Examining Beauty Standards

Beauty is not as pressing a matter as ethics, but it must still be addressed if one wants a complete understanding of what can and cannot be known about values.  One can find an enormous variety of aesthetic beliefs and cultural standards, just as one can find numerous moral beliefs and cultural ideas about ethics.  A problem arises, though, when any one idea of beauty is elevated over others in a way that pressures all people to abide by it.

Since all perceptions of beauty are strictly subjective (though each aesthetic perception, of course, either represents or does not represent the actual beauty of a thing), there is no basis whatsoever for holding up one body type or clothing style as more beautiful than another.  Although one standard may represent actual beauty, no being with my limitations could ever know that a particular standard of beauty is correct.  Each person is left with their own aesthetic preferences.  There is a vacuum of certainty about which standard, if any, conforms to objective aesthetic truths.

Do men really need noticeable muscularity to be attractive?  Do women really have to forgo natural hair that grows on places like the legs to be attractive [1]?  Perhaps, but no one can prove that these things are objectively beautiful outside of their subjective perceptions, and other perceptions might contradict them.  Notice that both examples here often involve some degree of sexism when encountered in the public.  Male muscularity is largely encouraged, but female muscularity is sometimes frowned upon.  Male body hair is accepted in many cases where female body hair would not be.  The very way these beauty standards are implemented itself shows how utterly, inescapably arbitrary they are, since there is no logical basis for thinking muscularity or body hair more or less attractive on one gender.

Even if everyone agreed about aesthetics, of course, their consensus would not make them correct.  People certainly do not agree about aesthetics!  Brief conversations with multiple people demonstrate this.  But even if they did, absolutely nothing about aesthetic metaphysics or epistemology is known beyond what can be known already.  The perceptions are still subjective even if the perceptions are universally shared by all humans.

Beauty--and I mean actual beauty, not mere perceptions of it--is valuable in that it is good.  However, it is not obligatory to become as physically beautiful as possible.  People who care about other matters to the exclusion of emphasizing physical beauty should not be pressured to do otherwise.  In the same way, people who do not wish to conform to a society’s arbitrary beauty standard should not be pressured to do otherwise.