 Survival of the Pretiest by Nancy Ektoff. I read this a few months ago, but both my personal and professional lives have been so hectic that only now am I getting around to doing a review. I took notes, however, so I don't think I forgot anything too important. It was written by Nancy Ektoff, a Harvard Medical School psychologist, and the book is several things. It's a discussion of historic attempts to quantify beauty. It's a discussion of how fashion works and other beauty markers work as signaling. It contains hilarious anecdotes about the extent to which people go to achieve beauty, and by far the most interesting. It presents a lot of raw data about beauty. It was a great read, funny, shocking, telling, and it teaches us a little bit about the world in which we live. I have two criticisms. First, I may have almost preferred the data without the book around it. That may be the geek in me talking, but yeah, just the data itself. What we know, what we think we know, and why we think we know it. The way the book is structured, it's actually not a very good reference book. It's hard to look stuff up. In my electronic version, there's no appendix that has a list of the research that was cited in the book. That was the best part for me, the data. Second criticism, not at all unexpected from a book authored by an academic, but it nods a little too hard to political correctness, and repeats, for example, the statistic about women earning 77 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. I think that statistic has been pretty exhaustively disproven at this point. There's a little bit of that, but it's easy to ignore. Let me just jump right in and talk about some of the funny things this book presented. The first thing the book does is that it establishes that beauty is a real thing. It's not some social construct. They do this by conducting a couple of heartbreaking experiments that involve babies. So babies who have no social, no cultural influence yet, or minimal cultural influence, they're from three to six months old. Researchers have consistently shown that three to six month old babies will look longer at attractive faces than unattractive faces. That's pretty heartbreaking. Now you may ask how do the researchers know which are the beautiful faces? Well, they just create, they do independent surveys. So the babies will look longer at faces that are generally considered beautiful, that are rated beautiful by just regular people, and they will look less at faces that are rated as ugly by just regular people. So the point is that beauty is a real thing for better or for worse. Now the real heartbreaking study was a look at mothers, and it compared the behavior among mothers who had attractive babies versus those who had ugly babies. The mothers whose babies were more likely to be rated as ugly spent less time holding them, and they reported higher difficulty and higher stress taking care of the child as compared to the mothers with beautiful babies. That's very, very, very sad. Mercifully, the mothers were never told that that's what was being measured. The researchers kind of told them something else instead of telling them, we think your kid is ugly, so we're going to measure how you react. Other data presented from the book, beautiful people were less patient, they were less willing to wait than ugly people. We also know that people assume that attractive people are better at almost everything. So any positive quality from intelligence to wealth to being good in bed to being good at your job, people will assume higher competence in beautiful people. In primitive cultures where there's a lot of disease, beauty tends to be even more important than in modern cultures, which are the ones that are usually accused of being materialistic and excessively committed to superficial things like beauty. In cultures where there's a lot of famine, or sometimes something supersedes beauty, for example, in cultures where there's a lot of famine, fatness, obesity becomes a status signal and people will gravitate towards that even though they will at the same time rate obesity as less attractive. The status signaling that happens in the culture will nevertheless make them choose obese people. Interestingly, average-looking people rate themselves as happier than beautiful people and there's no consensus as to why this is. There's a little bit of speculation that cause and effect is confused. So it's not the beauty that's making people unhappy, but it's the sort of discontentedness that's making people pursue beauty and pursue health and fashion and all these things more rigorously. There is a standard of beauty that transcends race. So beautiful people of any race will always be rated as beautiful, no matter who is doing the rating. Although the ratings are more consistent if people are rating their own race. So if Asians are rating Africans, they'll still pick the beautiful ones, but the cluster will be a little bit broader, whereas if Africans are rating Africans, it'll be a tighter grouping. If Mestidozo's are rating Mestizo, Asians rating Asians, Europeans rating Europeans, it'll just be a tighter cluster, but there is consistency when you do this between races. The book discusses historic attempts at measuring beauty, most of which were hopelessly flawed and laughably silly. One attempt from several hundred years ago involved face angles, and by this methodology, Greek statues had the greatest face angles followed by Europeans. That was interesting to me because I had no idea that old Greek statues were exaggerations of European faces, but in fact they are. When we do know a few consistent things about beauty, for example, symmetry is a big deal, because it's a sign of health that's consistently part of beauty. Thick shiny flowing hair is important. Something about the skin is important, and it wasn't clear if it was the fairness of color or the smoothness she was a little vague about that, maybe because of her bias towards political correctness. When it comes to describing beauty, this was interesting to me as a writer. Most people end up describing not the beauty, but the effect that it has on others. So when you're writing about a very beautiful person, you may stop writing about them and start writing about the reaction that everyone around them has or the feeling that everyone around them gets when this person enters the room, for example. It seems that averageness is attractive. So this came about in a very interesting way in the book. It was presented in an interesting way. There was some British researcher who compiled a bunch of photographs of psychopaths, people who'd been arrested in Britain for murder or other heinous crimes. This researcher did a blend of all their faces trying to capture some physical characteristic that was indicative of criminality, but what this researcher ended up doing was just creating a pretty handsome face. And as it turns out, that averageness is quite attractive. So if you blend the characteristics of a population, you'll find a pretty attractive face. And there's a lot to say about averageness. The book talks about another study about birds. This was a look at birds that get killed during severe windstorm. And birds with average length wings tend to die the least, whereas birds with wings that are a little shorter or a little longer tend to die more during windstorms. So you can intuit the appeal of averageness. You're safe if you represent the average. So average facial characteristics will always be beautiful. It'll never be extremely beautiful, however. And it seems that extreme beauty always comes from a lot of averageness with a single feature or a couple of features that are outliers. Okay, getting more specific. Men prefer youth. That's both true for gay men and straight men. Lesbians are neutral. And straight women on average prefer slightly older men. How important is beauty? Well, men value beauty much more than women do. And it's also becoming more important. In 1939, men rated beauty on a scale, how the importance of beauty on a scale of one to three, I guess in 1939, they used scales of three. But anyway, 1939, it was 1.5 out of three for men. And for women, it was 0.94 out of three. That was in 1939. 1989 has gotten much more important. Men now rate beauty, or not now, 1989, men rated beauty as 2.1 out of three. And women rated it as 1.67 out of three. Men will spend a lot of time looking at women. Women will not spend a lot of time looking at men. Interestingly, women, when looking at magazines, will spend more time looking at other women than at men, like they're checking out the competition or getting ideas for themselves. In women, men prefer younger. And the men's attractiveness to beauty is pretty merciless. It's hard to get away from it. However, before any female listeners start complaining, the women's attraction to men's status and wealth is just as merciless. You cannot get away from it. In one study of medical school students, 60% of men wanted a woman who earned less money than themselves. And none of the women, zero of the women, wanted a man who earned less money than themselves. Pretty telling. There was a study of West Point cadets, which I liked a lot. West Point is the United States Army's military academy. It's where the army gets its officers from. And I like this study because it punished false signals. The study found some correlation between masculine facial features and the rank achieved by male cadets, like a prominent jaw, deep-set eyes, small ears set close to the head, and a prominent brow. So cadets that had those facial features seem to achieve a slightly higher rank. However, cadets that had those facial features but had little leadership ability, they were the lowest rank of all. It's as if they were punished for sending false signals. So if you don't have masculine facial features and you're incompetent, that's preferable to having masculine facial features and being incompetent. There's quite a bit in the book about the extreme lengths that people, mostly women, go through to achieve beauty. There was a hilarious passage from an old British legal case from hundreds of years ago. A husband sued for a divorce, saying that the woman he woke up with in the morning looked too old, even to be the mother of the woman he'd gone to bed with the night before. Makeup has a long history. Red pigments were applied to the lips in 5000 BC, so over 7000 years ago. And red oxide from iron has been found inside Sumerian and Egyptian tombs. Okay, fair skin. The book was a little bit vague on this, because it's a controversial topic. But if anyone has ever attempted to quantify this preference, it was not cited in the book. That would be interesting precisely because it's so controversial. There's one theory. So the book, without ever quantifying it, the book does discuss a theory that a historically selection for fair skin may have been made because fair skin people, on fair skin people, it's easier to, number one, detect disease, and number two, see signs of sexual interest, namely like blushing of the cheeks. It's easier to detect than fair skin people. So that's one theory without ever quantifying the preference. Some other interesting statistics about plastic surgery, and there was a whole chapter about plastic surgery. These are just a couple of data points that I pulled out. Half of the world's cosmetic surgeons are in America, and one-third of those are in California. 70% of cosmetic surgery patients earn less than $50,000 a year, and a full third earn less than $25,000 a year. So cosmetic surgery is heavily skewed towards the poorer part of the population in the United States. There was a little specific information about men's and women's preferences for the opposite sex. Aside from men wanting youth and women wanting status and wealth, men seem to like a waist to hip ratio of 0.7. Women liked either slightly or moderately taller than average men. And there was a ton about fashion, which I think I won't go into this book review, but it painted a evolving fashion as sort of a cat and mouse game between the upper and middle class, where the upper class is constantly trying to distinguish themselves, and the middle class is always trying to imitate the upper class. There were many funny examples cited in the book about different authorities trying to stop this, and for example, forbidding the upper class from wearing anything but black. If I remember correctly, that was in some northern Italian town, maybe in Venice, the church banned that. And so of course, what happened was the middle class started wearing black to imitate the upper class. In another time, the legal authority tried to restrict the middle class and found that everyone was always completely happy to face the punishment or pay the fine in exchange for breaking the law and wearing the accoutrements that were reserved for the upper class. That's just an overview. Those are the things that I highlighted in my Kindle app. There is much, much more. I kind of wish there was an appendix that had just the data without the book around it. Sadly, the book does not, but I see that I have filled almost 20 minutes. So I hope you enjoyed this book review. The next book review will be Nietzsche and the Nazis by Stefan Hicks. That's all for now. Have a good one.