PEACOCKING
Darwinism is an essentially cruel mechanism. The notion that an animal – that is, each one of us – is handed, at the moment of conception, a random genetic assortment that will determine our fitness and, therefore, survival, doesn’t leave much room for those qualities we understand to be essentially human: perseverance, hope, inspiration, fidelity, industry, creativity, and love. So all the talk surrounding Richard O Prum’s book The Evolution of Beauty, about Darwin’s theory of aesthetic, clears the air.
The book proposes that beauty in animals – a perfectly symmetrical face, a strong musculature, an auspicious coloring – which has typically been thought to be an indicator of fitness, might have nothing to do with fitness at all, but with the mutable tastes of the beholder. And, in nature, as it often is with birds, it is the woman doing the choosing. Taken to its logical conclusion, then, women’s tastes are driving evolution, and male beauty exists simply so that women can have their fancy.
A hopeful corollary, for men, is that male beauty is not always fated genetically, but often performed. So birds sing, fly, dance, and make colorful and shapely nests, all of which are traits that make them beautiful to females. It’s a theory of beauty that’s at once dismal and forgiving. Dismal in that it values appearances (color, profile, proportion, spectacle) above other factors (character, strength), and permits women to choose mates for pleasure. Forgiving in that any male has the opportunity to give it a try, to put on a show, and to succeed beyond what has been coded for him in his genes. (It is also a powerful scientific argument for fashion, for both men and women.)
I had a kooky hippie-ish Health Education teacher in the seventh grade who, when describing puberty, told us that women became wide at the hips so that they could bear children, and men became wide at the shoulders because that made them more attractive to women. And that might be exactly right.
Photograph courtesy of Alexander McQueen. Spring 2008,
La Dame Bleue.