Umay baja gwapa? This is a question which has been asked from time immemorial. The cliché “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” reverberates yet society (or is it culture?) seems to dictate what is beautiful and what is not.
The Philippines is now alive as the Miss Universe pageant intensifies. Social media sites are full of screenshots from the ongoing preliminary rounds and people are so engaged in the dichotomy of gowns, national costumes and swimwear of the contestants. Which, anthropologists and social scientists might pose these questions: What is it with beauty pageants? What is beautiful? And what is the reason on the obsession for beauty?
The media is a dominant means for transmitting and reinforcing cultural beliefs and values and, while it might not be exclusively responsible for determining the standards for physical attractiveness, it makes escaping frequent exposure to these images and attitudes almost impossible. Advertising, in particular, creates a seductive and toxic mix of messages for men and women (Mahoney, 2018).
It is in media platforms where people see whitening products, makeup, clothes and many other cosmetics which promise a beautiful outcome once patronized. Society then depicts beauty as skinny waistlines, big muscles, tan skin, full lips, large breasts and six-pack abs; dismissing the fact that true beauty originates from the inside.
In Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession With Appearance Hurts Girls and Women, Northwestern University professor Renee Engeln calls this appearance-obsessed culture “beauty sick” — referring to “what happens when women’s emotional energy gets so bound up with what they see in the mirror that it becomes harder for them to see other aspects of their lives,” she writes.
The book indicts social and news media in helping to create beauty sickness by drawing on research and interviews with real-world girls and women. Engeln cites studies that show that women and girls who engage in social media report higher incidences of eating disorders, increased symptoms of depression, and more desire to have plastic surgery.
This is a classic example of allowing others or the media to define what is beautiful and what is not. And, what is the reason why Filipinos are so obsessed with beauty pageants? Is it a shallow, exploitative spectacle in an image-obsessed society?
"In the Philippine setting, pageants are an institution that will not fade away. Every sitio, barrio, barangay, local town and city holds and conducts its own beauty pageant yearly. It is part of our culture," Pawee Ventura, a pageant follower and frequent judge at international pageants, said in 2013.
"Our passion for beauty pageants could probably be traced back [to] the Spanish times. The traditional Santacruzan festival demands that the most beautiful lass in the barrio should be the Reina Elena. That in itself was a form of beauty pageant and that could be the roots of our love affair with beauty pageants," Ric Galvez, founder of leading pageant website Missosology.
But as international beauty contests evolved into redefining beauty, are Filipinos joining the bandwagon? Why was Miss Canada being bashed on social media due to her dark skin? Can they not see that the reigning Miss Universe is dark-skinned from South Africa? Is the colonial mindset brought about by the Spanish become genetically-embedded in our psyche that we limit our definition of beauty to the fair-skinned ones?
Today, marketing skin whiteners is more than just trying to appeal to Filipinos’ standards of beauty. For Filipinos, having a lighter complexion is desirable because it signifies social status, noble ancestry, and most significant, economic status. On television and film, there is also a disproportionate representation of people with whiter skin (Limos, 2019).
Human physical characteristics and their perception by the brain are under pressure by natural selection to optimize reproductive success. Men and women have different strategies to appear attractive and have different interests in identifying beauty in people. Nevertheless (Yarosh, 2019), men and women from all cultures agree on who is and who is not attractive, and throughout the world attractive people show greater acquisition of resources and greater reproductive success than others.
Studies agree that the key elements that go into the judgment are age and health, as well as symmetry, averageness, face and body proportions, facial color and texture. These elements are all Costly Signals of reproductive fitness because they are difficult to fake.
Faking it seems to be the objective of many these days. Besides, science and even Freud suggest that everything is all about reproduction. Probably, the obsession to beauty stems back to being attractive to be able to reproduce. Yet, can’t we all evolve and transcend?
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