In the year 1490, Leonardo da Vinci sketched the Vitruvian Man, his idea of a perfect human form. Being a man of math and science, it inscribed the ideal proportions of the body within a circle and a square, an analogy for the workings of the universe; and of course being a man, it was that of a man. A woman’s protruding bosoms and wide hip would not have fitted into da Vinci’s mathematical computation for a perfect body. So it goes that for much of written history, our view of beauty has been that of a man.
Some would argue that even in the animal kingdom, the males are those that exhibit beauty – the birds with the brightest feathers, the bucks with fiercest horns. Males are beautiful in order to attract females, in order to procreate. Though I would propose that if procreation is the end goal of beauty, it is the female body, however not flamboyant or fitting into a mathematical equation, that performs the final act.
Man looks to science to understand God. We’ve gazed into the galaxies, suns, and planets, and attempted, over and over again, to bring forth the grand theory to unify all that is nature. We marvel at the universe, at its mysteries, how life could endure against all odds. Life itself is beautiful.
It’s no surprise that we’ve attempted to explain our merits of beauty on the merits of life. The beautiful woman bears features that make her fit for procreation – youthful appearance calls for big eyes and full lips, ample chested, small waist-to-hip ratio, all for the promise to deliver and to nurture. Yet, if it were true, evolution would have made every female possess the same bodily characters. It would be a very boring situation indeed, but it would at the least fit into our crude understanding of nature. Women across the world continue to make babies and continue to deviate from our hypothesis. To explain the evolution of bodily features by adaptation to their environment is actually more persuasive than by procreation. Perhaps it is also a valid proposition that upon the merits of life, the merits of beauty are dependent upon survival?
Man looks to art to understand himself. In our quest to understand God, what we make – our faiths, our literatures, our engineering wonders – is more than ever a reflection of who we are. And we find beauty in those that we have painstakingly created from all that we’ve learned. Who hasn’t stood in awe in front of the Great Wall, next to the Pyramids, or under the Sistine Chapel? It is in art that we make our most dashing displays to woo each other, to please God, to satisfy our eternal search for nirvana.
Yet it is in art that we also witness the breathtaking diversity in our expression of the human soul. In art, we see that our view of beauty differs between cultures and genders, here and there, now and then. In fact, beauty ideals have changed throughout times across societies, and they have little alignments with the need to breed.
Have you come across someone so beautiful, yet their body follows no beauty standard? There is a light radiating from their eyes, the swing in their steps, the lines on their lips, all to make them somehow irresistible. Beauty ideals evolve because of them. They are the change makers; they turn the oddity into the beautiful. The true beauty that man can make is beauty from within.
One summer long ago, I found myself watching Charlie’s Angels over and over again, not for the story, but for Lucy Liu. I was feeling rather down and low; she was a sexy siren in that movie. Lucy Liu did not possess the beauty ideals, but if people found her beautiful, perhaps I could be beautiful too. Lately I find myself loving Sandra Oh. She was killing it in Killing Eve, but her off-the-chart confidence in The Chair makes her a hero. Perhaps women like Lucy Liu and Sandra Oh will make small frames, slanted eyes, and middle age be the new standard of beauty.
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