This is my conversation with Science of Sex writer,
about the ever-morphing beauty standards. Carlyn can be found on Medium here. She wrote the book Fashion Rebels which can be found on Amazon here.I’ve always been fascinated by beauty standards. They’re strange, mesmerizing, and curious, but at the same time, they’re stifling, suffocating, and arbitrary. Beauty trends aren’t carefully concocted ideals, brewed up by the smartest brains around. Like grammar, they’re organic structures that freely flow from the human experience almost effortless.
Also like grammar, they’re inherently social. But they're technically more social than grammar—you only need two people to have a conversation and thus grammar, but you need three to have a beauty standard.
Jordan Peterson was “bullied” off Twitter last year, after he caused a firestorm by saying that plus-sized Sports Illustrated cover model Yumi Nu was “not beautiful” and that “no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”
Never mind the fact that “authoritarian tolerance” is a contradiction in terms, but the tweet understandably garnered a hellacious backlash—a lot of people find Yuma’s body type immensely attractive.
And that’s why beauty standards have always fascinated me. Never mind whiny little wieners like Jordan Paterson, why is it that one person finds her body type beautiful and another doesn’t? Why isn’t there a roadmap of human beauty? Is it because we’re all genetically different with different desires that match up with different traits? Is it social? What is it?
Several times during the interview I refer to an article I wrote about body types and what we were shown on magazine covers when I was young, especially in the 1990s.
That article is here for anyone who wants to read it.
Carlyn explains the ridiculousness of the Renaissance era fashions and we discuss various other trends through the lens of science, including whether beauty is fixed, touching briefly on the role of evolutionary psychology (neither of us are fans, both morally and scientifically), the sudden and surprising (yet totally predictable) rise of men’s body issues, and much more.
Carlyn has a lot to say about fashion, how it relates to both personal and social power, as well as political power. She has a very clear message for anyone curious about how beauty and fashion relate to their lives and what it has to say about them.
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The History of Beauty Standards With Carlyn Beccia