Mallory Mosner
6 min readSep 28, 2021

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I'm sure there are studies, but there are also plenty of studies that appear to corroborate open Nazi-style eugenics, so studies don't always cut it--in fact, I'd challenge you to consider the following factors in relation to both the studies you allude to as well as your own personal experience:

1. Babies who are used to seeing people who look like their own parents, especially their mothers and siblings or other trustworthy caretakers from the point of birth would obviously begin from that point internalizing safety as corresponding to "attraction" -- if for no other reason than "I am *attracted* to the provider of milk or safety" from an evolutionary standpoint. I highly doubt that all babies everywhere across all time and space would be most drawn to the face of Marilyn Monroe.

2. Regardless of whether you were specifically raised or born into a home that was more "exposed" in terms of television and glamour magazines, you still are internalizing information of all kinds all the time, directly and indirectly from your parents. The National Geographic style magazines that you may have been exposed to earlier than Barbie also reduce non-Western cultures and people into objects of fascination that are far away, usually poor and pitiable, and presented in dark, ominous colors that suggest they are "survivors" of sorts even if they are beautiful (like the famous cover photo of the Afghan woman from decades ago).

The very choice of your parents to avoid exposure to the types of media that you seem to suggest singularly teach the behaviors and preferences oriented to white supremacy and a mediated form of beauty are still existent in the intentional absence of these forms of media; babies are sponges and your parents, either due to moral distaste for media or fear that you would internalize norms and behaviors that they deemed harmful, had their own predispositions about the very norms we speak of, which were applied unto you whether or not you are aware of it. I have encountered precisely zero parents who don't talk to their babies from an infantile stage about their attractiveness (which is usually tied to a specific set of gender norms as well--e.g. you're so handsome, or you're so pretty, and then the administration of trucks or feminine toys when the time comes).

Believing things are "attractive" is not a bad thing; I'm not trying to belittle or do away with attractiveness in general here. I'm trying to get you to think deeper about what "beauty" even is. Is beauty about safety? Sexual desire? Admiration? Kindness? There are too many qualitative subjective factors here to apply any universalist definition of it anyway, even if the definition of which you speak sounds rooted in eugenics.

Epigenetics is another factor to consider in relation to how attractiveness is not innate, but carried generationally. This one adheres to both nature AND nurture, since if your parents deeply feared or aspired to a certain form of physicality, especially if it was based on traumatic experience (which, one could argue, the dramatic decision to raise you without any of those influences probably stems from a very deep distaste on their part of contemporary sexuality, desire, consumption and amorality, likely a result of their own insecurities, trauma and possibly religious underpinnings, which also can become deeply entrenched), then that would certainly show up on some level in your very DNA, and/or in your socialization, if for no other reason than as a reaction to the repression of outer world materialism/hypersexuality that they were most likely trying to prevent you from overindulging in at too early an age.

I'm not trying to say you're repressed in a bad way-- all of us experience repression in this society, some of us in different ways or worse than others. It is simply impossible that your parents didn't project onto you from the moment you were born all of the facets of attractiveness/normality/aspirational behavior and even their own conceptions of the best case for evolutionary survival (attractiveness, however you define it, exists across the animal kingdom and throughout Darwinism, albeit in far more subjective and broad forms than you have delineated here) because they presumably loved you and wanted you to succeed and survive.

3. Relatedly, also corresponding to the alleged tendency of babies to focus on "conventionally attractive" faces: babies are absolutely energetically in tune with a lot of fields that adults are not so attuned to. People who spend their lives living with the privilege of conventional attractiveness, and make no mistake, it is a privilege, because Western society and this one in particular are so vapid that opportunities of literally every kind open up for those who conform easier to the aspirational/celebrated norms, they develop a different energy. When you are given everything or most things on a platter, even if it's just that a disproportionate number of people had crushes on you throughout your life, people wanted to be your friend (even if it was just for social capital) or you were given more promotions and opportunities for leadership (because you make for a good "face" or maybe your boss had a crush on you) or sold things easier because sheep people who don't question conventionality trust you on a whim and you get more credit for that, you have an air of ease and joy about you that other people have to work much harder to achieve. It's in a way a self-sustaining cycle where people who randomly get more are happier, which then causes them to get more (and the same feedback loop often happens in reverse for people who are not conventionally accepted and lionized in this way.

That being said, there are tons of people in this world who do not adhere to the norms of conventional attractiveness that you have described--in fact, the vast majority of people do not. Evolutionarily speaking, if the eugenics perspective you have provided were true, all non-normative, non-conventionally attractive people would at some point die out. And yet, contrary to what you suggest, there are still many people attracted to disabled people, fat people, people with big noses, people with big foreheads and chins, people with small abnormal eyes, flat cheeks, round faces and so on.

What I find odd is how easily you apply a principle of design that often does work for *objects* to human beings. There's a big difference. Human beings are alive, and by every measure far more complex than static objects. It's honestly not a good comparison. A human face is the culmination and expression and continuous living, breathing, changing manifestation of so many things. A brand logo is hardly that; it's static and limited in its scope and its history or capacity for evolution, even if it's aesthetically pleasing.

Lastly, even if you didn't have a Barbie until you were 9, I can see what you look like. The fact that you have spent what sounds like most of your life entrenched in wellness and weightlifting/training tells me that your personality leans more visual/aesthetic/please don't take offense to this but superficially oriented to being perceived as attractive (even if that's also rooted in caring genuinely about health). If you had a mirror or a pond from the time you were little, it would stand to reason that you, like the majority of beings, experienced a sort of ethnocentrism where you saw people who looked like you or your parents as better and more attractive. And if you perceived on the rare occasion that you did interact with society outside of your what sounds like fairly removed or pastoral life, then you probably saw shiny people in expensive shiny clothes and like most children do, picked up on the air of admiration they receive from others guffawing around them at their greatness and beauty. It doesn't need to be so obvious as "THIS IS HOT YOU SHOULD WANT IT" there's an energy far more nuanced, and kids younger than toddlers pick up on it; it's part of how our survival brains are formed and how we understand what is the safest thing to model our behavior/sense of self/controllable aesthetics around in order to have a sense of control over the longevity and quality of our lives.

Again, I would ask you: why do you *need* a golden ratio to validate your conception of beauty? Why can't you just accept that this is a vast, complex topic, and that even if you do have an appreciation of beauty that usually adheres to white- and Western-centric standards, that you are entitled to that and it's your opinion, but that doesn't make it universal or superior? What is even the point of trying to simplify using pseudo-science material that ultimately only serves purposes that are primarily rooted in eugenics? Would it ever be possible to just let the relative be relative without needing to control it with a false definition?

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Mallory Mosner
Mallory Mosner

Written by Mallory Mosner

Queer non-binary (they/she) Jewish writer and Ayurvedic Health Counselor who loves puzzles, cats and meditation.

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