《文化对比阅读》(上) Unit 9--Beauty Standards 3. Asian Beauty vs. the American Standard.docVIP

Asian Beauty vs. the American Standard Unknown Beauty matters. Ask any Asian American who has spent hours in front of a mirror tormenting herself with the question “Am I beautiful?〞 Beauty is one of those things that’s easy to spot but hard to define. That’s why lazy thinkers of the past have gotten themselves off the hook with the breezy “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.〞 Copout. That old saw begs the question, why does Ms Beholder think I’m a total hottie and my pal has a great personality. The whys and wherefores of beauty aren’t any more difficult to understand than, say, organic chem or quantum mechanics. It’s a matter of applying the same analytical tools with the same rigor. What’s really going on when we perceive someone to be hot? How does Asian beauty rate against white beauty in American minds? Are our faces beautiful or merely exotic. These are the questions on our minds. All meaningful discussions begin with fundamentals. Let’s not confuse personal attraction with a society’s beauty standard. As an example, most guys at the office may fantasize about that certain marketing assistant but you may avoid her because she reminds you of a teacher who traumatized you in the third grade. That brings up a key concept: that beauty comprises both a physical base and a social overlay. For any given individual the social overlay plays a much bigger role than it does for society as a whole. In other words, even though a society’s beauty standards do incorporate a large social component, it tends to average out endlessly variable individual biases into a collective social overlay. So how do Asian beauties like Vivian Lai, Song Hye-kyo or Sonohara Yukino compare on the beauty scale against the likes of Kate Hudson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon? A Universal Beauty Standard Evolutionary psychologists have concluded that humans have an innate attraction to beautiful people. Various studies have produced some obvious conclusions: that lateral symmetr