One experiment seems to support the idea that men and women mistake their own preferences for those of the opposite sex.
April Fallon and Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania showed four simple line drawings of male or female figures in swimsuits to nearly five hundred undergraduates. In each case the figures differed only in thinness: They asked the subjects to indicate their current figure, their ideal figure, the figure that they considered most attractive to the opposite sex, and the figure they thought most attractive in the opposite sex. Men 's current, ideal, and attractive figures were almost identical; men are, on average, content with their figures. Women, as expected, were far heavier than what they thought most attractive to men, which was heavier still than their own ideal. But intriguingly, both sexes erred in their estimation of what the other sex most likes. Men think women like a heavier build than they do; women think men like women thinner than they do:''
However, such confusions cannot be the whole explanation of why women follow fashion because it does not work for other features of attraction. Women are far more concerned with their own youth than men despite the fact that they mostly do not themselves seek younger partners.
And yet the notion that fashion is about status revolts us in a democratic age. We pretend instead that fashion is actually about showing off a body to best advantage. New fashions are worn by gorgeous models, and perhaps women buy them because they subconsciously credit the beauty to the dress and not the model.
Surveys reveal what everybody knows: Men are attracted by women in revealing, tight, or skimpy clothing; women are less attracted by such clothing on men. Most female fashions are more or less explicitly designed to enhance beauty; for example, a gigantic crinoline made a waist look small simply by contrast. A woman is careful THE USES OF BEAUTY
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to choose clothes that "suit" her particular figure or hair color.
Moreover, since most men grow up seeing women dressed and spend their critical periods seeing clothed women, their ideals of beauty include images of clothed women as well as naked ones.
Havelock Ellis recounted the story of a boy who, standing before a painting of the Judgment of Paris, was asked which goddess he thought was the most beautifuclass="underline" He replied: "I can't tell because they haven 't their clothes on: ""
But the most characteristic feature of fashion, today at least, is its obsession with novelty. We have already seen how Bell thinks this comes about, as the trendsetters try to escape their vul-gar imitators: Low thinks the key to women's fashion is novelty.
"Any conspicuous display which signals the ability to read fashion trends " is a clue to a woman's status. 38 Being the first in fashion is certainly a status symbol among women. Without the ability to induce constant obsolescence, fashion designers would be a lot less rich than they are.
This brings us back to the shifting sands of cultural standards of beauty. Beauty cannot be commonplace in a monogamous species like man; it must stand out: Men are discriminating because they will get the chance to marry only one or perhaps two women, so they are always interested in the best they can get, never in the ordinary. In a crowd of women all wearing black, the single one in red would surely catch the eye of a man, whatever her figure or face was like.
The very word fashion used to mean something between conformity and custom, where now it means novelty and modernity: Remarking on painful corsets and the hypocrisy of low necklines in a puritanical society, Quentin Bell observed: "The case against the fashion is always a strong one; why is it then that it never results in an effective verdict? Why is it that both public opinion and formal regulations are invariably set at nought, while sartorial custom, which consists in laws that are imposed without formal sanctions, is obeyed with wonderful docility, and this despite the fact that its laws are unreasonable, arbitrary, and not infrequently cruel.""
I am left feeling that this puzzle is, in the present state of
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The Red Quern
evolutionary and sociological thinking, insoluble. Fashion is change and obsolescence imposed on a pattern of tyrannical conformity.
Fashion is about status, and yet the sex that is obsessed with fashion is trying to impress the sex that cares least about status: THE FOLLY OF SEXUAL PERFECTIONISM
Whatever determines sexual attraction, the Red Queen is at work: If for most of human history beautiful women and dominant men had more children than their rivals—which they surely did because the dominant men chose beautiful wives, and together they lived off the toil of their rivals—then in each generation women became that little bit more beautiful and men that little bit more dominant: But their rivals did, too, being descendants of the same successful couples. So standards rose, too: A beautiful woman needed to shine still more brightly to stand out in the new firmament: And a dominant man needed to bully or scheme still more mercilessly to get his way. Our senses are easily dulled by the commonplace, however exceptional it may seem elsewhere or at other times: As Charles Darwin put it, "If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters in our women a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard. "'° This, incidentally, is as concise a statement as could be made for why eugenics would never work: A page later Darwin describes the Jollof tribe of West Africa, famous for the beauty of its women; it deliberately sold its ugly women into slavery. Such Nazi eugenics would indeed gradually raise the level of beauty in the tribe, but the men 's subjective standards of beauty would rise as fast: Since beauty is an entirely subjective concept, the Jollofs were doomed to perpetual disappointment:
The depressing part of Darwin 's insight is that it shows how beauty cannot exist without ugliness: Sexual selection, Red Queen—style, is inevitably a cause of dissatisfaction, vain striving, THE USES OF BEAUTY
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and misery to individuals. All people are always looking for greater beauty or handsomeness than they find around them. This brings up yet another paradox. It is all very well to say that men want to marry beautiful women and women want to marry rich and powerful men, but most of us never get the chance. Modern society is monogamous, so most of the beautiful women are married to dominant men already. What happens to Mr: and Ms. Average? They do not remain celibate; they settle for something second best. In black grouse the females are perfectionist, the males indiscriminate. In a monogamous human society, neither sex can afford to be either perfectionist or indiscriminate. Mr. Average chooses a plain woman, and Ms. Average chooses a wimp. They temper their idealist preferences with realism. People end up married to their equals in attractiveness: The homecoming queen marries the football hero; the nerd marries the girl in glasses; the man with mediocre prospects marries the woman with mediocre looks: So pervasive is this habit that exceptions stand out a mile: "What on earth can she see in him?" we ask of a model 's dull and unsuccessful husband, as if there must be some hidden clue to his worth that the rest of us have missed. "How did she manage to catch him? " we ask of a high-flying man married to an ugly woman.
The answer is that we each instinctively know our relative worth as surely as in Jane Austen's day people knew their place in the class system. Bruce Ellis showed how we manage this "assorta-tive mating " pattern: He gave each of thirty students a numbered card to stick on their foreheads. Each could now see the others '
numbers, but nobody knew his or her own: He told them to pair up with the highest number they could find. Immediately the person with 30 on her forehead was surrounded by a buzzing crowd, so she adjusted her expectations upward and refused to pair up with just anybody, settling eventually for somebody with a number in the high twenties: The person with number I, meanwhile, after trying to persuade number 30 of his worth, then lowered his sights and went progressively down the scale, steadily discovering his low status, until he ended up taking the first person who would accept him, probably number 2:4'