Cheesecake
I was in a conversation recently that turned to some starlet or other—I don’t remember who—and Jen declared her to be really cute. Jen was surprised when I muttered lukewarm agreement: “If that doesn’t qualify as cute, you must have some really high standards!”
Well, yeah. For cheesecake starlets, I have extraordinarily high standards. Let me tell you why.
First, pop culture, whether movies, television, or pop music, selects very heavily for beauty. Reluctantly, some room is made for actual talent, but homely people, male or female, are pretty much doomed to remain in art films and indie labels. Not to knock George Clooney, but he gets to make blockbusters while Steve Buscemi gets to make art-house films, and the culture of beauty is far more demanding of women than of men. Sex sells, and the entertainment industry likes to sell. How many current starlets are household names? A few hundred? Out of a population of hundreds of millions, the ones we see stamped all over the magazine stand are literally one in a million, and there’s no shortage of young beauties to replace starlets who are treated as crones once they hit 35.
Second, stars are somewhat self-selecting for beauty, themselves. Knowing their careers depend on looking good, they tend to work harder at it than we do; it’s a professional requirement, rather than a personal vanity. Muscle-toning exercise, diet (reinforced by tabloid reports on how the diet is going), and cosmetic surgery are par for the course.
Third, once a starlet edges out in front of her million rivals into that big role, and even before, she’s given a lot of professional help in looking good. Studios employ full-time staffs of cosmeticians and hairdressers, producing what would be thousand-dollar (or more) makeup jobs out in the consumer market. Lighting and cameras are aimed for best effect. Depending on the venue, the starlet may get a do-over; she gets only one chance to deliver an Oscar speech, but she might get a half dozen takes in a movie, and thousands of shots for a magazine spread. We in the audience only get to see the best takes, of course.
And whatever shortcomings survive all that can still be massaged out with a bit of Photoshop. I’m not talking a little acne touchup or erasing an out-of place lock of hair, either; Photoshop is routinely employed to enlarge eyes, lengthen necks, flatten tummies—structural changes that may not exist together in any human. The images are literally unreal; the camera may not lie, but what we receive isn’t always what the camera has to say.
Under those circumstances, do I have high standards of beauty? You bet! Given all that, anything short of eye-popping gorgeous is an underachievement.
For ordinary humans, the kind we meet in daily life, my standards of human beauty are much more reasonable, and I pay attention to keeping them that way. We all should. If you’d like a little help maintaining some perspective, watch “Evolution,” a powerful short funded by Dove to do just that.