Body cultureHow to find yourself in the history of beauty

Imagine in the same room at the same time all the women which you have ever seen - from Marilyn Monroe to the casual passer-by and the Thai TV host. They have nothing in common except that they are all human. But the beauty industry and the history of art, which is still decided to comprehend through the eyes of a white European, strive to confuse maps and give a clear standard, which neither you nor even Angelina Jolie most likely do not meet. Why this is happening and where this ideal of unattainable beauty comes from is a big and important question. Beauty is a matter of taste: it equally confirms the choice of partners by friends and polar comments under photos of celebrities. But for an adequate relationship with your body, it is more important to find support in the present and the past: short (in your opinion) fingers and plump (in your opinion) thighs have already happened to someone on this planet, and this is not an insuperable drawback, but an important and necessary one. a particular biological type, habitat, lineage, and social group. And there is nothing better and clearer than the general history of art to gain this support.

Text: Alice Taiga

Why is it so difficult for people to take their bodies?

Hidden under clothes and functionally necessary every second of our life, the body is at the same time the most necessary and most rejected

Din of the main episodes in the mythology of corporeality is the story of the first pair of people on earth. From the Bible, we know that a man created in the image of God, and a woman carved out of a man’s rib to save him from loneliness, lived peacefully and happily until

succumbed to sinful temptation. At the same time, the subject of their reflection was nudity, the nakedness of their own bodies - and since then, the person has a constant desire to hide and hide his intimate essence, worrying about the judgmental glances thrown at him. Hidden under clothes and functionally necessary every second of our life, the body is at the same time the most necessary and most rejected: 80% of people are not able to look at themselves naked for long without grief, and 40% of people have sex without undressing completely, or only in the dark . It is not surprising that the body becomes an obsession, and its adoption is a complex process of awareness. Eating disorders, diet and fitness, professional sports, taboo body images, movement, sex, procreation and the choice of a partner are dictated by the way we treat our bodies and others. Selfies become the word of the year and only create hysteria: instagram filters easily raise our self-esteem, but a lack of likes knocks her back.

Pop culture also does not particularly help us to accept ourselves in its original form - for political and cultural reasons, the countries of the first world dictate the universal standard of beauty. A quick glance at the world map shows that 80 percent of the world's population is still beyond media awareness: we know very little about too large non-Western countries, small nations, sex of older people, transgender perceptions, the daily life of LGBT people and the sexuality of children. Documentary films about primitive tribes now living on earth outside of media reality hint that our obsession with body, clothing, and disguise "flaws" is a property of civilization: the body for primitive tribes is an important symbol and canvas for creativity, the epitome of the holiday, and one African woman in 40 years will not lament the saggy bosom, and the leader of the tribe - about gray temples.

We know in detail how powdered wigs gave way to the low-key luxury of the Empire, but we don’t represent the canons of beauty of a billion Chinese, the aesthetic values of Indian tribes, and we don’t see the difference between ethnic groups speaking Arabic. We do not know what 90 percent of the nationalities in Russia look like (ask any acquaintance to describe Mari, Yakuts, or Khanty) and what notions about beauty exist on minority reservations that remained in almost all modern societies. The history is written by the winners: while women in the inquisition Spain were shackled into belts and crinolines, in Latin America they made tattoos, multi-storey hairstyles and let their eyes down with Basma - but everyone knows about Spain, and only very curious people about Latin America.

That is why Picasso lost sleep after the exhibition of African masks in Paris, Matisse went to work in North Africa, and Gauguin, arriving in Tahiti, painted the locals more often than exotic landscapes and unknown flora and fauna. Even now, God willing, 50 pages out of 1000 pages will be given to volumes on the history of art of non-European and non-American art. Beauty standards are written in political history and always go hand in hand with cultural domination and submission. The political turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries led to the fact that we want to look more like girlfriends of American lumberjacks than French mademoiselle, and checkered shirts with jeans are sold as massively as silk and velvet were sold in the 19th century.

Beauty has always been in the eye of the beholder, and this man until the middle of the 20th century was a man - Guerilla Girls in one of his most famous works said that a woman can get into a museum only posing for a man nude. And although women artists existed in the Middle Ages and in the Enlightenment, female beauty was the object of a biased masculine gaze. Reflection in relation to gender, own body and the history of art appeared in aesthetics already at the beginning of the 20th century, so that we can see the whole canonical female beauty from the sculptures of Phidias to the aesthetic revolution of Manet - with masculine eyes. How can you adequately perceive your appearance, if for centuries you have been only an object of assessment - a big question. As a question, is it possible to trust the thousand-year-old stereotypes of a pale-skinned man who, all this time, uprooted everything that did not fit into his conception of the norm.

Antique ideal through the centuries

an adult is able to recognize beauty in 150 milliseconds, considering the proportions of the face with his eyes

The judgments about beauty in ancient Greece boiled down to the fact that beauty is a blessing, and more often it is also moral. "Beauty shone among all that was there; when we came here, we began to perceive its radiance more distinctly through the most distinct of

the senses of our body are eyesight, because it is the most acute of them, ”says Plato in“ Fedra. ”The fact that the glow of beauty has not faded since then confirms our subconscious trust in people who look good on us — Lukism, which is criticized along with racism and ageism. Nancy Etkoff's famous work "Survival of the Prettiest" is replete with examples of how more likeable candidates are given jobs, confirmed credits, overvalued on exams, and less jail time. So what makes up the beauty of the body? "The harmony of its parts with a certain nice color ", - Plato writes and sets the following parameters: the golden section, with a face width of 2/3 of its length and perfect symmetry between the left and right half.The complexion is certainly bright, because the democracy of Ancient Greece was based on the work of the swarthy population of North Africa and the southern islands with whom it was not appropriate for a noble citizen to be associated.

Even monthly babies confirm Plato's correctness: children watch with interest the symmetrical faces of handsome men and women, regardless of the appearance of their biological parents, and for 150 milliseconds an adult is able to recognize beauty by considering the proportions of his face. Face recognition has become an incredibly important condition for the survival of the human species, which is why instant face reading and assessment becomes our tool for orientation in the outside world. "All Chinese are the same person" is a consequence of this mechanism. Even in "The Good Wife" they said that one could not trust the testimony of a white woman against a black man - we have racial detectors that help us to unmistakably recognize only the representatives of our ethnic species. If we are not able to recognize the features of other races, then how can we fit them into our ideas of beauty?

Beauty as an area of politics in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

even in the Renaissance, beauty was spoken of exclusively as a feminine property, turning the weaker sex into a beautiful

Europe of the late Middle Ages absorbed ancient concepts of proportions, but crossed them with aggressive early Christian theology and changes in ethnic composition. Italy transferred to Europe the canons of the early Renaissance, taken from the same Roman latitudes.

Light skin, thick hair and a soft lush body were a guarantee of procreation and status acquisition for men. At the same time, male beauty as a subject of public discussion did not exist even in the Renaissance era - beauty was spoken of exclusively as a female characteristic, turning the weaker sex into the beautiful one. Influential Italian families acquire chroniclers and friendly philosophers who rewrite the chronicles of the ancient world and the Middle Ages - from the beautiful Cleopatra and Socrates to Joan of Arc and Richard the Lionheart: men and women are most often given qualities that are valued in the reality of Italy of the XV-XVI centuries, respectively, men's ardor, valor and courage - against female beauty, gentleness and refined manners.

When urban life was clearly separated from rural life, the dichotomy “slender and pale = beautiful” and “fat and dark = ugly” took shape: the rich inhabitants of Europe did not have the musculature of peasant women and townspeople for whom physical strength was a condition for survival. In the 17th century, a dense physique became synonymous with poverty and poor affluence: a commoners diet on cereals, bread and beans differed from the feeding of the nobility from game, vegetables and fruits (the diet of its time). Pale and fragile graceful noblewomen lived in enclosed areas, wore sun masks during day walks (sanskrins) and due to the lack of muscular loads were creatures with a completely different body structure than stocky commoners with a strong tan. Few people, except Durer, talk about universal types of female beauty, but he also in his categories does not avoid clear characteristics: “rustic” and “slim” are two different types of beauty, but still with the same proportions - 7 units in the waist 10 in the chest and thighs.

To regulate women's appearance, other, sometimes dubious criteria were used: a woman whose temperature is on average half a degree less than that of a man, in philosophy and medicine is assigned a cold and wet type as opposed to a dry and hot male. From these established bodily properties, a code of conduct followed: weakness and slight pallor were considered a condition of attractiveness recognized by society. It is also curious that a woman until the XVII century existed in aesthetics only by its upper half. The half-length portraits are much larger than the full-length frontal portraits: the legs and buttocks were a stand that ensured the smooth movement of the female bust in space, and the Renaissance girl was bending, according to the

anatomists, even worse than the first Barbie. In the 17th century, with the strengthening of the female monarchy and the birth of the court theater, the behavior and movement of a woman became as important as the upper part of her body. For the first time in historical testimonies appear words describing the waist in a hundred different epithets, remarks appear in memories regarding height, posture and mimicry, about which women, who were previously living sculptures with a barely moving head, could not even guess. The woman draws attention not only to natural data, but also expression: gradually, beauty is beginning to be associated with a sense of humor and reactions, and in the diaries of the nobles it is said about the habits and habits of queens and favorites.

As for the improvements in appearance, the church did not officially endorse the use of cosmetics. Beauty should be natural, as it is a gift from God, but with its own reservations: “If blush serves a good purpose, for example, to get married, there is no sin in them”. Renaissance girls used cosmetics mercilessly not only for marriage: the Renaissance became the first beauty-era with the advent of the cosmetics market, designed for both the income of an aristocratic woman and a penny laundress. Beauty, having become a serious public elevator for a woman, required investments, and the main desire was to emphasize its natural features (bright decorative cosmetics was synonymous with prostitution) in combination with what we now call the luminous effect. On the distribution of nitrates, lead and mercury in cosmetics of that time can be found in the diaries of courtesans and court ladies: without fear of ulcers and damage to the skin, which can not be compared with the annual dose of parabens and sulfates, the girl of the XVI century mercilessly poured solutions for changing their colors and rubbed poisonous compounds to preserve youth.

How female beauty gets not only an image, but also a language

comprehending the laws of the universe through physics and exact sciences, people are looking for new words to describe the overwhelming feelings

Scripture of female beauty changes dramatically in the XVIII century - languages continue to evolve due to epithets and new nouns, society ceases to be hermetic, the previous Reformation eliminates the influence of the church, and people, learning the laws of the universe through physics and exact sciences, are looking for new words to describe

not explained by science overwhelming their senses. Another era of the Enlightenment is trying to find a justification for the irrational attraction of the sexes, and Descartes, in his discourses on love, pays tribute to the benefits of the passions that beauty can cause in a male character. Montesquieu emphasizes women's obsession with appearance at court: "There is nothing more serious than what is happening in the morning when a lady is going to work on her toilet." The personal diaries and the epistolary genre of the 18th century make beauty the subject of public discussion, memories and discussions: beauty is prepared through the influence it has on other people.

Besides the fact that a white European woman is in the center of attention, otherwise beauty is recognized as a relative phenomenon — you will not find two similar people in thousands of portraits of nobles of the 18th century or dedication to your loved ones. Painters are trying to fix the beautiful in its fleeting: flowing in the wind dress and scattered hairstyles take the beauty away from the demonstrative static, in the slumber of which she was always immersed. Sketches and graphic sketches of the time show that portraits begin to draw with a free line, starting from the anatomy of a particular person, rather than adjusting to the rules of the golden section, which already seems to be a revolution. Art historian Ernst Gombrich called it the dilemma of modern art: how to draw a person without a finished sample? Women, however, cannot escape from a passive role imposed by society. Even the progressive Rousseau writes about the feminine physicality: "Women are not created to run, they run away only to be overtaken." But society’s pressure on the female body in the form of painful belts and stiff corsets, chipping shoes and heavy fabrics is decreasing: the woman is associated with motherhood, and therefore should not suffer from men's tricks - she is advised to exercise tight body belts to replace her waist. walks, and proportions in clothes are finally approaching the natural.

The accelerating rhythm of life of a European woman

Women of the end of the XIX century increased in all areas except public policy

the uro-revolutions and the Napoleonic wars completely change the ethnic and class composition of the female society by the end of the 19th century: the European peoples mingle greatly and often migrate, and the aristocracy is joined by representatives of the bourgeoisie who are not inferior in wealth

urban middle class bureaucracy and commerce. In these dynamic new societies, every woman is placed in an extremely competitive environment, where beauty is her resource for market opportunities. If earlier the community, family and lineage controlled the fate of a woman, now the vanity fair of big cities could throw a lottery ticket even to an orphan. Fictional stories of Jane Eyre or Becky Sharp - not the most typical, but quite possible scenario of women's fate in the XVIII-XIX century. The role of women at the end of the XIX century has already increased in all areas except public policy - they were able to manage inheritance and property, get divorced and get parental rights, create businesses and as a result of a huge leap to remarry. But the high-ranking man was still the main reward for the fact that a woman got at the right time in the right place.

“Dexterity and flexibility are the first two advantages”, they write about Parisians in the XIX century, and it becomes clear that henceforth female competition in big cities will change the balance of power in understanding beauty. Baudelaire in the memories of Parisians actively uses the word "makeup" and focuses on coquetry as the main model of women's urban behavior. Cosmetic companies, for example, Guerlain, made super-profits from powder and blush, while there were demonstrations of suffragist women outside the window. Красоте не стесняются придавать и эротическое значение: Золя подробно описывает свою героиню Нану, при взгляде на которую у мужчин начинает замирать не только сердце, но и все, что ниже пояса. Движение женщины и ее походка становятся такой же обязательной чертой ее внешности, как и ее лицо - акцент в одежде наконец спускается ниже талии и переходит на бедра.

При этом красота все еще не должна быть дерзкой или посягать на мужскую сферу влияния - внешность революционерок остается за кадром мужского взгляда на женскую историю, хотя крестьянки и мещанки попадают в поле зрения художников. London of the 18th century, Paris of the 19th century, Manhattan of the first half of the 20th century - places where there is tacit competition for a place in the sun with very limited opportunities in income, education and the chances to independently influence your future. Beauty is first placed on the sacrificial altar of the dream of a family castle, which is replaced by the cherished Tiffany showcase, but the key to everything seems to be a good marriage. A woman before universal emancipation is difficult to resist the temptation and put on her beauty - even Eleanor Roosevelt to the question "What would you like to change in life?" replies: "I would like to be a little prettier."

Whatever the logical and correct history of the change of archetypes from antiquity to the avant-garde, the whole logic of the Eurocentric world view is divided on the twentieth century. Hermetic and understandable for their peoples and classes broke through to meet each other in times of wars and world crises, and it turned out that the parallel "third world" was not somewhere there, but very close, and never was the third. If standards are such an unequivocal thing, why does the size grid extend from XS to XXXXXXL, and we only see a zero size? Why does the wearing of the hijab move from a political debate to an aesthetic one and back again? Why do American women, having obtained political rights, spend more on cosmetics in the 21st century than on education and social services? Why, being a Russian Korean or an Indonesian black woman, is it so difficult to find a model to follow? And why do 20 percent of the world's female population suffer from nutritional stress? All this time very old and very young, people with disabilities and not like everyone else, very thick and very thin, whole nations and countries - and this superfluous, not fitting into ancient Greek canons, became so many that already the canons themselves do not seem so unshakable. However, Hollywood superstars, like 80 years ago, hypnotize us with their perfect smiles, and Russian men want women to prefer family to work. Has something changed or nothing has changed?