Every week (every other day?) I stumble upon a post / article / discussion about pressure on women to be pretty. And I keep hearing protests and disappointments - we don’t want the society to tell women how to look, women should feel good in their bodies and feel pretty any shapes they are. Bad pressure on women comes from the society, either meaning ‘man’ or ‘other women’ or ‘those horrible capitalist pigs selling us beaty products’. But does it really?
But why do we, women, care? Why feeling pretty is so important? Why can’t we just feel ugly and happy at the same time? And it has been going on for thousands of years!
Might that be, that we want to feel pretty, because we are programmed by our genes to want to look pretty?
Our daughters instantly pick up on the messages on how to be pretty. Anything that adds even tiny amount of cuteness (however measured) to a 5 year old sells incredibly fast.
We are programmed to care about our looks. In a direct way!
It seems like feeling pretty on its own could be a more primitive and basic instinct than caring about what other people think of us (or our looks). I would expect people living in complete isolation from other humans or within an artificially created society that does not discuss looks in any way (would not even have vocabulary for it), would still in some way develop a sense of being beautiful / not beautiful. And actively try to look beautiful! Not sure we could test it though...
But the sole fact that woman have this innate, intrinsic tendency that make them want to look beautiful, does not mean this is ‘good’ as it is ‘natural’.
As any other characteristic - eg. having low or high intelligence, having low or high empathy, it can have positive or negative impact on humanity. Would humanity be better as a a species if women did not care about how they look? What would happen if we take this away?
Would we stop growing in numbers as man would struggle to find women attractive and therefore we would have less sex?
Would women and men contribute more equally to very high skilled and competitive professions (like quantitative finance) because women would waste less time on beauty related things?
Would men become frustrated and unhappy and therefore less driven to compete for this high status professions (social points normally being related to have more sex would stop being so attractive as sex would become less alluring?)
