"Survival of the Prettiest"

(The Science of Beauty)
-by nancy etcoff
1999
A flawed, delightful read. Nancy attempts a comprehensive overview of the part beauty plays in humyn relations. Her main point, that the appreciation of beauty is natural, is well made. She offers cross-cultural and infant studies that leave little doubt that not only is beauty appreciation inevitable, it's also largely immutable (for the individual, not the species) - there are all sorts of automatic triggers we follow from birth to death, too many of them unfortunately a relic of an era when procreation was the primary goal of sexual interaction (in particular, the male pursuit of hyper-fertile females is a instinct that serves us poorly in a time when the vast majority of sexual interactions are recreational, not procreational).
Nancy's work serves as a rejoinder to those who have proposed that "beauty" is just a social construct used to oppress wimyn. While her point has merit, i rather think the truth lies between the two extremes - yes, our desire to BE beautiful and POSSESS beauty is natural, but our patriarchal society takes these tendencies and amplifies their worst aspects, to keep wimyn "in their place". Even though etcoff nods toward that reality, her dismissal of the "beauty myth" is more than just a marketing creation of her publishers (though that was a factor, no doubt).
She has occasional blind spots - for example, in writing about how men use less of their vocal range than wimyn, she encourages the reader to assume there is something natural about that, instead of just reflecting of a culture which discourages male emotional expression.
But the main flaw of this book is that it sometimes relies on personal polls as evidence, though there are few things more unreliable (or flat-out deceitful) than what people say about themselves.
When she confines herself to scientific evidence, her work is compelling and provocative. The best part is where she dives into our self-destructive cultural assumption that beauty equals goodness. And there are plenty of other gems. Three month-old infants prefer to gaze at faces that adults also find attractive, including from races they'd never seen. Wimyn are attracted to men who smell least like themselves...unless they're on the pill. And do you know why you prefer a mirror image of yourself, while your friends prefer a photo?
Throughout, etcoff's use of quotes and anecdotes is damn near perfect. Nonetheless, given the flaws and the fact that modern scientific discovery moves so quickly, one would be justified in reading only the wonderful concluding chapter. Etcoff's central contention is that instead of negating beauty as a means by which wimyn relate to the world, we need to incorporate it into a larger paradigm - the universe of smarts and character and independence. Even though the feminist/scientist part of me leans a little more strongly in the anti-beauty direction, her point is both considered and fair.