Social Matter

In the occidental world today, beauty is perhaps more concentrated than it has ever been anywhere in all of human history.  That is to say, large swaths of the most beautiful women, at the peak of their nubile physical allure and residual fertility, take pilgrimages to cities and universities which densely cluster their beauty for a select group of men.

For previous generations, especially before the last century, beauty was much differently allocated.  Without urbanization and quick transportation, people mostly stayed put.  A well-reputed, successful man would pick from the handful of beautiful women in his town or village.  The uncharming loser might not see a naked girl his entire life.  The girl would yearn for the favor of the most attractive man she could grasp among the Dunbar-sized number of men in her town or immediately walkable social sphere.

Today, the winning man moves to a crowded city and has pick of the most beautiful women from all the small towns in his continent.  The loser who would have been previously anhedonic can have a perfect “10” perform his fantasy with unparalleled skill with just a mouse click.  The beautiful girl yearns for the favor of the most attractive man she can grasp among a large number of attractive men in her new city, who are constantly being replenished and recompared.

Besides easy travel and urbanized economic opportunity, a confluence of other factors amplify this trend.  Medicine has brought worry about sexually transmitted infections to nearly non-existent levels for normal heterosexual sex among people of the right demographic, there are numerous options to block fertility so that the passing on of genes doesn’t ruin the fun, and traditional morality that values virginity in females has been starkly depleted.  These factors work to ensure a steady supply of women will continue concentrating their beauty in the competitive sexual markets of elite cities.

But not so fast.  Blue-eyed blondes with heart shaped asses are not an infinite largesse bestowed upon us by a higher power.  We are all of woman borne, and if you understand heredity you understand that beautiful girls must, on average, have mothers that were also beautiful.  That is to say, to keep this current beauty spigot flowing the world needs beautiful women to have daughters.

And there’s the rub.

By some irony, the forces that concentrate beauty and prime it for sex also systematically decrease the fecundity of the most beautiful women.  The high volume, easy contraception sexual market seems to preordain the sexes for fruitless serial monogamy by preying on each sex’s unique weakness.  The women with newly unlimited choice delay locking themselves into one man for fear of missing out, the men with newly consequence-free sexual options happily prefer lustful romps to family formation.

At the same time, less attractive human groups whose contraceptive wishes are tainted by low future planning power are having their fertility subsidized above their resourcefulness, sometimes via direct means like welfare, free health care and “foreign aid”, and sometimes indirectly, like the decaying of any type of restraining moral code to model from their bettors.  Idiocracy is uglyocracy.

The result of this confluence of factors is simple:  The current amount of beauty is a bubble, it will pop, and the world will get uglier.  There are cynics who would say that with our government subsidized high carbohydrate diets and sluts with short hairdos and tattoos aplenty, the peak of our beauty bubble is already in our rearview mirror.  They may have a point.

So why does this even matter?  Well it would seem everyone would agree that female beauty is a great thing, at least on a superficial or instrumental level.  Men would readily agree.  Beautiful women would agree.  The only people who may not agree are bitter ugly women.  But I would caution the sensible civilization builders not to write off concern for the fate of female beauty as a purely hedonistic value.

I posit that female beauty matters on some deeper level.  Current civilization analysis focuses heavily on the characteristics of human groups, and for good reason: it is people who build civilizations.  Many things matter, such as IQ, empathy, ingroup identification, race, etc.  I see no reason why beauty should not be thrown in the mix as an important characteristic as well.

Consider this:  the existence of female beauty is so rare in the animal kingdom and even among human groups it is the exception to the rule.  It leads one to believe that civilization and beauty are interdependent, that each may be instrumental for the other’s existence.  Civilization may just be an exercise in allocating the scarce but highly incentivizing force of beauty.  The face of a fat slut will not launch a thousand ships.

This opens the door to some questions.  If female beauty is an anomaly in nature, how did it get here?  Why did it emerge in certain human groups?

That’s certainly up for debate but don’t expect your friendly neighborhood Anthropology department to explore it with a true open mind.  There’s hurt feelings and funding to worry about.  Being unconcerned with either, I’ll give it a go:  Thousands of winters of scarce, sparse prey and harsh terrain culled a significant percentage of men.  Lack of easy gathering opportunities neutered the production capacity of women, forcing them to depend on the remaining men for food sources.  As men could no longer resort to a fuck and chuck breeding strategy because their children wouldn’t survive in a dearth environment solely on the efforts of the mother, heavy male parental investment emerged as Darwin’s winning gene, keeping the oversupplied ratio of spermatazoa to ovum in deadly check.  As men invested heavily in their mates, they chose fewer of them.  Pressure laid on women to capture a man’s attention and sweat for a long time, not just for the three and half minutes needed to obtain his genes.  Geographic isolation prevented interbreeding with other races less adapted to beauty.

The ugly women went barren and beauty flourished.

But the pressures have been relieved.  Industrialization has provided abundance and economic opportunities for women.  Civic society has given the average western man no fear for his life.  We have too many men and women who don’t need them.

Of course, the elephant remains in the room, shitting on our hardwood floors: sexual success is no longer inextricably joined to reproduction.  With contraception, beauty is no longer adaptive.  A girl given great beauty by the grace of genetic chance will enjoy her ride on the tingly joysticks of the Financial District but her beauty can die with her if she contracepts or miscegnates.  Anyone who has seen the sausage being made will attest that absent biological pressures, the beauties do not necessarily possess other civilized virtues, such as femininity, chastity, and maternal instincts.  C’est la vie.

It is important not to get too histrionic about this.  After all, we are just biological beings responding to our incentives and proclivities.  Every generation has their evolutionary cross to bear, birth control may be ours.  By decoupling sex and reproduction, it is selecting for those who really want kids.  Will beauty survive?  We’ll have to wait and see.  Just as the baby boomers are maligned for squandering their economic inheritance, the Generation Xers and Millenials may be remembered as those who squandered the great beauty inheritance, lucky to be in the right place at the right time for maximum personal consumption with little regard towards its replenishment for future generations.

For now, pour out a little liquor for all the men who died while stalking reindeer on the Scandinavian tundra to produce favorable ratios for the men who made it back to camp.  For the plain women who died barren, unable to get the attention of a strong hunter.  For the harsh winters that kept women dependent on men and kept seed-spraying polygyny in check.  For the men who invested heavily in their young, and for the beautiful women who reached their zenith through childbirth.  This Bud’s for you.