A while ago I read an post by Miss Model Behavior about having dinner across from Karolina Kurkova a Victoria’s Secret model. My first thought when looking at her picture and hearing that she was a lingerie model was, “wow, hot chick,” but something didn’t seem right. I did a google image search for her and then I started to become worried. I just didn’t think Karolina was that attractive. Don’t get me wrong, Karolina is pretty and she would definitely get a second glance if she walked by, but I just didn’t think that she was that “hot.”
The picture above is a good example. If you think of all the things that make a girl attractive, she seems to have them–smooth skin, lots of skin, pleasant smile, good hair, prominently displayed breasts… Yes, she meets all these criteria. No, I don’t feel that much attraction to her.
At this point I started to feel bad. Were my standards for beauty so impossibly high that not even one of the top models in the world could satisfy them? If I didn’t find this woman (selected for her beauty out of numerous other women) attractive, how could I be attracted to any normal woman? I knew that I was strange, but I worried that my abnormality far exceeded even my estimations.
After a week or so of feeling despondent and pondering this question, the answer struck me while I was walking to class. Maybe the more accurate way of phrasing it would be that the answer walked right in front of me. I noticed a very attractive girl walking around on campus. Then I noticed another. Then I realized that I had been noticing all of these girls all the time but had not connected them to my inner thoughts. The girls I was seeing were way more attractive to me than Karolina Kurkova, and they were just ordinary women.
My next line of thought was that maybe many of my ideas about beauty are false. I believe that beauty is a sign of perfection. In humans beauty is an indicator of how closely someone is to being perfectly healthy. Beauty can be faked, so not everything that seems beautiful is healthy, but everything that is healthy is beautiful. You do not have to teach yourself that something healthy is beautiful; you know it instinctively. People automatically notice beautiful objects without having any idea about whether they are perfect or not. Did my realization mean that beauty is not–relatively–quantifiable and exists only in the eyes of the beholder?
I quickly realized that this cannot be the case. If it were, any woman would have an equal probability of being considered beautiful by any man. If I were to grab all of the guys walking around on campus and survey them, they would probably choose mostly the same girls as being most attractive.
Many men may disagree with my opinion of Karolina Kurkova. They may even go so far as to say that she is one of the most attractive women around outside of a few other models, celebrities, or movie stars. I don’t think that they are lying, and I will address what I see as their error in a future post.
After more research and thought I have come to the conclusion that our standard for judging beauty is flawed. I will submit my evidence in a second future post and possibly submit some theories about how our definition of asthetic human beauty should be modified.
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