be a positive correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness in the children's generation.
Kanazawa specialises in research into beauty and how it relates to other aspects of people's genetic make-up and social standing. In other research he found that middle-class girls tend to have higher IQs and be physically more attractive than their working-class counterparts.
Examples of the beautiful and brainy are legion. They include Lily Cole, the supermodel turned Cambridge University student, and Brian Cox, the former D:ream keyboard player who became a physicist.
However, Kanazawa stresses that his findings are statistical and should not be applied to individuals.
It goes without saying that our contention that beautiful people are more intelligent is purely scientific; it is not a prescription for how to treat or judge others, he writes.
Fame Getting Shorter
Andy Warhol predicted the 15 minutes of fame culture more than 40 years ago. Now scientists have declared it official: we really are becoming shallower.
An investigation of fame based on the appearance of the names of actors, writers, politicians and scientists in literature has concluded that people are more famous than ever before, but are also being forgotten more quickly.
The study, by a team at Google Books, mined five million books - 4 per cent of all those published - for mentions of the most famous people of their age.
Celebrities were sorted by the year they were born and the 50 most popular, based on the number of times they appeared in the literature, were picked for every year from 1800 to 1950.
The study found that fame is disappearing faster, with the average time taken for the number of mentions of a celebrity's name to fall to half its peak dropping from 120 years to 71 years.
For example, Robert Louis Stevenson, the author, born in 1850, continues to make frequent appearances, while the musician Stevie Wonder and the artist Antony Gormley, who are among the most mentioned names of those born a century later, are projected to fade into obscurity more rapidly.
The study, published today in the journal Science, also found that modern celebrities are younger than their 19th-century predecessors. Those born in 1950 initially achieved fame at an average age of 29, compared with 43 for those born in 1800.
Most famous actors tend to become famous earlier (about 30), than the most famous writers (about 40), while politicians have to wait until they're over 50. Scientists reach a similar level of fame as actors, but not until after their deaths.
Real Beauty
At the recent wedding of Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall, the bride's cousins, Princes William and Harry, read an extract from Margery Williams' children's story, The Velveteen Rabbit.
A toy rabbit and horse are having a conversation. The rabbit asks the horse what it means to be "a real person". The horse replies that it means being loved. "It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.
"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand - once you are Real, you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."
I confess that I had never heard of either The Velveteen Rabbit or Margery Williams before, but I found myself moved by the very adult sentiment in those words. Hollywood still tells the same tale in children's movies like Toy Story and Shrek, which is why they speak to parents as well as children. Love transforms. It makes us beautiful in the eyes of those who love us. It makes us real.
Judging Women By Their Looks 2
Society's focus on a woman's appearance is so insidious that women themselves buy into it, sinking money into things like breast implants rather than investments. But beauty is a lousy investment.
Women never seem to escape the world's fixation on their appearance - often at the expense of anything else, including talent, brains, or performance.
As Ashley Judd pointed out in The Daily Beast, women are relentlessly "described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification."
As anyone in the public eye can attest, that kind of attention is anxiety-producing, even when the verdicts are approving. When they're harsh, the judgments can be excruciating.
I've been on both sides of that equation, and neither was easy. The summer I was 13, I was introduced to female objectification with a bang - literally. My chest had just developed, seemingly overnight, and as I strolled one day down a quiet suburban street, a truck driver startled me with a yell: "Hey, Blondie!" I picked up speed, but he followed, issuing lewd comments about my physical attributes and what he'd like to do to them. Finally - his eyes on me instead of where he was going - he drove into a telephone pole with a horrifying crash. As he erupted in a volley of furious obscenities, I sprinted away as fast as I could, terrified by his rage.
That was only the beginning. For the next quarter of a century, going out in public alone was an endless challenge. Men's eyes followed me everywhere, as did their comments. Strangers accosted me constantly, sending over unsolicited drinks in restaurants and asking me out without introduction. At one job after another, male colleagues I scarcely knew sent me poetry and short stories they had written about me, even a play about me and my dog - all imputing various characteristics to me based solely on my appearance. People I'd never met introduced themselves at parties and invited me to Paris for the weekend, or to the Caribbean. Men proposed to me on the first date, knowing virtually nothing about me except for the way I looked.
Soon after I became a newspaper reporter, I was named one of the top young talents in the area by the leading magazine in the city where I worked - but it described me as getting the best assignments because I was a "blond bombshell," while neglecting to mention all the writing and reporting awards I had won (or the fact that the man who wrote the snide remarks had asked me out and I turned him down).
Finally, in my late 30s, I got married and had four pregnancies in quick succession. I had two children, two miscarriages and several operations; I gained weight and got older.
And it was all over. When I walked down the street, nobody bothered me; when I stopped to look at a painting in a museum, no one sidled over to strike up a conversation. For the first time since puberty, I could go anywhere I wanted without being hassled.
To me, becoming invisible in middle age was an enormous relief - but I had no idea that a much nastier phase lay ahead. When I was 57, I published a book about women's economic empowerment that became a controversial bestseller - and suddenly total strangers were writing about my appearance again.
But this time, they were vicious. Although I had been married for a couple of decades and was the mother of two teenagers at the time, people who didn't like what I said in my book attributed the results of my reporting to the 'fact' that I must be childless, bitter and lonely because I was fat, ugly, and old. Most of those who wrote such things were women.
From then on, the vitriol resurfaced every time I wrote about women's issues, particularly when they involved sexism, misogyny or any form of discrimination. The stronger the position I took, the more poisonous the attacks on my personal appearance; angry commenters of both genders attributed whatever I thought or said to my not being able to get a man because I was so undesirable.
All of which has led me to the conclusion that if you're female, you can't win for losing. When you're young, nobody pays attention to what you have to say or the work you do because of the way you look - and when you're old, nobody pays attention to what you have to say or the work you do because of the way you look. Whether you're perceived as an irresistible babe or a saggy, baggy old hag, it's all about your appearance.
And the Internet has only intensified the problem. Public figures are subjected to unrelenting scrutiny by the media and popular culture, and even private citizens can suffer an astonishing amount of body-snarking from their peers, because virtually no one is so private as to remain invulnerable in cyberspace.
Moreover, women are often each other's worst enemies; Ashley Judd noted that many of her tormentors were female. "That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient," Judd wrote. "Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate... This abnormal obsession with women's faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times - I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women."
In recent days, Samantha "don't-hate-me-because-I'm-beautiful" Brick joined the debate with an article about the advantages and disadvantages of being attractive, which included retaliation from other women. Her piece touched off an international furor, complete with a fusillade of sniping that neatly illustrated her point that good-looking people are trashed for having an unfair advantage even if they admit to it.
Brick said she's looking forward to aging out of the period when strangers sent her free bottles of champagne, because her looks provoked so much envy from other women. But most women disagree. For women, good looks are power. Social science has only confirmed their assumption, bombarding us with research and polling data showing that beauty gets rewarded with everything from higher pay to the attribution of positive character traits.
No surprise then, that a recent survey of women aged 18-25 found that 41 percent would prefer having large breasts to having high intelligence, and more than a quarter of those who responded said they would trade their IQs for bigger breasts.
A lot of women now act upon such yearnings. Americans spent nearly $10 billion on cosmetic procedures last year, with more than 9 million surgical and non-surgical procedures performed in the United States alone. Breast augmentation led the list of the top five surgical procedures for women, followed by liposuction, tummy tucks, breast lifts, and eyelid surgery. Among non-surgical options, Botox ranked as the most popular.
If it's below freezing and your house is cold, a D-cup won't do you much good.
Even with surgical assistance, beauty can't be counted upon to protect women from the vicissitudes of aging - particularly the economic ones. A new analysis of Census Department data shows that the majority of American women over 65 are now unable to meet their daily financial needs. When you're a senior citizen, no one cares how beautiful you used to be - and no matter what you look like, you're way beyond the stage when it gets you a free pass behind the velvet rope, let alone a free dinner.
Which brings us back to the women who prefer big breasts to intelligence. The cost of breast augmentation varies, but $5,000 is a representative figure. A 30-year-old can spend $5,000 on a boob job - or she can take that $5,000 and invest it.
If she puts only that amount into the markets and receives an average annual return of 7 percent from then on, without ever adding a penny to her savings, she will have $74,582 at age 70, according to financial literacy expert Manisha Thakor, the author of On My Own Two Feet: A Modern Girl's Guide to Personal Finance, and Get Financially Naked: How to Talk Money with Your Honey. If the 30-year-old starts investing $5,000 a year from that age onward, and receives an average annual return of 7 percent, by the time she's 70 she will have more than a million dollars.
So maybe the women who think it's more important to have big boobs than an IQ above room temperature should picture themselves at 70, financially strapped and forced to decide whether they'd rather put food on the table or heat their home when the temperature plummets. If it's below freezing and your house is cold, a D-cup won't do you much good.
Because no matter how attractive you are, it's not going to sustain you over the long haul. My mother died last year at 87, shortly after the New York Times mentioned that women today can expect to live an average of 13 years longer than their mothers did. That puts me at 100 and counting.
Which lends a whole new perspective to the question of how you look and what that means. Women tend to measure the advantages of beauty by considering its short-term benefits, but life is a marathon, not a sprint - and these days, even after they start earning senior-citizen discounts, most women still have a long road ahead of them.
The end of the diva paradox
Great surgeons don't need to be respectful or have a talented, kind or alert front desk staff. They're great at the surgery part, and you're not here for the service, you're here to get well (if you believe that the surgery part is what matters). In fact, gruffness might be a clue to their skill for some.
Great opera singers don't have to be reasonable or kind. They sing like no one else, that's why you hired them, and why they get to (are expected to) act like divas. Get over it.
So the thinking goes.
The traditional scarcity model implied some sort of inverse relationship between service and quality. Not for service businesses like hotels, of course, but for the other stuff. If someone was truly gifted, of course they didn't have the time or focus to also be kind or reasonable or good at understanding your needs. A diva was great partly because, we decided, she was a jerk.
I think that's changing, possibly forever, for a bunch of reasons:
The state of the art is now easier to find. Word spreads about behavior and service faster than ever. As a result, customers quickly become aware of what a raw deal they're getting from this supposedly gifted individual.
It's so much easier to deliver better service (Dr. Diva, please send me an email if you're running late!) that we're far less forgiving.
Since just about any intelligent and caring person can use technology and a bit of humility to deliver better service (see above), we start to wonder whether that diva provider actually is intelligent and caring. And if he isn't, it doesn't really matter if he has some sort of skill, because uncaring hands are worth avoiding.
With fewer great gigs available (even in opera), it's not so easy act like a jerk (or be insulated and uncaring) and still get work.
What Women Want
WHEN it comes to partners, men often find women's taste fickle and unfathomable. But ladies may not be entirely to blame. A growing body of research suggests that their preference for certain types of male physiognomy may be swayed by things beyond their conscious control - like prevalence of disease or crime - and in predictable ways.
Masculine features - a big jaw, say, or a prominent brow - tend to reflect physical and behavioural traits, such as strength and aggression. They are also closely linked to physiological ones, like virility and a sturdy immune system.
The obverse of these desirable characteristics looks less appealing. Aggression is fine when directed at external threats, less so when it spills over onto the hearth. Sexual prowess ensures plenty of progeny, but it often goes hand in hand with promiscuity and a tendency to shirk parental duties or leave the mother altogether.
So, whenever a woman has to choose a mate, she must decide whether to place a premium on the hunk's choicer genes or the wimp's love and care. Lisa DeBruine, of the University of Aberdeen, believes that today's women still face this dilemma and that their choices are affected by unconscious factors.
In a paper published earlier this year Dr DeBruine found that women in countries with poor health statistics preferred men with masculine features more than those who lived in healthier societies. Where disease is rife, this seemed to imply, giving birth to healthy offspring trumps having a man stick around long enough to help care for it. In more salubrious climes, therefore, wimps are in with a chance.
Now, though, researchers led by Robert Brooks, of the University of New South Wales, have taken another look at Dr DeBruine's data and arrived at a different conclusion. They present their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Dr Brooks suggests that it is not health-related factors, but rather competition and violence among men that best explain a woman's penchant for manliness. The more rough-and-tumble the environment, the researcher's argument goes, the more women prefer masculine men, because they are better than the softer types at providing for mothers and their offspring.
An unhealthy relationship
Since violent competition for resources is more pronounced in unequal societies, Dr Brooks predicted that women would value masculinity more highly in countries with a higher Gini coefficient, which is a measure of income inequality. And indeed, he found that this was better than a country's health statistics at predicting the relative attractiveness of hunky faces.
The rub is that unequal countries also tend to be less healthy. So, in order to disentangle cause from effect, Dr Brooks compared Dr DeBruine's health index with a measure of violence in a country: its murder rate. Again, he found that his chosen indicator predicts preference for facial masculinity more accurately than the health figures do (though less well than the Gini).
However, in a rejoinder published in the same issue of the Proceedings, Dr DeBruine and her colleagues point to a flaw in Dr Brooks's analysis: his failure to take into account a society's overall wealth. When she performed the statistical tests again, this time controlling for GNP, it turned out that the murder rate's predictive power disappears, whereas that of the health indicators persists. In other words, the prevalence of violent crime seems to predict mating preferences only in so far as it reflects a country's relative penury.
The statistical tussle shows the difficulty of drawing firm conclusions from correlations alone. Dr DeBruine and Dr Brooks admit as much, and agree the dispute will not be settled until the factors that shape mating preferences are tested directly.
Another recent study by Dr DeBruine and others has tried to do just that. Its results lend further credence to the health hypothesis. This time, the researchers asked 124 women and 117 men to rate 15 pairs of male faces and 15 pairs of female ones for attractiveness. Each pair of images depicted the same set of features tweaked to make one appear ever so slightly manlier than the other (if the face was male) or more feminine (if it was female). Some were also made almost imperceptibly lopsided. Symmetry, too, indicates a mate's quality because in harsh environments robust genes are needed to ensure even bodily development.
Next, the participants were shown another set of images, depicting objects that elicit varying degrees of disgust, such as a white cloth either stained with what looked like a bodily fluid, or a less revolting blue dye. Disgust is widely assumed to be another adaptation, one that warns humans to stay well away from places where germs and other pathogens may be lurking. So, according to Dr DeBruine's hypothesis, people shown the more disgusting pictures ought to respond with an increased preference for masculine lads and feminine lasses, and for the more symmetrical countenances.
That is precisely what happened when they were asked to rate the same set of faces one more time. But it only worked with the opposite sex; the revolting images failed to alter what either men or women found attractive about their own sex. This means sexual selection, not other evolutionary mechanisms, is probably at work.
More research is needed to confirm these observations and to see whether other factors, like witnessing violence, bear on human physiognomic proclivities. For now, though, the majority of males who do not resemble Brad Pitt may at least take comfort that this matters less if their surroundings remain spotless.
Beauty and Success
The ugly are one of the few groups against whom it is still legal to discriminate. Unfortunately for them, there are good reasons why beauty and success go hand in hand.
IMAGINE you have two candidates for a job. They are both of the same sex - and that sex is the one your own proclivities incline you to find attractive. Their CVs are equally good, and they both give good interview. You cannot help noticing, though, that one is pug-ugly and the other is handsome. Are you swayed by their appearance?
Perhaps not. But lesser, less-moral mortals might be. If appearance did not count, why would people dress up for such interviews - even if the job they are hoping to get is dressed down? And job interviews are turning points in life. If beauty sways interviewers, the beautiful will, by and large, have more successful careers than the ugly - even in careers for which beauty is not a necessary qualification.
If you were swayed by someone's looks, however, would that be wrong? In a society that eschews prejudice, favouring the beautiful seems about as shallow as you can get. But it was not always thus. In the past, people often equated beauty with virtue and ugliness with vice.
Even now, the expression 'as ugly as sin' has not quite passed from the language. There is, of course, the equally famous expression 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', to counter it. But the subtext of that old saw, that beauty is arbitrary, is wrong. Most beholders agree what is beautiful - and modern biology suggests there is a good reason for that agreement. Biology also suggests that beauty may, indeed, be a good rule of thumb for assessing someone of either sex. Not an infallible one, and certainly no substitute for an in-depth investigation. But, nevertheless, an instinctive one, and one that is bound to redound to the advantage of the physically well endowed.
Fearful symmetry
The godfather of scientific study of beauty is Randy Thornhill, of the University of New Mexico. It was Dr Thornhill who, a little over a decade ago, took an observation he originally made about insects and dared to apply it to people.
The insects in question were scorpion flies, and the observation was that those flies whose wings were most symmetrical were the ones that did best in the mating stakes. Dr Thornhill thought this preference for symmetry might turn out to be universal in the animal kingdom (and it does indeed seem to be). In particular, he showed it is true of people. He started with faces, manipulating pictures to make them more and less symmetrical, and having volunteers of the opposite sex rank them for attractiveness. But he has gone on to show that all aspects of bodily symmetry contribute, down to the lengths of corresponding fingers, and that the assessment applies to those of the same sex, as well.
The reason seems to be that perfect symmetry is hard for a developing embryo to maintain. The embryo that can maintain it obviously has good genes (and also a certain amount of luck). It is, therefore, more than just coincidence that the words 'health and beauty' trip so easily off the tongue as a single phrase.
Other aspects of beauty, too, are indicators of health. Skin and hair condition, in particular, are sensitive to illness, malnutrition and so on (or, perhaps it would be better to say that people's perceptions are exquisitely tuned to detect perfection and flaws in such things). And more recent work has demonstrated another association. Contrary to the old jokes about dumb blondes, beautiful people seem to be cleverer, too.
One of the most detailed studies on the link between beauty and intelligence was done by Mark Prokosch, Ronald Yeo and Geoffrey Miller, who also work at the University of New Mexico. These three researchers correlated people's bodily symmetry with their performance on intelligence tests. Such tests come in many varieties, of course, and have a controversial background. But most workers in the field agree that there is a quality, normally referred to as 'general intelligence', or 'g', that such tests can measure objectively along with specific abilities in such areas as spatial awareness and language. Dr Miller and his colleagues found that the more a test was designed to measure g, the more the results were correlated with bodily symmetry - particularly in the bottom half of the beauty-ugliness spectrum.
Faces, too, seem to carry information on intelligence. A few years ago, two of the world's face experts, Leslie Zebrowitz, of Brandeis University in Massachusetts, and Gillian Rhodes, of the University of Western Australia, got together to review the literature and conduct some fresh experiments. They found nine past studies (seven of them conducted before the second world war, an indication of how old interest in this subject is), and subjected them to what is known as a meta-analysis.
The studies in question had all used more or less the same methodology, namely photograph people and ask them to do IQ tests, then show the photographs to other people and ask the second lot to rank the intelligence of the first lot. The results suggested that people get such judgments right - by no means all the time, but often enough to be significant. The two researchers and their colleagues then carried out their own experiment, with the added twist of dividing their subjects up by age.
Bright blondes
The results of that were rather surprising. They found that the faces of children and adults of middling years did seem to give away intelligence, while those of teenagers and the elderly did not. That is surprising because face-reading of this sort must surely be important in mate selection, and the teenage years are the time when such selection is likely to be at its most intense - though, conversely, they are also the time when evolution will be working hardest to cover up any deficiencies, and the hormone-driven changes taking place during puberty might provide the material needed to do that.
Nevertheless, the accumulating evidence suggests that physical characteristics do give clues about intelligence, that such clues are picked up by other people, and that these clues are also associated with beauty. And other work also suggests that this really does matter.
One of the leading students of beauty and success is Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas. Dr Hamermesh is an economist rather than a biologist, and thus brings a somewhat different perspective to the field. He has collected evidence from more than one continent that beauty really is associated with success - at least, with financial success. He has also shown that, if all else is equal, it might be a perfectly legitimate business strategy to hire the more beautiful candidate.
Just over a decade ago Dr Hamermesh presided over a series of surveys in the United States and Canada which showed that when all other things are taken into account, ugly people earn less than average incomes, while beautiful people earn more than the average. The ugliness penalty for men was -9% while the beauty premium was +5%. For women, perhaps surprisingly considering popular prejudices about the sexes, the effect was less: the ugliness penalty was -6% while the beauty premium was +4%.
Since then, he has gone on to measure these effects in other places. In China, ugliness is penalised more in women, but beauty is more rewarded. The figures for men in Shanghai are -25% and +3%; for women they are -31% and +10%. In Britain, ugly men do worse than ugly women (-18% as against -11%) but the beauty premium is the same for both (and only +1%).
The difference also applies within professions. Dr Hamermesh looked at the careers of members of a particular (though discreetly anonymous) American law school. He found that those rated attractive on the basis of their graduation photographs went on to earn higher salaries than their less well-favoured colleagues. Moreover, lawyers in private practice tended to be better looking than those working in government departments.
Even more unfairly, Dr Hamermesh found evidence that beautiful people may bring more revenue to their employers than the less-favoured do. His study of Dutch advertising firms showed that those with the most beautiful executives had the largest size-adjusted revenues - a difference that exceeded the salary differentials of the firms in question. Finally, to add insult to injury, he found that even in his own cerebral and, one might have thought, beauty-blind profession, attractive candidates were more successful in elections for office in the American Economic Association.
That last distinction also applies to elections to public office, as was neatly demonstrated by Niclas Berggren, of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, and his colleagues. Dr Berggren's team looked at almost 2,000 candidates in Finnish elections. They asked foreigners (mainly Americans and Swedes) to examine the candidates' campaign photographs and rank them for beauty. They then compared those rankings with the actual election results. They were able to eliminate the effects of party preference because Finland has a system of proportional representation that pits candidates of the same party against one another. Lo and behold, the more beautiful candidates, as ranked by people who knew nothing of Finland's internal politics, tended to have been the more successful—though in this case, unlike Dr Hamermesh's economic results, the effect was larger for women than for men.
If looks could kill
What these results suggest is a two-fold process, sadly reminiscent of the biblical quotation to which the title of this article refers. There is a feedback loop between biology and the social environment that gives to those who have, and takes from those who have not.
That happens because beauty is a real marker for other, underlying characteristics such as health, good genes and intelligence. It is what biologists call an unfakeable signal, like the deep roar of a big, rutting stag that smaller adolescents are physically incapable of producing. It therefore makes biological sense for people to prefer beautiful friends and lovers, since the first will make good allies, and the second, good mates.
That brings the beautiful opportunities denied to the ugly, which allows them to learn things and make connections that increase their value still further. If they are judged on that experience as well as their biological fitness, it makes them even more attractive. Even a small initial difference can thus be amplified into something that just ain't - viewed from the bottom - fair.
Given all this, it is hardly surprising that the cosmetics industry has global sales of $280 billion. But can you really fake the unfakeable signal?
Dr Hamermesh's research suggests that you can but, sadly, that it is not cost-effective—at least, not if your purpose is career advancement. Working in Shanghai, where the difference between the ugliness penalty and the beauty bonus was greatest, he looked at how women's spending on their cosmetics and clothes affected their income.
The answer was that it did, but not enough to pay for itself in a strictly financial sense. He estimates that the beauty premium generated by such primping is worth only 15% of the money expended. Of course, beauty pays off in spheres of life other than the workplace. But that, best beloved, would be the subject of a rather different article.
Enhancement
It's a familiar problem: I am running a bit late after spending too long deliberating over my choice of footwear. Should I wear high heels, and have to deal with pain and discomfort in exchange for added height and a smarter look, or go with more practical flats? Knowing I'm probably going to have to run for the train now, I choose the flats and head for the door.
It turns out my morning conundrum is particularly appropriate given my destination: the new Superhuman exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. When we consider human enhancement, many of us automatically think of technologically advanced, futuristic developments. But the exhibition reminds us that enhancement is already a part of our daily lives - whether you wear glasses, tinker away on a smartphone, or, like me, debate the form and function of high heeled shoes.
Superhuman is timed for the start of the Olympic games in London, but in a refreshing shift from the heavy focus on traditional sport science, the curators opted to explore human enhancement by taking inspiration from the Paralympics, and the blurry line between ability and disability.
Pressure to conform to societal ideals is a major driving factor of enhancement, whether through high heels or extreme plastic surgery. Such ideals have also played a large role in the discourse about disability, and this exhibition provides glimpses of past solutions to physical challenges that demonstrate just how conceptions of disability have evolved. The realistic looking but hugely impractical prosthetics from the 1960s and 70s developed for children born with disfigured limbs due to thalidomide exposure demonstrate the thinking at the time that prosthetics needed to replace what is missing.
Today, one need look no further than double amputee runner Oscar Pistorious's "Cheetah" prosthetics, and the controversy they have stirred, to see that technology and design can give wearers of prosthetics far more than is possible with accurate replicas of limbs, or even the confines of the "normal" human body.
At the exhibition, the film Cremaster 3, by artist Mathew Barney, brings the metaphor to life. In the film, athlete and model Aimee Mullin, who was born without shin bones, is transformed into a superhuman cheetah-woman with real cheetah legs.
When it comes to predicting the future of human enhancement, perhaps the best way to speculate is through video, which the exhibition does exceptionally well. One fascinating contribution is Charlotte Jarvis's film I Need a Hero. Shocked by a 2004 US reality TV series called The Swan, in which "ugly" women won extreme makeovers including plastic surgery, Jarvis takes the concept one step further. Her film sets up a fictitious game show for which the prize is to become the ‘ultimate hero’. The winner undergoes a series of operations to effectively turn him into a superhero: his heart is wired to electrodes to make it stronger, for example, he gains a bionic eye, and even has his arm amputated and replaced with a bionic version.
Such uneasy works highlight our ambivalence about enhancement, and put into context the first and perhaps most inconspicuous exhibit on display, a small, winged figurine that casts a shadow over the exhibition wall. This is Icarus, the Greek mythological figure who fatefully built his own wings out of feathers and wax; his shadow is a stark reminder of the perils of trying to fly too close to the sun.
At a heritage show in London next month, scientists will study visitors' genes to determine whether they may be capable of having a child with ginger hair. Using a simple saliva test, experts will search people's DNA for any of three common variants in the MC1R gene which are responsible for red hair colour.
About four in ten British people are thought to carry the mutations despite not having red locks themselves, which can lead to "surprise" births of flame-haired children.Because the gene is recessive, only one in four children born to two carriers will be born with red hair, and one in two will themselves be carriers.
Children with only one parent who carries the gene will not be red-haired themselves, but half will also carry the same variant which they could pass on to their children.
Dr Jim Wilson, chief scientist at BritainsDNA, the ancestry company behind the test, explained: "This means that families can carry a variant for generations, and when one carrier has children with another carrier, a red-headed baby can appear seemingly out of nowhere."
About one in ten people in Ireland has red hair despite 40 per cent carrying the red hair variant. In Scotland only 13 per cent have red hair and in England the figure is six per cent.
Ginger hair is far more common in the UK than in Europe, where only 1.3 per cent of people are red-headed, and the rest of the world where the rate drops to just over 0.5 per cent, or one in 200.
Sports Stars Are Not Role Models
The news from South Africa was shocking, but maybe it shouldn't be. Like too many other sports celebrities, he won by breaking the rules. Will we ever learn to cut this self-delusion?
When I read the four-line alert on my iPad Thursday morning about the charge of murder against Oscar Pistorius, the 26-year-old South African who had become an Olympic-caliber runner despite the loss of both legs, I had a visceral reaction: "Holy shit."
Pistorius's lower legs had been amputated as an infant because of malformation. But with the use of carbon-fiber prosthetic blades, he had overcome what seemed physically impossible to overcome. He competed in the 400-meter distance with the world's elite. Given his handicap, his speed seemed incomprehensible, a hero, yes a permanent hero that nothing and no one could ever bring down.
So I was obviously shocked when I read that Pistorius had been arrested Thursday for killing his girlfriend, 30-year-old model Reeva Steenkamp, at his home in Pretoria with shots to the upper body and head. Hence the "holy shit."
Until I came to my senses five seconds later and realized the whole notion of heroes in sports is absurd and always has been and we all have to stop the hyperventilated hyperventilation (see Aug. 27, 2012, Newsweek piece on Lance Armstrong by yours truly).
I have said this before and it is time to say it again: we must put an end to self-delusion and judge gifted athletes for what is embedded within them beyond their skills - the selfish entitlement that comes with nonsensical idolatry and seals them in an airtight bubble regardless of their feigned ability to act humble in postgame interviews. Why do we so routinely fall for the "I'm just doing what's best for my team" line when one eye of the player is trained on the stands looking for the next dolled-up groupie to bed for the night.
They are narcissistic men. They have to be, anybody has to be, in pursuit of greatness. They are also men for whom the ends always justify the means, seek any edge to give them the millimeter that separates the successful from those toiling in obscurity. Just go to the beginning rounds of the U.S. Open in tennis. Watch the 88th best player in the world serve and volley with exquisiteness and then watch one of the top seeds and ask yourself what the difference is except that tiny slice. If it means the difference between anonymity and fame, financial struggle and millions, who would not grab for that sliver by any means possible?
Maybe if you were moral. Or upright. Or believe in rules. But athletes and coaches don't believe in rules, but breaking them without detection. Bountygate with the New Orleans Saints. Cameragate with Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, fined for training a video camera on the opposing sidelines to pick up offensive and defensive signals. Relief pitchers in small parks, picking up signs from the opposing catcher because of clear sightlines, relaying them to batters with various hand movements. Steroids. Doping. Human growth hormone. Greenies. Now deer antler spray and magic underwear.
The problem is not with the athletes, very few of whom desire role-model status (New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter is the only one I am confident of). Want to hear baseball players bitch? Listen to their put-upon groans when they have to go out on the field to sign autographs during fan appreciation day.
The hero label still stuck despite behavior that continued to be disturbing.
The problem is our endless mythologizing of the athlete, this notion that they stand for something special beyond the field of play. They don't, but that doesn’t stop us from trying to make them equal to the image we insist on having for them. It goes back to the Greeks and the idea of sport as some sort of Herculean sacrifice without personal enrichment. The worst and most pernicious propagandist was the early 20th-century sportswriter Grantland Rice, with his endlessly inflated descriptions, such as comparing the backfield of Notre Dame to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1924. Epic writing yes, impressive under deadline, but biblical bullshit.
When it comes to Pistorius, go back in the archives of The New York Times Magazine to January 18, 2012, and read the piece by Michael Sokolove, for my money the best long-form journalist on sports in the country.
Sokolove clearly liked Pistorius. He also showed a side of the man that Sokolove ultimately dubbed as an 'adrenaline freak' (although an out-of-his-mind freakin' danger freak would have been more accurate): a penchant for driving cars 155 miles per hour on roads with standing water; the crash of his boat that required 172 stitches; a keen interest in guns and shooting, keeping dangerous animals as pets.
Sokolove also went into detail on whether Pistorius's blades gave him an unfair advantage over runners with intact bodies. There has been a radical difference of opinion, but the soundest scientific voice in the piece came from Peter Weyand, a professor of applied psychology and biomechanics at Southern Methodist University. Weyand established that Pistorius's blades were very light, 5.4 pounds, as compared to 12.6 pounds for the leg and foot of a normal runner. According to Weyand, that gave Pistorius the ability to reposition his blades 20 percent more rapidly than a normal competitor.
How much of a difference would that make?
Weyand said it gave Pistorius an enormous 11.9-second advantage in the 400 meters. That would give Pistorius a time of roughly 57 seconds in the 400 meters, nowhere near the world’s best and mediocre for even a high schooler. But Weyand has not wavered in the face of fierce criticism from other academics who have studied Pistorius. Nor does he have any axe to grind, describing Pistorius's efforts as still remarkable.
Raising questions about the possibility of such an unfair competitive advantage just got in the way of the story. It also would have been seen as hideously politically incorrect. We wanted a myth so we created a myth: Pistorius not simply the Blade Runner, as he was nicknamed, but able to compete with the best of the best at the 2012 London Olympics. He arguably got more attention at the Olympics than any other athlete.
He did win his first heat with those lightning-fast blades. But he finished last in the semifinals, a space capsule crashing back to earth. But the hero label still stuck despite behavior that continued to be disturbing.
In the 2012 Paralympics T44 division, he finished second in the 200 meters to Brazil's Alan Olviera; instead of grace in defeat, he said that Olviera's blades were too long, something of an irony for a handicapped man accused of using unfair equipment to his competitive advantage. He kept a gun in his Pretoria home, not surprising given the level of violence in South Africa. But he also showed an inordinate interest in shooting and his prowess, going to the range at night when he could not sleep.
Initial reports were that Pistorius might have shot Steenkamp because he believed a burglar had infiltrated his house, which was something he feared. There were the requisite comments of disbelief, including from Sokolove on a New York Times blog yesterday. "I can't imagine anything like that," said Sokolove, perhaps because most people usually don’t confide the notion of blowing away their girlfriends, even to The New York Times.
After the initial reports, police did confirm that there had been previous incidents at the house involving allegations of domestic violence. All sorts of instant theories will be floated. Finding out what happened may take weeks or months or years or never, since there were no witnesses to the shooting.
But given what has been credibly written about him personally, Oscar Pistorius was transfixed by the dark side of the moon.
Evolution of Beauty
BEAUTY, the saying has it, is only skin deep. Not true. Skin is important (the cosmetics industry proves that). But so is what lies under it. In particular, the shape of people’s faces, determined by their bone structure, contributes enormously to how beautiful they are. And, since the ultimate point of beauty is to signal who is a good prospect as a mate, what makes a face beautiful is not only an aesthetic matter but also a biological one. How those bone structures arise, and how they communicate desirable traits, are big evolutionary questions.
Until now, experiments to try to determine the biological basis of beauty have been of the please-look-at-these-photographs-and-answer-some-questions variety. Some useful and not necessarily obvious results have emerged, such as that one determinant of beauty is facial symmetry.
But what would really help is a breeding experiment which allowed the shapes of faces to be followed across the generations to see how those shapes relate to variations in things that might be desirable in a mate. These might include fertility, fecundity, social status, present health, and likely resistance to future infection and infestation. Correlations between many of these phenomena and attributes of the body-beautiful have, indeed, been established. But in a pair-forming, highly social species such as Homo sapiens, you also have to live with your co-child-raiser or, at least, collaborate with him or her. So other things may be important in a mate, too, such as an even temper and a friendly outlook.
It would be impossible to do such a breeding experiment on people, of course. But as Irene Elia, a biological anthropologist at Cambridge, realised, it has in fact been done, for the past five decades, on a different species of animal. Dr Elia has published her analysis of this experiment in the Quarterly Review of Biology. The animals in question are foxes.
The story starts in 1959, in Novosibirsk, Russia. That was when Dmitry Belyaev, a geneticist, began an experiment which continues to this day. He tried to breed silver foxes (a melanic colour variant, beloved of furriers, of the familiar red fox) to make them tamer and thus easier for farmers to handle. He found he could, but the process also had other effects: the animals' coats developed patches of colour; their ears became floppy; their skulls became rounded and foreshortened; their faces flattened; their noses got stubbier; and their jaws shortened, thus crowding their teeth.
All told, then, these animals became, to wild foxes, the equivalent of what dogs are to wild wolves. And this was solely the result of selection for what Belyaev called 'friendly' behaviour - neither fearful nor aggressive, but calm and eager to interact with people.
The link appears to be hormonal. Hormones such as estradiol and neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which regulate behaviour, also regulate some aspects of development. Change one and you will change the other. So in a species where friendliness is favoured because that species is social and the group members have to get on with each other - a species like Homo sapiens, for example - a 'friendly' face is a feature that might actively be sought, both in mates and in children, because it is a marker of desirable social attitudes. And there is abundant evidence, reviewed by Dr Elia, both that it is indeed actively sought by Homo sapiens, and that it is such a reliable marker.
What men look for in the faces of women, and vice versa, is so well known that research might seem superfluous. Suffice to say, then, that features like those seen in Belyaev's foxes (flat faces, small noses, reduced jaws and a large ratio between the height of the cranium and the height of the face) are on the list. People with large craniofacial ratios are, literally, highbrow.
More intriguingly, the presence or absence of such features skews parents' attitudes to their offspring. At least 15 studies have shown that mothers treat attractive children more favourably than unattractive ones, even though they say they don't and may actually believe that. At least one of these studies showed this bias is true from birth.
Some of the details are extraordinary. One researcher, who spent a decade observing how mothers look after young children in supermarkets, found that only 1% of children judged unattractive by independent assessors were safely secured in the seats of grocery carts. In the case of the most attractive the figure was 13%. Another researcher studied police photographs of children who had been abused and found such children had lower craniofacial ratios than those who had not been.
In a state of nature, this sort of behaviour would surely translate into selective death and thus the spread of the facial features humans are pleased to describe as 'beautiful'. If such features do indicate a propensity to friendly, sociable behaviour, as they do in foxes, then such behaviours will spread too.
Crucially for Dr Elia's hypothesis, they do indeed indicate such a propensity. Even as children, according to 33 separate studies, the attractive are better adjusted and more popular than the ugly (they also have higher intelligence, which assists social skills). And of course, they have less difficulty finding a mate - and as a result have more children themselves. One study found that the most beautiful women in it had up to 16% more offspring than their less-favoured sisters. Conversely, the least attractive men had 13% fewer than their more handsome confrères.
The beholder's eye
An appreciation of what is 'beautiful', moreover, seems innate - as Dr Elia's hypothesis requires it should be. Babies a few days old prefer pictures of the faces of people whom their elders would define as beautiful to those they would not, regardless of the sex and race of either the baby or the person in the photo.
People also seem to be more beautiful now than they were in the past - precisely as would be expected if beauty is still evolving. This has been shown by assessing the beauty of reconstructions of the faces of early humans. (Such reconstructions, sometimes used in murder cases where only skeletal remains of the victim are available, produce reliable depictions of recently dead people, so the assumption is that ancients really did look like the reconstructions made of them.)
None of this absolutely proves Dr Elia's hypothesis. But it looks plausible. If she is right, facial beauty ceases to be an arbitrary characteristic and instead becomes a reliable marker of underlying desirable behaviour. It is selected for both in the ways beautiful children are brought up, and in the number of children the beautiful have. Face it
The Curse of Beauty
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make beautiful. Just look what they did to Kim Novak.
Until Sunday night, most of the world thought of Novak primarily as the siren of Hitchcock's iconic 'Vertigo,' a famously stunning actress whose career peak happened nearly 60 years ago. Then she showed up at the Oscars, presenting the award for best animated feature with an admiring Matthew McConaughey. Her hair was a shoulder length tumble of blond, but it was her face that was the most surprising for a woman of her 81 years. Her eyes seemed pulled back, her lips seemed strangely inflated and her skin seemed at once unnaturally taut and puffy. If you were on Twitter on the time, you could almost hear the collective gasp. Donald Trump - hardly one to comment on anybody else's personal appearance - tweeted that she should sue her plastic surgeon. Comic Nick Youssef later joked that she’d been 'safely transported back to the Hollywood Wax Museum.' Plenty of amateur critics chimed in with their own jibes about the seemingly 'Frozen' star, prompting her defenders, like the folks at the Wire, to warn, 'Know that we're judging you if you're making fun of Kim Novak right now.'
Kim Novak, who in just the past few years has survived breast cancer, bipolar disorder, fire and a serious horse riding accident, doesn't have to justify her face or her private choices to anyone. She essentially left the Hollywood race years ago, and the snark of the Internet likely has little effect. But hers wasn't the only heavily scrutinized and shock-inducing countenance in an evening that began with host Ellen DeGeneres declaring youth 'the most important thing in the world.' There was 68-year-old Goldie Hawn's not-exactly-natural-looking appearance. There was DeGeneres' crack about 67-year-old Liza Minnelli looking like an 'amazing Liza Minnelli impersonator.' There was the entire train wreck known as John Travolta.
These were all people who could once command adulation, who graced magazine covers and bedroom walls. Now they're punch lines - not so much because they've dared to get older but for the manner in which they seem to have chosen to do so. And it doesn't take any great detection skills to see trickled-down versions of those same factory-issued faces on several other leading actors and actresses - as well as newscasters and politicians - decades younger than Kim Novak and company. There are entire generations of entertainers now walking around with peculiarly immobilized, sandblasted-looking cookie cutter countenances. In Hollywood's funhouse hall of mirrors, weird is the new normal.
The entertainment system is undeniably far crueler to women than men. Male stars like Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford and Harrison Ford, after all, still get to be exemplars of masculinity, while only Helen Mirren is allowed to be over 60 and remain a goddess. And the quest to keep young and beautiful can take some drastically misguided turns.
Yet the sad part is how unnecessary - even career-killing - so much of this flat-out disfiguring is. In sharp contrast to the some of those profoundly appearance-altered presenters Oscar night, it was a field of considerably more natural-looking older actors - Bruce Dern, June Squibb, Meryl Streep and Judi Dench – who were among the actual nominees. And it was the still actively working 88-year-old Angela Lansbury and 68-year-old Steve Martin who picked up honorary Oscars. Why might that be so? Could it be because none of them, not even Streep, have ever been famed primarily for being beautiful?
Without the onus of being sex symbols upon them, they've been less fiercely scrutinized throughout their careers and likely less pressured to unnaturally maintain the gifts that by nature belong only briefly to the select few they're ever given to. Though 68-year-old Dolly Parton is untouchably awesome no matter what she does, it's still unnerving to see her become more mannequin-like with every public appearance. She says that 'Anybody that's got the nerve, desire and the money to have surgery, should find a good doctor and just do it,' but based on what many aging Hollywood celebrities look like, 'good doctors' must be in alarmingly short supply.
With a few notable exceptions - like Joan Rivers, who built an entire career of making fun of her own looks - the most extreme, downright troubling plastic surgery almost inevitably appears on the most once-gorgeous faces. Poor Mickey Rourke, for instance, has admitted, 'I went to the wrong guy,' and the results speak for themselves. It's sad, because there seems a whole lot to be said for letting go of that youthful beauty - like facial mobility, and career longevity. And though being desirable may be all you want when you're 20, trying to hang on to it can be a curse that lasts a lifetime.
Attractive Men Get The Investment
You may have thought that to succeed on Dragons' Den you required nerves of iron, a flawless pitch and fearless negotiating skills but you would be wrong. Apparently you just need to be an attractive man.
Researchers from Harvard Business School have found that male entrepreneurs are far more likely to receive investment than females, and that sexy ones do even better.
This held true even when the content of the pitch was the same.
Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors say that they found 'a profound and consistent sex gap in entrepreneur persuasiveness. Both professional investors and non-professional evaluators preferred pitches presented by male entrepreneurs compared with pitches made by female entrepreneurs'.
'Attractive males,' they noted, 'were particularly persuasive.' The same did not seem to be true for attractive females, however.
The research was undertaken to investigate possible causes of the persistent gap between the number of female and male entrepreneurs. In the United States, studies have found that women-led ventures receive only 7 per cent of all venture capital funds. In Dragons' Den, around half as many offers of investment are given to women as men.
One of the questions the study authors wanted to look at was whether that could be explained by men being better at starting businesses. Even if not, could it still be sensible investor behaviour? 'If male entrepreneurs are inherently more talented or more likely to be at an advantage throughout their ventures . . . then the sex gap in entrepreneurship may result from rational discrimination.'
A group of investors were shown two video pitches by entrepreneurs, narrating from off-screen, describing their business idea. They were then asked to choose which they would most like to invest in. Unknown to them, the voiceover was randomly assigned as male and female.
In a separate experiment, another group of potential investors was shown a similar pitch in which they were also presented with a photograph supposedly of the narrator - which had been altered to be more or less attractive. The scientists found that investors, of both sexes, chose the male pitch almost 70 per cent of the time - and even more so if the man was attractive. They also found that 'male-narrated pitches were rated as more persuasive, logical and fact-based'.
Since the pitches were otherwise the same, did this mean that investors were indeed behaving irrationally by preferring men over women? Well, the authors concede, perhaps not - if there is an inherent bias in society towards male businessmen, then even if the investor does not hold that bias it might be sensible to accede to it.
'This discrimination does not necessarily represent irrational marketplace behaviour,' they write. 'If discrimination arises along the entire growth path of female-led ventures, then early-stage investors may rationally seek to avoid such investments.'
The Curse of Celebrity
The Paralympian enjoyed the kind of fame that bestows a sense of invincibility. The Greeks and Romans knew the risks.
We will never know what was going through the mind of Oscar Pistorius when he pulled the trigger four times on that February night last year. His testimony, to me, sounded rather implausible but I can also understand why the judge was loath to convict him of first degree murder on the basis of circumstantial evidence.
What we do know, however, is that the character of Pistorius changed a great deal between 2004, when he took up athletics, and 2012, when he arrived in London as the poster boy of the Paralympic movement. As David O'Sullivan, a radio journalist who has known Pistorius since he was 17, wrote: 'He is not the boy I knew.'
Pistorius once threatened to break the legs of a footballer after an argument about his then girlfriend. He spent a night in police cells after an allegation of assault against a woman who had come to his house for a party (he eventually reached an out-of-court settlement). He let off a gun in a restaurant (an offence for which he was convicted yesterday).
Arnu Fourie, a good friend, shared a room with Pistorius in the Olympic village in 2012, but just couldn't cope with his volatility. 'I asked Fourie what it was like rooming with Oscar,' O'Sullivan said. 'He told me he had been forced to move out because Oscar was constantly screaming in anger at people on the phone. I thought Fourie was joking and waited for him to smile. But he was serious. I was taken aback. I had never thought of Oscar behaving like that.'
When most of us behave like idiots, or cross boundaries, we are told about it. Our friends, our family and our colleagues call us out when we are petulant, aggressive, or boorish. These checks are the stuff of our moral education. The problem for celebrities is simple: they are often deprived of these precious chastisements. They are surrounded by sycophants and hangers-on. They make demands without fear of mockery. The moral boundaries that are so clear to most people start to blur.
When Pistorius was brought in on charges of assault, it was reported that police officers, in awe of the star, asked him to pose for photos.
Team-mates reported that if he didn't like his kit and started shouting, officials would run around like supplicants.
This doesn’t explain why he shot his girlfriend, but that's not my point. I am merely suggesting that this helps to explain how a charming teenager morphed into a man who, even according to his friends, was often out of control. In many ways, Pistorius was more than a celebrity; he was an untouchable symbol of hope and inspiration.
I spent three days with Pistorius in 2007. We went to a wildlife sanctuary, drove around Pretoria and dined together. I watched a training session in a state of growing admiration as he ran sprints on those dark blades until the point of exhaustion. On the final day I sat in the stands as he broke the world record for the 100 metres at the South African Disabled Championships. He was charming, likeable and impressively ambitious.
But the trappings of celebrity were already apparent. He got angry with a waitress when his favourite lunch table wasn't available, which surprised me. He drove at double the speed limit while talking on his mobile phone, which surprised me even more. When I nervously asked why he wasn't worried about the police, he said: 'They wouldn't want to touch me.'
The Ancient Greeks had a deep understanding of the dangers of fame and glory. They recognised that the small concessions given to the great and good incubate all sorts of hidden dangers.
The Romans understood this, too. Conquering generals given the honour of parading through the streets were often followed by a slave whispering in their ear: 'Remember you are mortal'. This was partly to remind the general of his own vulnerability, but it also performed the ceremonial function of thwarting hubris.
Geoff Scott, a former professional footballer, has made more than a hundred prison visits to former players. He is often asked why so many footballers, despite having experienced fame and glory, end up on the inside. He replies that it's often precisely because they have experienced fame and glory.
Think how often you read about the rich and famous coming to believe in their own invincibility. They are given carte blanche to break so many small rules that they start to break bigger rules.
Celebrity is an enticing but also, in certain circumstances, perilous thing. When Luis Suarez bit an opponent during the World Cup, his team-mates, captain and coach claimed that he was a scapegoat and victim. The Uruguayan president greeted him at the airport. There was no critique, no admonishment, just a shower of sycophancy.
How is a person to discern the boundaries of acceptable behaviour when those around him are colluding in the fantasy that, if you are a big enough star, anything goes?
None of this explains why Pistorius committed such a devastating crime, intentionally or otherwise, and is not meant to. My heart goes out to the family of Reeva Steenkamp: they and their late daughter are the only real victims of this tragedy.
But we can glimpse in the journey of Pistorius from modest young man to a volatile and often petulant superstar a cautionary tale that has occurred throughout history.
It is the honest chastisement of those around us that keep us on the straight and narrow.
Lucy Lawless
My Kiwi pal, who has never seen an episode of Xena, was watching the queue of autograph seekers at a fan convention. At first they are laughing and joshing at the back of the line. Then when they get to within four or five people from the table she said they become very still and focused on me.
By the time they get to the front they have worked themselves into a lather. Some dissolve into tears and can't speak.
My friend's jaw was on the ground. "What the hell do they see in you?" she asks. It's moments like these that reinforce the notion that fame is a phenomenon of other people. It cannot possibly be about the actors, most of whom are all too aware of the gulf between fan perception and reality.
The uberfan has attached to the actor an awesome mythology. Xena: Warrior Princess has an unusually fervent group of adherents. Its themes of inner strength, love and the potential for redemption have spurred many of these fans to free themselves from lives of torment.
I hear stories of escape from sexual abuse or battery and their stigma. I meet many gay people who found the courage to come out to their parents, or folk with health challenges who used the messages of strength to push through.
I am guessing that these people were primed to pull these messages out of the ether at the time they watched the show. What's incredible is that they acted upon those impulses. So really, the magic happened in them. I claim no responsibility for any of it but that's some kind of alchemy.
Face-lift makes you feel better
As Joan Rivers once said: 'I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I'd look like without plastic surgery'. Scientists have now at least partially answered her question - she would have looked less sociable, less likeable and possibly less trustworthy, too.
Having a facelift does not only make you look younger, research has claimed, it also changes the way in which people perceive you. Researchers showed before and after pictures of women who had undergone such surgery to 170 people. After viewing the pictures, participants were then asked to allocate scores for various personality traits, including social skills, trustworthiness and likeability.
'What we really wanted find out was, what are we accomplishing with facial plastic surgery?' said Michael Reilly, from Georgetown University Hospital in Washington DC. 'There's a huge industry in this. People are paying a lot of money to make themselves look different. Rather than just making people look different, what I really wanted for my patients was to be able to authentically tell l them, 'I can make you look better'.'
The pictures were drawn from a large pool, and researchers ensured that no one individual saw before and after pictures of the same person. Even so, they found there was a clear pattern of difference between how patients were rated after surgery.
Dr Reilly said he hoped that the work, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Facial Plastic Surgery, would change perceptions of his profession. 'I want this to alter the conversation around cosmetic surgery,' he said. 'People have a lot of strong opinions. This could give people who are anti-surgery pause - these are traits that people are judged by all the time, that have a strong effect on wellbeing. It is easy to say, 'Own your body, own yourself', and it's great if you feel that way. If people don't feel that way, they shouldn't be made to feel they are getting the devil's curse by going for surgery.'
The research is in some ways an extension of work that has shown considerable advantages accruing to more attractive people.
There is a tendency for people to project positive attributes on to physically beautiful people, who are, among other things, more likely to be promoted and do well in job interviews.
This is the first research to explicitly find a similar link in the effects of plastic surgery.
Beautiful Voices
BEAUTY is in the ears of the beholder: men can judge the attractiveness of a woman just by hearing her talk, according to scientists who have found that females with an attractive face also tend to have voices deemed appealing.
'People can make quite reliable guesses about women's facial attractiveness on the basis of their voices,' said Markus Koppensteiner, an anthropologist at Vienna University, who co-authored the research, published in a peer reviewed journal.
'Attractive voices may create an idea about what a woman will look like.'
The finding reverses the traditional jibe of 'having a face for radio' and could explain the visual appeal of radio broadcasters such as BBC Radio 1's Fearne Cotton and Annie Mac.
'It could explain why women who have made it [on radio] also have attractive faces,' said Koppensteiner.
For the study, he and his colleagues photographed the faces of 42 women before measuring their body symmetry and recording their voices.
One group of men then evaluated their looks and another their voices. The team found those rated highly for appearance also scored well for the way they sounded.
Previous research has suggested women also pay close attention to men's voices, preferring a deeper pitch because they associate it with a larger body size.
In evolutionary terms, this may have signalled desirable attributes that females were seeking in a mate, such as social dominance and masculinity.
Youthful Genes
SCIENTISTS believe they have identified a group of genes that allow some people to look far younger than their true age.
A project involving almost 1m people led by scientists at Harvard University and 23andMe, a private genetic database, found that 10% of white and 20% of black Americans carry the 'genetic recipe' for youthful skin.
The researchers believe its presence can result in people looking up to 10 years younger than they really are, potentially explaining the youthful appearance of celebrities such as the actress Halle Berry, 48, and the model Iman, 59, the wife of the musician David Bowie.
Some of the findings are being presented this week at the World Congress of Dermatology in Vancouver, Canada. More details will appear in a series of publications, including the International Journal of Dermatology, later this year.
The findings include details of specific versions of genes from among 2,100 that age and repair the skin, which have been identified by the teams from Harvard and 23andMe and are carried by people who age exceptionally well.
The genes, according to the researchers, fit into seven categories that govern functions such as DNA repair, the maintenance of the junctions between skin cells, and the performance of the skin's barrier against damaging environmental factors.
Another category covers the production of elements in the skin called lamellar bodies that produce lipids, molecules containing fats, waxes and nutrients that help to keep the skin moist.
The researchers have been collaborating with scientists at Procter & Gamble (P&G), the cosmetics giant that has funded their work. Nine other academic institutions are also involved.
With sales of facial skincare products estimated by Mintel, the market research firm, to be worth more than £1bn a year in the UK, the potential rewards from identifying an effective way to maintain youthful skin are enormous. P&G already produces Olay, a skincare line worth an estimated £2bn a year globally.
Rosemarie Osborne, a senior research fellow in P&G's beauty technology division in Cincinnati, Ohio, said: 'We expect that anti-ageing skinare regimes will become increasingly tailored to individual gene profile, leading to personalised skincare, in the same vein as personalised medicine. 'Ultimately, anti-ageing treatments may include tablets. I can't see them replacing creams, but it is possible.'
Alexa Kimball, professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School and a member of one of the research teams, said: 'Many of us felt that people with darker skin aged better because of more pigment and better photo [sunlight] protection, but we have found there is much more to it than that. They have other characteristics in their skin which confer good ageing, which until now we had no idea about.'
As well as spawning a multibillion-pound cosmetics industry, the search for youthful looks has resulted in soaring use of Botox, which temporarily paralyses facial muscles, and dermal fillers.
The actress Felicity Kendal, 68, best known for her role in the BBC sitcom The Good Life, was among those who used Botox, but photographs taken last week show that, after she discontinued its use from 2010, wrinkles have appeared.
The notion that black skin ages better than white skin is not new. Chris Griffiths, professor of dermatology at Manchester University, has shown that the extracellular matrix, a spongy material between skin cells, retains a better structure among black people.
However, Emily Conley, a spokeswoman for 23andMe, warned black people against assuming their skin would age slowly. 'We have found that many people who identify themselves as ethnically black often have mostly European DNA,' she said.
Only Sevens Get Ahead
In the summer of 2014, a new, very attractive face appeared on the location-based dating app, Tinder. Her name was Amanda. Amanda had silky brown hair and was, frankly, downright gorgeous. Soon, men far across the land were bombarding her with messages (Amanda herself had a thing for boys in finance and Silicon Valley tech-heads).
The three or four-line 'conversations' would usually follow the same pattern: some chitchat, then Amanda would get on to her favourite subject – reading. She was hooked on a fictional series she was reading online called The Underwriting. It was, she would say, like watching The Sopranos or Mad Men - that-s how addictive it was. 'When can I meet you?' her suitors would start asking her, plaintively. But then Amanda would break off all contact. The more aggrieved of her admirers sent her vile messages of reproach. They felt they had been duped.
And, frankly, they had. But not by Amanda. They'd been duped by another woman altogether. Her name is Michelle Miller.
Amanda exists only as a fictional character - fleetingly on Tinder, in 2014, and, for a relatively long time before that, only in the mind of Michelle Miller (it had been Miller who had set up Amanda's fake Tinder avatar, using a photograph of the best-looking model she could find in a stock library).
In 2006, at the age of 21, Miller had graduated from Stanford with an English degree. Like many ambitious arts graduates, however, given the favourable career prospects in finance, she changed course, hooked a couple of top jobs in consultancy firms and travelled all over the world doing them. She then returned to Stanford and graduated with a business MBA in 2011, three years after the financial crisis and just before Facebook went public, minting the world’s first generation of nerd millionaires.
More than 200 tech-heads - most of them men - pocketed at least $20 million each. When, MBA in hand, Miller was offered a position at JP Morgan as a private wealth manager, it became her job to advise the newly minted young nerds, who were awkward around women, she noticed, on their spare cash. She noticed other things, too, not without some amusement: the huge amount of sex, sexual tension, sexual harassment and sexual discrimination that was going down in these interlocked yet competing worlds of savvy hi-tech and macho finance. She noticed how the alpha young men on Wall Street, some of whom she dated and whose hot/cold behaviour always ended up tediously dominating the neurotically charged girl-chat of even the savviest single women she knew, seemed to operate from a unique mindset.
She made a video about it, How to Think Like a Man: shut down 80 per cent of your brain, devote half of what's left over to sex.
She noticed how geeks passed themselves off as nerds and how both geeks and nerds had so many hang-ups about women, which they'd had since puberty, that they were very unlikely to hire any. She noticed how, if you wanted to get ahead in the corporate world, especially in hi-tech, looks weren't just an asset but a necessity - unless you were a man, in which case you could be as fat or as spotty or as weird as you liked.
Miller judges herself to be a 'seven out of ten'. If she'd been further down the scale (not attractive enough) or much higher (too attractive), she doubts she would have even made it through the door at business school, where all the other women, she noticed, were sevens, too - a trend that she saw continue in corporate life. And she noticed how even the sevens, herself included, would become blander and blander, setting aside excessive amounts of headspace and time for self-beautification, working out at the gym, wearing exactly the right calibre of attractive-without-being-intimidating facial expressions in their drive to fit into a mould unconsciously prescribed by their male colleagues.
They were, for the most part, unpalatable, unsayable thoughts for the post-feminist age of hi-tech, somewhat still bruised in parts by the economic crash. 'I became more and more convinced that fiction can explain things better than nonfiction can. I wanted to create conversations that need to be had.' The short version of what happened nextis that Miller left JP Morgan, having raised $160,000 in venture capital to write an online novel. She came to London and wrote it. When she launched it on her website on a subscription-only basis, it went viral.
Miller did all this sitting over lattes in various cafes in Islington. Today, she is in another cafe, in south London, on the other side of her phenomenal, self-willed and self-orchestrated publishing success. She's over here from New York on her book tour. She easily paid back the $160,000 loan when a publisher bought the rights (in book form) to her first two novels for well above that amount. Tomorrow she's going to Amsterdam. The Underwriting is being translated by people of all nationalities around Europe. Miller has sold the TV rights, too.
The first thing I notice about her is that she doesn't look how tradition holds that even a semi-popular novelist should look, which is dowdy and introverted and probably a bit moth-eaten. She's 30 and, if you are the kind of person who can bring themselves to do things like rank women out of ten for attractiveness, you'd probably agree with Miller that she qualifies as a seven, with the kind of face and body that JP Morgan would have no problem slotting into a client-facing role. Confusingly, Miller doesn't act how I always imagined a Silicon Valley wealth manager would act, which is brash, ego-driven and intelligent, but also slightly dim.
Instead, she is an extremely considered person, almost wise, with an intelligence that runs the gamut of left and right brain. She is funny, but also very serious and calm. 'Someone,' she tells me, 'commented on my book being very juvenile in its assessment of how people relate to each other, how obsessed my book is with whether you were in the right frat at college. But I feel that, in San Francisco, it's still about these social dynamics that existed, not even in university but in high school - it's the frat boys against the nerds.'
I am interested in her seven theory. It's the kind of thing you really hope against hope isn't true. She's written an article about it online, and not everyone liked what it said.
'I first started playing around with the idea in business school,' she says. 'There, you study successful people and try to work out why they're successful. All the women we were studying were so different from each other, and their advice was so contradictory: you must have a spouse because the spouse will support you; you must not have a spouse because a spouse gets in the way; wait to have kids; no, have kids early. It was just so confusing. And so I started looking at what common threads there were between all these successful women. The one thing that showed through very clearly was that they were all attractive, but they weren’t gorgeous. I started looking at my business-school class and realised that all the women were pretty seven-ish, while the men ran the gamut.'
I find this rather depressing. I'm a bit shocked by her seven theory, I say. And the weeding out of non-sevenish women begins at university admissions level?
'I actually think that's the most important stage because that's in your early twenties, where you are given opportunities or you aren't. The funny thing is, after I published the number-seven piece, I got a call from someone I knew from a high-powered consulting firm and he said, 'Oh my God, Michelle, this is so true. We just interviewed this girl and we didn't take her on because she was too hot. There was just no way we could work with her. She's just too attractive.' And I said, 'Did you tell her that was the reason?' And he said, 'No, we said it's just a very competitive year.'
'My heart just kind of ached for this girl. She thinks she's not good or smart or capable enough when, really, it's because the men decided she was too distracting or that she was a liability to the firm because clients may hit on her. And I think that's unfair because they're never told why.
'It's not as simple as discrimination any more. It's more nuanced, and that's why we're not getting anywhere. We're not willing to call that out. There is a lot of unconscious bias and it's an uncomfortable subject because it's not intentional. We have to talk about it.'
What's the difference between a nerd and a geek, I ask her. A nerd, she explains patiently, is one of those superbrains who is fixated with one thing. Being around a nerd is usually exhilarating because they're touched by genius and you learn so much. A geek is someone who may look like a nerd, who also works in hi-tech, but who is quite a mediocre person of average intelligence. That's why geeks often try to pass themselves off as nerds.
Whether they're nerds or geeks, 'When it comes to women and women's place, these men, who didn't talk to women at school during their formative adolescent years, either have a deep anger towards women or they're just not comfortable, because they're not used to being around women. Especially in the age of video games and porn, it's completely possible for these boys to shut off from women from age 11 or 12, when it's uncomfortable.'
How can you tell when a nerd or a geek is uncomfortable that you're female?
'Eye contact. The lack thereof. The energy. It's very hard to describe. When you're sitting across from someone and they're just not comfortable in your presence, you can feel it. Deferring to other men, sending emails about follow-up meetings only to their male colleagues. I don't think it's an intentionally malicious thing. I think it's a comfort level.
'If you're living in Silicon Valley and you have a fast-moving, competitive environment, and an investor looks at his star engineer and he doesn't want to risk him not doing his best because there's a girl in the room and the girl makes him nervous - the investors don't insist on having women in the room, and that's what I mean. On Wall Street, at least, there are processes in place. You do have to include women. There are rules now. Silicon Valley doesn't have rules, so the default becomes one that isn't favourable to women.'
I'm looking at Miller, thinking about something else now: how can a single individual create a multiplatform publishing phenomenon from a cafe in Islington? (She has six other - top secret - related projects on the go.) She says she just likes experimenting. For example, in 2013, she anonymously wrote a four-part opinion piece about how impossible it was for women to get a decent boyfriend in San Francisco because all the single men were geeks. 'I wanted to see if I could make something go viral. I sent it to four people and it blew up two weeks later.'
At JP Morgan, she began to feel something was missing. She took a creative-writing class on the side. 'Even though I had an English degree, I wasn't reading novels any more, and I wasn't reading novels any more because I spent 12 hours in the office every day. We would be reading all day long, but we would be reading what was on our browser and whatever was available online. I missed fiction and that experience. So the original concept was: can you put fiction into the workplace? Fiction to read in your lunch hour, instead of another blog post.'
The more I talk to Miller, the less I can imagine her as one of the smiley but bland corporate sevens in finance. Has she changed much since she left? Completely, she says. Did she do the five-year plan thing, I ask. 'I used to be obsessed with it until it all went wrong,' she says. 'I was supposed to be married with a child 18 months from now. I don't think that's going to happen.'
She says she's much happier now and that her new life is hugely liberating. What was she like in her former life? 'It was all about what other people had done. That really shuts you off from your potential because, in order to be successful, you must be married by this age or have children by this age, and then you realise life is completely unpredictable. Why waste that energy? Women feel very insecure about the choices they make. But they're just trade-offs. And that's why I think we need to get away from this tendency. Rather than ask, 'What am I supposed to do?', focus instead on, 'What do I really want?' And, say, 'All right, if this is what I really want, there are trade-offs.'
Miller is currently single. There's no way she's going to put herself on Tinder now, I think. 'I'm on Hitch,' she says - it's another dating app. Some of the men she meets on Hitch, she says, know who she is. Only half-jokingly, they ask her if she's going to put them in her next book. Going full circle again, it's not impossible that, last year, one or two of Miller's current prospects were duped by a nonexistent woman called Amanda.
The power of seven. By Michelle Miller
The key to being a successful woman in today's business environment? You need to be a seven out of ten on the attractiveness scale. A woman should strive to be ugly in middle school, so that, unable to rely on her looks for attention, she's forced to develop a brain and a personality, and then become attractive enough to be noticed, but not so attractive that her accomplishments are undermined.
For the most part, women in business aren't discriminated against any more. CERTAIN KINDS of women are discriminated against. Unattractive women, for example, who are either forgotten or ignored, and really hot women, who are either treated like a liability or have all of their accomplishments diminished ('She only got the promotion because he wants to sleep with her').
Think back to your consulting/banking/law firm analyst class. The girl with frizzy hair and glasses? She's back-office now, crunching numbers on account of not having 'good client-facing skills'. How about the hot blonde everyone wanted to sleep with? She got bumped to a role where her power over men and threat to women have been successfully contained.
Now think about the girl in the class who's getting ahead. You like her, right? She's the kind of girl you're neither embarrassed to be associated with, nor intimidated to talk to. She doesn't get caught up in office gossip because she's neither insecure enough to deliver it, nor hot enough to be the target of jealous attack. Clients and colleagues make enough passes at her to keep her feeling flattered, but not so many that managing the attention takes up all her time. When she talks, people aren't distracted by the thought of what she's like in bed, and so they listen to what she says. Bosses like her because she's a seven.
So, when the women-in-business quota needs to be filled, the sevens take it, and the world moves happily along, embracing our progress towards gender equality, ignoring the reality that half our gender are being left behind because everyone's too afraid to acknowledge the ugly (or hot?) elephant in the room.
My advice? Recognise that we're in a flawed system that has undercurrents of unconscious bias, but rather than accept that as some 'natural' state to which we must adapt, point out its absurdity and challenge the system to evolve.
7 Lies Celebs Tell
It's official: Kate Winslet is, in case you missed it, the most annoying celebrity of the moment. Back in February, we had the gushy acceptance speech. Now she's gone and done it again with the I'm so working-class, me comments. Truth is, though, Kate is no more prone to gaffes than her peers. A combination of wanting to be liked, wanting to be taken seriously, genuinely believing themselves to be chosen spokespeople for the world and just getting carried away with the sound of their own voices makes celebs - and actors, in particular - liable to say stuff that confirms they really are living on another planet. For example:
I always thought I was ugly All actors say they hate the way they look. Viz: I was so lanky; I had such a funny face. Claudia Schiffer, Uma Thurman, take your pick - they were all convinced they were hideous, and now they think they're fat. Only Kate Moss has the honesty to say she thought she looked cool on the day she was discovered in an airport.
I eat normally Yeah, right. Delve deeper and we discover this means they eat solids at least once a day, but no raw food after 4pm, and no carbs during the week, no red meat and no sugar. This is up there with I wouldn't rule out plastic surgery, in the future, meaning: I've had everything and I'll be getting more.
I have such a boring, normal life - you wouldn't believe it. Celebs say this the whole time. What they mean is that they have a TV, they know where the fridge is and they gave birth to their own children. Again, they forget they are talking to civilians. Probably they do have quite a normal life, as compared with Elton John or Michelle Obama, but it's not normal normal: they're not queuing up at Somerfield, are they, with packets of unethical chicken? They're not pressed up against a stranger's armpit on the Tube, trying not to get swine flu. (The extreme version of this is Kate's I am working-class, innit.)
It was so tough getting back in shape after the birth of Nectarine Or not, what with the personal trainer, the dietician, the Power Pilate machine in the dressing room, the yoga teacher and the membership of the club. Though probably it does seem tough compared with paying a surrogate - yes, we-re talking about you, SJP.
I have convictions and I want to make a difference Who can forget Sharon Stone's comment about karma after the earthquake in China? Or Naomi Campbell's so-called stand on fur?
I just throw on the first thing I find. But it's Lanvin. And it's a size eight. And you are tanned and buffed all over like a sponge finger. Don't you see that this is not the same as scrabbling under the chair for that Zara top that may or may not smell too beery from last night?
I never think of myself as famous. No. Not until you can't get the table reservation/seat on the plane/entry to the nightclub. You are famous, sweetie. And you'd be better off if you remembered the first rule of celebrity: don't believe your own hype. Just don't try to be like us. It's too late for that.
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson and his doctor tried desperately to keep the wolves of fame at bay. It destroyed both of them.
Michael Jackson's fans were - still are - especially fervent. He went out of his way to embrace the freaks and the outsiders and they gratefully reciprocated. But their slavish devotion didn't extend to wanting to know the truth about his life.
Jackson was under incredible pressure to deliver. He was expected to prove that he was the most athletic, balletic pop star and dancer the world had known - at 50 years old. Not even Nijinsky or Nureyev would have agreed a 50-date residency at that age. His fans expected him to live up to his Thriller video image. For ever. But he had created his greatest work 25 years before, literally half a lifetime ago.
Fans do not allow their stars to age. That wry comment in the entertainment world that dying young is a "good career move" is financially pretty sound. The image remains perpetually young and beautiful. No "circle of shame" photographs appear in magazines revealing the horrid imperfections that stylists cover up. The Jackson estate has more than wiped out his debts and earned $176 million in the first year since his death.
The trial of Conrad Murray for the involuntary manslaughter of MJ brought out details that I have no doubt pained the doctor. His patient's dead body was picked over with as much dignity as roadkill. Wrong as Murray was, no one seems in any doubt that he, too, was a fan. (You could reasonably point out that with a promised million-dollar annual fee, he would be a fan, wouldn't he?) Perhaps everyone knew Michael Jackson wore a wig, had extensive facial surgery, including a remodelled nose, and had a tattooed hairline - not in my view, for pure vanity, but to perpetuate his Peter Pan image. He was in a tough situation. Who can imagine what it's like when demand for tickets to your shows is so high that the number of dates grows from five to fifty? A million people were due to turn up to his concerts at the O2.
Almost every movie and music star states that, having craved fame, they would do almost anything to be rid of it. Check out Eminem's song Careful What You Wish For (look after him, please America!). But once you have done that legendary crossroads deal with the devil, as first laid out by the blues player Robert Johnson, it seems that there is no turning back.
You can't pick and choose between the advantages and disadvantages of triple A-list fame: the lack of privacy, the scrutiny, searing criticism and intrusion; the fear of attack by dangerous fanatics (see John Lennon and George Harrison); the disappointment when a trusted member of the inner circle blows the whistle; the growing paranoia about the motive of anyone who tries to make friends with you.
The result is loneliness and isolation. Not, of course, for every star - Elton John, whose personal life was once a train wreck, has turned it round, and is now the first person that many troubled stars turn to.
It struck me how unusually frank was the admission by the young American pop star Katy Perry, the embodiment of modern glamour, when she said: "I don't actually LOOK like this." Layers of eyelash extensions, fake tan, hair extensions, Botox, neck lifts, eyebrow plucking, skin lasering, lip plumping, body sculpting, teeth implants ... that is the painful business of being a global star.
The real person becomes lost under the huge weight of celebrity. The job involves punishingly long hours, lack of sleep, round after round of "promo" work, perky interviews on pre-dawn radio shows, fluttering eyelids poked by yet another make-up artist at each and every studio. Everyone wants to shake your hand, for you to scribble your name on their T-shirt, arm or belly. "Could you just?" "One more, for my brother." No artist can object.
These are the fans who buy the records, the tickets. I remember asking Lennon to sign an LP cover, and apologising for doing so.
"Don't worry," he said., "I used to ask for autographs outside Liverpool Empire." But later he pointed out rather bleakly that he had sacrificed his entire youth to help the Beatles to become the Four Most Famous People In the World.
So a star gives up the right to a personal life, to normal adult relationships, because, frankly, there isn't much time. Close relationships exist only with workmates - tour managers, fellow performers, publicists, record pluggers ... the trusted few who will not sell you out to the tabloids. (A confidentiality clause often stops that risk.) But this team, the star's "family", return to their off-duty lives, which is why the Big Names can find themselves alone when they most needs close friends.
As with so many US A-listers, at his most extreme hour there was no one to keep a sharp eye out for Michael Jackson. Kurt Cobain, who became the not-necessarily-willing voice of the grunge generation through Nirvana, committed suicide in his greenhouse after disappearing when a drug "intervention" misfired. He was 27.
Marilyn Monroe, the eternal epitome of glamour, and now the subject of a yet another new film, also died distraught and alone. She was 36.
The overzealous team around a star can unwittingly make them helpless and dependent. When a grown man or woman cannot use a washing machine, or pay their own electricity bill, their would-be helpers are not a force for good. To constantly tell your employer how wonderful, wicked, fabulous, talented ("what a lege . . .") they are, all the time, every day, is ultimately the ideal way to drive them totally delusional and off their rock star rocker.
Elvis Presley surrounded himself with a team of cronies who were paid to laugh at his jokes. There were hardly going to tell him that his diet of junk food and pills would kill him. Most likely he wouldn't have listened anyway. Elvis was, after all, the King, succeeded by Jackson, who was (briefly) married to Elvis's daughter, and was called the King of Pop. And he named his son Prince.
MJ was the ultimate Big Spender, ill advised - if properly advised financially at all. It was his fatal mistake to team up with a doctor who was also deeply in debt. Together they created an alchemy to cope with the circling wolves and demanding fans that ultimately brought about their mutual downfall. It was a tragedy, and it was almost inevitable.
Celebrity Marriages
The news that Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones have “taken a break” from their marriage comes as no surprise to those close to the couple — friends of theirs (and mine) who are amazed not by their separation, but that they managed to keep the marriage together for as long as they did.
Thirteen years of wedded bliss in show business equals about 150 years of marriage among regular people. The odds are never good when two strong narcissistic personalities who need and get a lot of unqualified love from audiences (without having to do any of their dishes), whose best friend is a mirror and for whom money is not a problem, pledge devotion to each other for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Most of the time, with celebrities, it just doesn’t work.
Michael met Catherine in 1998 when he was exhausted from his first marriage to Diandra Luker, a socialite 13 years his junior (he was 32, she was 19). They split after 17 years together.
Diandra bore an uncanny resemblance to his mother, Diana Love Dill, a socialite with ties to Bermuda aristocracy. Her husband, Michael’s father, Kirk Douglas, was one of the legendary swordsmen during the latter years of the golden age of Hollywood, proud of the notches on his, er, belt, which he bragged about extensively in his memoirs.
Michael’s desire to please his father, while at the same time needing to compete with him, led the younger Douglas into show business. While he was never able to match his father’s roster of great films, he did find a way to go head-to-head; Michael, too, had an insatiable desire to bed as many beautiful women as possible.
Michael’s sexual obsessions found their way into his best- remembered films, including Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, in which he played successful, but sexually flawed weak men easily seduced by deeply disturbed, sexually flawed women. Even his Oscar-winning turn in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was of a deeply flawed, successful man brought down by his greed — sexual as well as monetary. These are not great films but they registered high on the zeitgeist of the late 1980s.
Then, at the height of his career in 1998, 53-year-old Michael met the raven-haired, brown-eyed Catherine Zeta-Jones shortly after the Welsh-born actress, then 28, had starred in The Mask of Zorro, the Hollywood film that made her a star in America. They had separately attended the Deauville American film festival in northwest France.
According to his friend David Foster, when Michael first saw Catherine, “his eyeballs popped out of his head. Just whoomp.” Michael made it his business to meet her. His opening gambit was this charm-filled come-on: “I want to be the father of your children.” Without skipping a beat, a smiling Catherine replied: “I’ve heard a lot about you. It’s nice to know it’s all true. Good night.”
Nothing turns on a narcissist like overcoming rejection. Michael began a campaign of pursuit, beginning with a bouquet of roses delivered to her room the next day with a note of apology. Their romance kicked in soon after and Catherine made it official when she brought Michael with her to Edinburgh the next year for the world premiere of Entrapment, the film she made with Sean Connery (to whom she had been romantically linked).
Two months later Michael took Catherine to Beverly Hills to meet Kirk and his second wife (a German-born producer). Kirk was charmed by Catherine. The next day, when asked by the press if Michael was going to marry Catherine, the senior Douglas replied: “I would say that I would like to marry Catherine.”
Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones reportedly disagreed over the extravagance of their wedding in 2000 Douglas and Zeta-Jones at their wedding in 2000 (Joe Klamar/Lewis Whyld)) If Michael was a touch gun-shy about stepping back into the tender trap, Catherine let him know that she would settle for nothing less. At Christmas that year she took off for Wales sans Michael to spend the holiday with her parents.
At the last minute Michael flew to be by her side and the following week, on the night of the millennium New Year’s Eve, he proposed marriage and Catherine said yes.
There are some close to Michael who believe things began to go wrong as early as their wedding day. Michael, for whom this was a second marriage, is said to have preferred a quiet, dignified, private affair while Catherine wanted a wedding to rival Princess Diana’s — if not at St Paul’s Cathedral, then at New York’s grand Plaza hotel, a bash of Old World glamour cut with New World glitz.
Sure enough, it made them the latest It couple, the Liz and Dick of the new century.
Catherine later jokingly remarked that the best thing about the wedding was not the food, or the friends, or the entertainment, or even Michael himself, but the prenup. “I get taken care of very well,” she said on another occasion. Ah, romance!
When Cary Grant married his first wife, Virginia Cherrill, it is said that after they awakened on their wedding day he asked her what she was still doing there. What do you mean, she said, to which he replied: “Well, we were married. That’s where this film usually ends.”
This surely apocryphal story, especially in the case of celebrity marriages, has the ring of truth. Celebrities love courtship, especially one played out in public, the romance, the chase, the big day, the endless front-page pictures. But when it comes down to the day-to-day of post-wedding bliss, they fare less well, especially if the groom is advancing headlong into his Viagra years and the bride has lately become America’s newest sex goddess.
It is believed that Michael intensified his steady regimen of plastic surgery to maintain as much of his youthful appearance as he could, to please Catherine (and help him continue to get work — the same thing). They settled into lavish digs in New York, set about the task of raising a family and vowed never to let work separate them.
Yet when they both appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a 2000 film in which they have no scenes together, he shot his in Ohio and she shot hers in San Diego, California. They never worked together on a film after that.
In 2003 Catherine won an Oscar for her performance in Chicago and the competitive edge began to scratch the surface of their “perfect” marriage. In a scenario reminiscent of A Star Is Born, Michael’s career fell into a bit of a decline while hers soared. Her schedule necessitated their spending less and less time together.
In 2010 Michael, then 65, revealed he was suffering from stage 4 throat cancer, a condition usually terminal, and would undergo a difficult programme of chemotherapy treatments. Catherine had just finished appearing in a limited revival of A Little Night Music on Broadway. She was about to turn 41. After Michael’s announcement she took their two young children and left for a holiday in Bermuda.
Michael stayed behind alone. It was in reality a separation that never ended. It seemed that she struggled to deal with Michael’s illness, which aged him terribly and left him frail. It didn’t help when Michael, a former smoker, inexplicably claimed he had caught the disease by transmission via oral sex with women. Later he rather sheepishly added he didn’t mean from his wife.
As he slowly recuperated, Catherine spent an increasing amount of time in Wales and continental Europe, where she battled her own illness, an eruption of manic depression that may have been triggered by Michael’s illness.
His new frailty emphasised their age difference. And when he was well enough to work again he chose to make the bizarre TV-movie biopic of Liberace, Behind the Candelabra. To Catherine, seeing her husband prancing around and lusting after his co-star Matt Damon must have been an embarrassment. Would Sean Connery have taken such a role? As rumours flew of their troubles, denials, the surest form of confirmation, came not from them but from their representatives.
They have not been seen together in months. Catherine is said to be working on a film for Soderbergh, Michael on Tragic Indifference, in which he plays a lawyer suing the Ford motor company, based on a true story. Their lives go on, separated by duelling narcissism, creeping insecurity, ageing beauty, health concerns, real-life drama queens and playing drama queens in the movies. It’s another episode of that most familiar of front-page downfalls — the disintegration of the perfect celebrity marriage.
No Fatties For The Gays
It’s an idea so prevalent in the gay community that the hook-up app Grindr made it a commandment: No Fats.
Have you ever been told you’re too fat for Grindr? A recent study from the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity shows you’re not alone.
According to researchers Olivia Foster-Gimbel and Renee Engeln, one-third of the gay men they surveyed reported experiencing “anti-fat bias”—even among those who weren’t classified as overweight by the Body Mass Index. These forms of everyday discrimination most commonly included “rejection by potential romantic partners on the basis of weight.”
For instance, were a “fat” gay man to approach someone in a bar, Foster-Gimbel and Engeln found that there was a “greater likelihood that the overweight man would be blatantly ignored, treated rudely, or mocked behind his back” than a heterosexual male of the same size.
In the ’90s sitcom Will and Grace, there’s an old joke that men could be considered skinny by straight standards but labeled fat among their gay peers. Because it’s hard to speak with accuracy about the habits and preferences of an entire community, this is a generalization, but it’s one that is often true. Gay men face enormous pressure to fit into a very narrow view of beauty—often defined on hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff by the groups they leave out: “No Fats, No Femmes.”
These politics of exclusion leave many feeling left out of a community that, after coming out, they hoped would embrace them. In a BuzzFeed article from 2013, Louis Peitzman argued while the LGBT community might preach to its youth that “It Gets Better,” the message for plus-size queers isn’t so hopeful.
“I can tell you that when I lost 15 pounds due to depression, a well-meaning older gay man told me I had done the right thing,” he writes. “I can tell you that one person I tried to date helpfully offered, ‘You could be really attractive if you lost some weight.’”
While Peitzman says that the majority of these incidents amounted to concern trolling—hurtful comments disguised as life advice—others lacked even the veneer of friendliness. In an extreme example, Bruce, a 35-year-old man living in Chicago, was called a “fat pig” by another member of his gym. Bruce asked the gentleman out on a date, and after exchanging contact information, he received this message in his inbox:
I didn’t have the guts to tell you this at the gym but I won’t be going with you to see the Cubs. It’s not because I have a boyfriend or anything like that. It’s because I have a hard time respecting you. There’s really no kind way to say this so I’ll just come right out with it. You’re a fat pig. I’m not trying to judge you or anything, really. It’s just that I take care of my body and spend a lot of time focusing on my health. Just looking at you, I can tell you don’t. Yeah, you show up to workout but I’ve watched you and most of the time, all you do is cruise other guys. The worst part is that the men you seem to check out are way out of your league. Why would anybody be interested in you when you obviously don’t give a crap about yourself? Instead of trying to drum up conversations with me and other guys, you should spend more time losing the fat.
As Pace University professor Dr. Jason Whitesel writes in his 2014 book, Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma, queer men even have trouble finding community in gay subcultures that should act as informal support groups (e.g., bears or otters). Whitesel interviewed the members of Girth & Mirth, an international organization dedicated to celebrating “big men and their admirers,” and found that they had internalized a great deal of the bias that they’d experienced from outside the community.
Whitesel writes, “Some big men confessed that they want to dissociate themselves from other people who are fat, as if fatness were contagious.” This included a respondent who explained that his fat positivity had limits: He “drew the line at ‘super-chubs,’” despite the fact that he himself weighed 300 pounds. This phenomenon proved such an issue for Girth & Mirth that expanding membership has been difficult.
One member describes inviting attendees at a pride parade to march with the group. “[P]eople were offended,” he said. “Some people were just shocked we had identified them as one of us, and they didn’t want to be.”
If this fat shame is so pervasive, where does it come from?
According to blogger Virgie Tovar, it’s both a product of the larger cultural hang-ups around body image and masculinity itself. “Fatphobia in so many ways is about hating and policing women and our bodies, but what I’ve realized recently is that in some ways, the fatphobia that fat men experience is also a result of misogyny,” she writes.
To be overweight is, thus, to be considered simultaneously weak and feminine, so much so that the Grindr commandment against “fats and femmes” is almost always a package deal.
It’s not hard to find evidence of an explicit linkage between these two ideas. Back in 2012, Natasha Turner of The Dr. Oz Show—not exactly known for its scientific rigor—reported that “abdominal fat in men increases the conversion of testosterone into estrogen.” Turner continues, “As estrogen levels rise, so does the tendency to accumulate more abdominal fat, fueling the situation.”
For an even less scholarly view on the subject, check out this post on a Paleo forum:
I’ve come to view excess body fat as a kind of female secondary sex characteristic these days that certainly doesn’t do much to enhance the manliness of those males in possession of it. I encounter a lot of overweight or obese males who seem to view their girth as being mostly muscle, but it’s solely the result of sweets, sweetened beverages, breads, and other foods that seem to be more in what I at least associate with the female realm. You can’t really get fat from gnawing on carcasses and other manly eating practices.
These ideas are particularly harmful for gay men, many of whom might have grown up internalizing negative messages about queer people from a young age. Homophobia itself is rooted in misogyny: It’s bad to be gay, because having sex with men is something that a woman does.
As Simon Moritz explains in the Huffington Post, slurs like “fairy” and “sissy” have a dual meaning rooted in anti-gay and anti-woman bias: “They prize masculinity by demonizing femininity.”
While many gay men might grow up to question that gender essentialism and embrace living in the gray areas of gender expression (after all, a little eye shadow never hurt anyone), others might feel even more invested in traditional definitions of manhood. Who can blame them? Many queer youths spent their entire childhoods being bullied and shunned by their peer groups, and as adults, they crave what we all desire: a sense of belonging. They just want to finally fit in—any way they can.
If Gawker’s Brian Moylan suggests that need for acceptance breeds a culture of “fear”—where we’re worried we won’t be fit or attractive enough to get invited to the right party or the right bedroom—it’s also creates even more ostracizing. “This cycle of insecurity sets a nearly impossible beauty standard and sends a toxic message to queer men: If you don’t look a certain way, you don’t deserve to be loved,” Tovar argues.
The gay community’s toxic masculinity problem isn’t just an issue for those who are told they “need to lose a few pounds,” but everyone who is told that they don’t fit an unrealistic standard of physical perfection—including those who are too skinny, too short, or not white. After all, you can’t throw a rock on Grindr without hitting someone who doesn’t want to hook up with black guys or Asian men.
That beauty myth has proven incredibly harmful: If queer men shell out more money than any other population on getting fit, they also have the highest rate of eating disorders. Statistics from the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) show that while gays account for roughly 5 percent of the population, they represent 42 percent of men with a history of disordered eating.
As NEDA found, telling those men that being skinny and fit is the sole answer to their problems won’t help anyone. Instead, a truly affirming community is one that promotes acceptance. “A sense of connectedness to the gay community was related to fewer current eating disorders, which suggests that feeling connected to the gay community may have a protective effect against eating disorders” the organization writes.
For decades, feminists have been telling us exactly that. The solution to our image issues isn’t to create more stigma but to further a space for inclusion—that shows the beauty of a diverse range of body types and gender expressions. Rather than fostering a culture where everyone has to look the same to be beautiful, it’s about celebrating difference.
Gay men desperately need to champion our own body positivity movement, one that looks beyond tanned go-go boys and muscle beach bros. Sure, you can have a good body and an enlightened view of masculinity, and lots of people go to the gym for their own reasons.
There’s nothing wrong with being buff, but a great shirtless selfie shouldn’t be a prerequisite for feel like you’re man enough to belong.
Changing Idea of 'Notable' People
Richard Beeston, the distinguished foreign correspondent and former foreign editor of this newspaper who died in 2013, will be admitted to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography next year. Beeston will join Marie Colvin, the foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times killed in Syria in 2012, whose DNB entry was published last month.
A life commemorated in the DNB may be the highest distinction this nation can bestow, far more meaningful than medals and titles, and much longer-lasting. For the dictionary, started in 1884 by Virginia Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen, is our index of national character, an astonishingly ambitious attempt to collect together all the most notable people from our past, and which now runs to well over 62 million words.
Fame is fickle. Statues of worthy unknowns and blue plaques commemorating those longforgotten stand testament to the way that the definition of noteworthiness changes over time, leaving oncerevered figures marooned in the oxbows of history.
The DNB was revised and updated in 2004, and every year several hundred new entries are added, rigorously selected from among the long-overlooked and recently dead. Thus providing a fascinating insight into what is now considered memorable in our national life. Under Leslie Stephen, I suspect that neither Beeston nor Colvin would have made the cut: our former foreign editor probably died too young for full Victorian commemoration; Colvin was a woman, and both were journalists.
The original DNB was intended to collect every dead notable into one huge, alphabetical reference work. It was a massive undertaking, running to 63 tomes by the time it was completed in 1900: the equivalent French project is still stuck in midalphabet; the Italians gave up at “L”.
But it was partial, in every sense, and highly discriminating. Most of those admitted were clubbable, white males, with a preponderance of parsons, diplomats, colonial administrators and soldiers. Virginia Woolf complained that her father’s mighty book contained “no lives of maids” — this was not strictly true, but only about 5 per cent of the entries were women. The bias towards patriotic public servants was exacerbated by two world wars and the expansion of the state.
That rigid definition of what constitutes significance stands in stark contrast to the biographical riot that now exists on the internet, where every life is considered equally worthy of commemoration (or, more often, self-celebration) — where 15 minutes of fame or less can be parlayed instantly into a wiki entry that will last for ever, and may or may not be true. Establishing an evolving definition of noteworthiness, and ensuring accuracy, has never been more important, or harder.
The new DNB revised and vastly expanded the old one, winnowing down the more earnest entries, extending the definition of nationality to include foreigners who have had a profound impact on British life, and admitting categories of people under-represented in the Victorian version: far more business luminaries, inventors, sporting figures, rock stars, scientists, crooks, poets, the occasional eminent journalist and, above all, women.
Once available only in giant volumes, the dictionary can now be accessed online by anyone with a library card, while each batch of additional entrants offers a refinement of what it means to have made a contribution to our national history. Character, psychology and appearance now weigh as heavily in selection as formal public recognition.
With 11,500 contributors and 45 panels of expert selectors, the DNB editors lay particular emphasis on the great unknowns, people who may have spent a lifetime quietly but profoundly shaping our national life in more obscure fields, without ever emitting a self-puffing tweet. Much of the work involves excavating disregarded women from the past: between 25 and 30 per cent of the new entrants are female. Among those who died in 2012 and were admitted to the DNB this year are Clive Dunn of Dad’s Army, Davy Jones of the Monkees, Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser, and Jocky Wilson, the darts player.
Where once the DNB immortalised the great and the good, the new dictionary includes a far higher number of the infamous, eccentric and bad. Jimmy Savile’s waxwork in Madame Tussauds has been melted down, but he remains in the DNB, and rightly so. In the words of its editor, David Cannadine, the DNB should include “people of notability, whether malefactors or benefactors”.
The original DNB was conceived as a work of pure reference. Today’s is far more: it is a statement about national identity, and it attempts to establish where real value lies amid the blizzard of cheap celebrity culture. As a mirror to modern Britain, it reflects how much less concerned we are with those who rule us, and how much more interested in those who entertain, enlighten or appall us.
The first entry in the old DNB was Jacques Abbadie, an 18th-century pamphleteer who, “always relying upon a remarkable memory, put off writing until copy was demanded by the printer”. He had that in common with Richard Beeston who, like many of the best journalists, liked to file exactly on deadline. Much has changed in the criteria for admission to our compendium of national character, but the earliest entrant and one of the latest will, at least, have that in common.