Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. The standards of feminine beauty have not changed for millennia. Symmetrical features, luminescent eyes, full lips, and luxuriant hair all express health, wealth, and well-being as well as being pleasing to a natural sense of geometrical order, and sexual appeal. There is little difference between the women painted by Leonardo and the most beautiful Hollywood actresses of today.
Such beauty has always assured success. All things considered, beautiful women are hired first, promoted first, married first, and sought after always. Beauty has been less important for men whose success and sexual appeal has come largely from professional ambition, family status, and wealth; but still, the tall, handsome man is always noticed, deferred to, and given the benefit of the doubt. While women may reasonably doubt these men’s fidelity, they are drawn to them. Male beauty implies good breeding, good nutrition, and good genes. It is a stand-in for the more easily assessable and practical qualities.
It is no surprise that the women portrayed in art – the women of Botticelli, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Ingres, and the sculptors of ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome – have been beautiful. The wives and courtesans of royalty, the aristocracy, and the socially prominent have been beautiful, and while kings like Henry VIII, desperate for an offspring, chose as much for fertility as for beauty as he continued to remain childless, most demanded only the most attractive.
It is also not surprising that the standards of female beauty in non-Western cultures which have in recent years emerged from poverty – India, China, and Korea – have become more universal, remarkably similar to those in the developed world. This is in part due to competition – It is understandable and normal for women in formerly poor countries, now rich, to emulate women in the West.
Feminism attempted to redefine beauty and change perspective from a purely male one to a female one. What men thought of women was irrelevant, said feminists. Every woman’s ‘beauty’ was relative to her and her alone; and that female value and worth had nothing whatsoever to do with looks or appearance.
This new perspective challenged the notion of essential beauty and challenged men’s authority at the same time. It was appealing to women not only because it gave them new authority, esteem, and privilege but because it marginalized the idea of physical beauty.
Or so feminists thought. Women today might be more self-aware, confident, ambitious, and powerful than ever before; but classic beauty has neither lost its appeal or place in popular culture.
Study after study have shown that beauty has benefits far beyond the bedroom. Attractive women and men are given preference in hiring. While supervisors may not admit it, a candidate with all the professional qualifications plus beauty, is more likely to get the job. Professor Shahani-Denning of Hofstra University has compiled the most important research on the subject.
The bias in favor of physically attractive people is robust, with attractive people being perceived as more sociable, happier and more successful than unattractive people. Attractiveness biases have been demonstrated in such different areas as teacher judgments of students, voter preferences for political candidates, and jury judgments in simulated trials.
Recently other researchers have investigated the “beauty is goodness” stereotype in U.S. films and found that attractive characters were portrayed more favorably than unattractive characters on multiple dimensions across a random sample drawn from five decades of top grossing films. The authors also found that participants watching a biased film (level of beauty and gender stereotyping) subsequently showed greater favoritism toward an attractive graduate school candidate than participants watching a less biased film. In the area of employment decision making, attractiveness also influences interviewers’ judgments of job applicants.
Beauty is a fact. It is a tradable commodity, a factor in natural selection, a variable in most social and commercial transactions, and the first and last thing we remember about people. It is no surprise at all that some of the most famous paintings and sculptures in history have been of women. Artists since Greek and Roman times saw a sublimity in the female form.
Donald Trump has long had wokeness in his sights, and has labeled the current movement that has attempted to reset the sexual compass to spin every which way, a ridiculous deformation of natural law, an insult, and the worst of the progressive agenda to turn America into a sexual side show.
That is but one side of the coin; the other is to restore millennia-old conceptions of women as the most alluring, attractive, impossibly seductive and timelessly beautiful of God's creation. However, men for decades since the advent of feminism have been told that there is no such thing as universal feminine beauty, and that physical appearance is but a chimera, a meaningless attribute, one which diverts the attention away from a woman's true value. The Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon returned, re-energized, and hyped from a thousand pulpits.
Men who subscribed to the progressive canon - women, gays, black people, and the environment - bought the feminist line and deferred to the neo-Stalinist rules of orderly behavior. No Means No, MeToo, and hands-off-unless-I-say-it's-OK.
These men's eyes turned to the ceiling when a beautiful woman walked in the elevator out of concerns for her privacy, her distinct womanhood, and to abide by the feminist rules of engagement. Comments on a woman's appearance were off limits regardless of the efforts she put into looking great. Workplaces were turned into sexless gulags, and a culture of morose sexual indifference was the rule.
At the same time women's magazines gave lie to this assumption. On cover after cover sexy women were everywhere, and headlines on how to get a man and how to keep him were prominent. How, these journals explained? Look great, look sexy, look inviting, and come on as women have done ever since Cleopatra.
Men's magazines, knowing that their readers, no matter how much they might profess feminist ideology, still went straight for the centerfold and kept it by their bedside. Neither side - women's magazines and men's - had changed one iota. Not only did they manage to survive in a censorious era, they thrived. Amidst the cant and sexual hyperbole in the marketplace, these magazines touted hot women.
Perhaps the most vivid distortion of natural selection was the American airline industry, now under obligation of federal law, purged their ranks of beautiful stewardesses and replaced them with any comer who could push a cart. Asian airlines - China Air, Singapore Airlines among them - knew that beautiful, young, attentive stewardesses were an essential part of their business and first class marketing plan. If given a a choice when flying from Singapore to Manila, what businessman would choose the dowdy, jelly-rolled, mussed women of United?
Donald Trump has made no bones about his love for beautiful women. He squired them, married them, and presided over beauty pageants which featured them. Pictures of him with beauty queens were used by the Left to try to expose him for the misogynist he was. He cared little for a woman's real worth, only her superficial beauty. He wanted to dominate, intimidate, cow, and bed women, nada mas. Beauty pageants were meat markets, slave auctions, shameful reprises of men's historic disdain for women.
Nonsense, said Trump. Whether his beautiful model wife, his daughter, or the sparkling, bejeweled arm candy he was always seen with, women were and would always be alluring, desirable, and objects of male sexual attention.
Now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, the sexual counter-revolution is at hand. Not only will the transgender parade be cancelled, the tough Bernal Heights girls sent back home, and Bay-to-Breakers gay boys returned to their barracks, but beautiful women will be everywhere in Republican Washington and beauty pageants organized from Bar Harbor to Spokane.
Like everything else in the progressive canon now seen for the presumptuousness it has always been and dismissed, the beauty-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder nonsense will be gone, dismissed, and left out forever. Men who have yearned for the likes of Charlize Theron, Jennifer Lawrence, and Scarlett Johansson for millennia, now can come out from under wraps - their interest is not prurient, salacious, or backward.
The days of the Emperor's New Clothes is finally over. Beauty pageants are back, and while it may take some doing, so will beautiful American airlines' stewardesses.
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