This is a summary timeline of last Friday’s post on the evolution of leftism in the late 60s.
1940-70: Millions of black people move from the mostly rural South to Northern cities in the Great Migration
In 1963, a Communist assassinated Kennedy, making LBJ president.
1964: LBJ’s Civil Rights Act passed
1965: LBJ’s Immigration Act passed
1966: Cultural Revolution began
The global Left, feeling disenchanted due to the USSR’s failure to achieve a utopia and repudiation of Stalinism, turns to China for inspiration. It abandons proletarian-driven communism in favor of student-driven communism.
1967: 159 race riots burn down American cities, protesting segregation and police brutality. Many cities never recover.
1968: World goes crazy. Maoists murder millions of people.
From the 60s to the 80s, schools are integrated, legal segregation is dismantled, and the police back off black communities. As a result, urban crime skyrockets:
Whites flee the violence, contributing to a culture of rootless anomie, dispersed families, and lost wealth as property values plummet.
1969: Stonewall Riots; Nixon elected on “law and order” platform in response to leftist violence
1973: Harvard Crimson accuses Nixon of genocide for opposing the Khmer Rouge
1974: Nixon forced out of office by the media
1975: Cambodian Genocide begins: Khmer Rouge kills 1/3 of their country
The version of this story we usually hear:
Whites were mean and wouldn’t let blacks live in their cities. They forced blacks into ghettos, which were mysteriously full of crime and oppressed by the police. Everything in the ghetto fell apart and the students couldn’t learn anything. After MLK was murdered, integration began, prompting evil white flight. Today, the police are still oppressing black people.
The version you don’t hear:
The “Great Migration” started an urban crime wave that lasted for 3 decades, destroying inner cities and murdering thousands of people. Black rioters in the 60s and 70s burned down thousands of buildings, driving businesses out of black neighborhoods. Factory owners decided to relocate to China and import Mexicans to avoid hiring blacks, decimating the working class.
The version you hear:
Nixon was a bad man who authorized the Watergate Hotel break-in.
The version you don’t hear:
Nixon was fighting the Maoist Khmer Rogue. The media’s campaign to drive Nixon from office resulted in one of the worst genocides in human history.
evolutionistx 
[…] Source: Evolutionist X […]
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Two additional points in 1974-75 the democrat dominated congress during and post Watergate cut funding and restricted the ability of the South Vietnamese to obtain equipment, all but guaranteeing their defeat. Nixon most likely had the 1960 election stolen from him by election fraud in Illinois and also in Texas.
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Good points. Election fraud is its own rabbit hole, though.
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Hey, it’s Simon Elliot here, from Twitter. This is the only way I could contact you, as you don’t list your email anywhere. I have been inexplicably locked out of my Twitter account, even though I’ve only been a member for one day! I definitely want to continue our discussion, as you seem like the only respectable one out of the lot of them. They all came at me with a disparaging attitude, and it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them is responsible for me being locked out of Twitter. I think they feel threatened by my questions. Is there any way we can continue to discuss the matter of the absence of phenotypical femininity prior to the mid-20th century?
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Hi, Simon, welcome to the blog. Sorry to hear about your Twitter account. Go ahead and discuss away.
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Thanks. I really have no idea what’s going on with Twitter, or how to get my account back. I feel as if some unscrupulous bastard has orchestrated this. Probably that Latin American guy who was calling me a lunatic. I offered to send him a copy of the enquiry I sent to Buss, Etcoff and Sapolsky, but he said I wasn’t worth his time. Well we’ll see about that. I shall paste the enquiry here, if that’s alright with you, and we can go over the fine details. I shall put it in quotes.
“Hello (recipient’s name here), my name is Simon and I’m 24 years old. I’m from the UK. I have no formal qualifications or credentials of any kind, but I do have Asperger’s syndrome and OCD, and an obsessive interest in evolutionary psychology, neuro-aesthetics, genetics and philosophy. I hope you do not mind a layman who has the temerity to contact you with his questions. Please forgive my boldness, if that is the case.
Before I present my query to you, I feel some exposition is needed. I wish to emphasise how much I loathe postmodernism and its assorted tenets; social constructionism, radical scepticism of truth claims, and the maddening solipsism of cognitive relativism. I take offense to cognitive relativism, not just because it’s unfalsifiable and self-refuting, but because, as I’m sure you know, autistic people are very dogmatic in their defence of truth and logic. So for a group of pretentious academics to suggest that logic and reason do not exist, or that there are multiple versions of them, offends my sensibilities more than anything else. I hope we are on the same page in that area, and my question is in no way meant to undermine current knowledge of biological sex differences. Nonetheless, I feel I must ask it, but I was unsure who would be the best person to ask. Ideally I need someone who has a background in evolutionary psychology and art history. I have sent similar emails to Nancy Etcoff, David Buss, Geoffrey Miller, Vicki Bruce, Jerry Coyne, Gad Saad and Steve Stewart-Williams. So far there have been no replies from any of them. I hope that you may be the exception.
I have no doubt that we, at this current period in time, possess more objective, irrefutable evidence that beauty, especially female beauty, is objective, innate, and measurable. I know the postmodernists (the least extreme among them, at least) would ask that we not refer to beauty as objective, but rather that an “intersubjective consensus” exists. But I’m going to use the word objective, because I believe the science of beauty needs the protection and respect that the word objective affords. For as long as we use words like subjective, the postmodernists still have a foothold, and I for one refuse to indulge their tedious word games, their protestations about semantic accuracy notwithstanding.
What concerns me is that throughout history (both European and global) there is no representation whatsoever of the gorgeous, hyper-feminine female phenotype that our culture is positively swimming in today, and the unique, mesmerising, alluring qualia it induces. It is completely absent from the art of past cultures, despite how essential it is, not just as a metric for gauging genetic fitness and fertility, but as a source of aesthetic bliss. Men’s response to it is most pronounced, of course, but even women admit that the most attractive woman will always be more valuable than the most attractive man. I think this proves that women realise their unique status as the peacock, as it were, within our species. It seems that, from Greco-Roman times all the way up to the early 20th century, there was an embarrassing (and in my view, utterly contemptible) dearth of knowledge regarding what women are biologically supposed to look like. For example, the Venus de Milo, aside from her (admittedly miniscule) breasts, looks decidedly mannish. She has no feminine fertility markers of any kind, no proportion (as we accurately understand it today) or symmetry, and no paedomorphic (neotenous) facial features. On the contrary, she is very masculine-looking. And the more masculine something is, the closer it is to ugliness on the aesthetic spectrum, as we know. I understand that our ancestors knew nothing of evolution and genetics, but they should still have known the basics of masculine and feminine phenotypes, as it was encoded in their DNA just as it is in ours. So my question is, why did they have it so obviously wrong for so long? Were our ancestors simply stupid? I mean, I know there was a lot of homoeroticism in antiquity, but this is just ridiculous. Worse still, it serves as ammunition for the postmodernists, which is unbearable. I can only ascribe the absence of femininity in art during these times to censorship, likely due to the influence of Abrahamic misogyny. Or perhaps the phenomenon of intralocus sexual conflict was that much more prevalent in times past; a genetic side-effect of a culture that (bizarrely) places higher value on men and masculinity than on women and femininity. And when hyper-masculine men mate with the most feminine women, the feminine genes are defiled by the testosterone spill-over. Beyond that, I’m utterly at a loss to explain the ineptitude of our ancestors in accurately depicting female beauty. I only write this email to you because, try as I might, I have not been able to find any academic papers addressing this issue, which for me sticks out like a sore thumb. In Victorian times, even young women, supposedly in the prime of their fertility, were depicted in sketches and illustrations with small, recessed mouths and protruding chins and noses. What is this madness?
It has seemed to me for a long time that past notions of female beauty were completely divorced from biology, which is extremely odd, since biology really is the only valid measure of beauty. What the Greeks and Romans believed was simply inexplicable; a historical bizzarity that I’m relieved has been proven to be most egregiously wrong. I think it’s very obvious that their obsession with masculinity and their homoeroticism tainted their view of the female form. I’m sure the same could be said of Hitler and his cherished Arno Brekker works, which I find quite brutal and hideous. But if the Greco-Roman depictions are genuine, and that is what their women actually looked like, I think that proves beyond any doubt that hyper-masculinity comes at a deadly price. It’s ultimately a genetic trade-off. If the men become more masculine, then so do the women. It seems that masculinity genuinely is toxic, at least from a genetic point of view. This whole problem arises, of course, because the sexes are not entirely discrete and dichotomous as they ideally should be. If all embryos started out as a sexless blank slate and the presence of either estrogen or testosterone determined their ultimate sex, as opposed to them merely remaining female by default and then becoming male if enough testosterone is present, that would eliminate all ambiguities and there wouldn’t be any phenotypical cross-contamination.
Some people, such as the postmodernists and the various alt-right reactionary movements (how ironic for them to be lumped together), might say that my prizing hyper-femininity over masculinity is “just as bad” as the prizing of hyper-masculinity over femininity in past cultures. I think this would be a false equivalence, for several reasons. Firstly, the default sex of all embryos is female, so I think nature is pretty much affirming that the female sex is the more important and sacred (for want of a better word) of the two. Masculinity is straying as far from the default position as you possibly can, and could therefore be considered an aberration. Some might say I reek of the naturalistic fallacy at this point, but the naturalistic fallacy can only be employed on a limited number of occasions. For instance, would anyone accuse society in general of committing the naturalistic fallacy because we affirm that large, sparkling white teeth are more attractive than a mouth full of yellow rotten ones? In this case, what other than nature is going to inform our view of what is healthy? Of course the cultural anthropologist will jump up and exclaim with giddy glee that some unpronounceable and utterly irrelevant tribe in the middle of nowhere, completely isolated from rational thought, believes that yellow, sharpened teeth are beautiful. This would indeed contradict what we know to be true, but it’s not a genuine contradiction. Rather, it is an inexplicable one, and it arises because of the backwardness and borderline retardation (“OMG! did he just make a value judgement?!”) of these tribespeople.
Secondly, as Steve Stewart-Williams has elucidated splendidly, in our species it is the female that is the showier, more aesthetically breathtaking specimen (providing her exposure to estrogen in utero was maximal). In this way, human beings are in contradiction to almost every other species on this planet, in which it is the male that is the more phenotypically dazzling. I think that human sexual dimorphism that aesthetically favours the female makes more logical sense, primarily because behavioural traits such as sweetness, gentleness, gracefulness and the maternal instinct go hand in hand with aesthetic beauty and softness of form, as opposed to behavioural masculinity and the paternal instinct, which manifest phenotypically as angular, aggressive and harsh, and so the form and the function are logically linked.
One thing that disturbs me greatly is that we could be seeing a pushback against the objectivity of beauty, but this time coming from a faction of the biological sciences. It seems a new assault on objective beauty is being waged, in the form of appeals to neuro-plasticity. One prominent art historian and neuro-aesthetician suggested to me that the Greco-Romans had “overridden” our inbuilt desire for phenotypically hyper-feminine women, in favour of masculinised women. He said that their masculine culture had “re-moulded” their neural networks to different evolutionary ends, and that a preference for masculinised women is indeed evident from classical antiquity up to the 20th century. Hitler’s Third Reich is an example of a more recent culture that worshipped masculinity and promoted masculinised women in their art and propaganda.
I knew that the indictment of objective beauty would advance on two fronts. The first, that facial femininity and masculinity are arbitrary and ephemeral social constructs that have no basis in biology, has (thank god) been unequivocally defeated using every scientific metric we have, although the postmodernists of course refuse to acknowledge this. The notion that beauty is a quantifiable phenomenon capable of being evaluated was resisted almost entirely for political and egotistical reasons, and was relentlessly challenged by the usual suspects, our neo-Marxist foes in the humanities and social sciences, on behalf of the phenotypically-impaired. But the second front is coming in the form of neuro-plasticity, a social engineer’s wet dream, to be sure. It is now being argued by some in the biological and evolutionary sciences that our preferences for sexually dimorphic faces are evolutionarily novel, if the following article is anything to go by:
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/40/14388.full
This article seems to be implying that men’s response to femininity is negotiable, that it is pliable; that what men find attractive in women does not, by default implication, have to correlate with biological femininity. This would be akin to arguing that what we find sweet does not necessarily correlate with sugar. And although the authors don’t say just how recent the origins of our current infatuation with femininity may be, I postulate that (in the unlikely event that they are correct) it could have developed within the last hundred years. I know it’s an astonishingly short amount of time from an evolutionary perspective, but it would explain why there is no record whatsoever of phenotypical femininity in over 2000 years of our civilizational history. In contrast to everything we’ve learned from biology and evolutionary psychology, facial femininity is completely absent from the historical record. From Ancient Greece and Rome, through the Medieval period and the Renaissance, and through the Regency and Victorian periods, and even as recently as the Edwardian era, we find an abundance of highly masculinised women being held up as the “ideal” of female beauty. All of history can be invoked to counter our current scientific knowledge about beauty. Our opponents will ask, “if you have hard science and common sense on your side, then why does history overwhelmingly contradict you?” I’m afraid what’s going to happen is the postmodernists are going to jump on the neuro-plasticity theory and argue that our neural programming can be altered by culture, and men can be programmed to prefer masculinised women like the Venus de Milo. I’m terrified that phenotypical femininity, which seems to have existed for such a brief amount of time, may be extinguished if conservation efforts are not made, and a robust defence formulated to protect it from the postmodernist social engineers.
In conclusion, I have included an attachment, apparently it’s a magazine illustration from the 1890s that inexplicably purports to be “a picture of health and beauty”, no less. It demonstrates exactly the kind of grotesque masculinisation of women’s faces in art that I wish to highlight, and I hope to stimulate some academic discussion on the matter. From what I’ve seen and read, this incredibly bizarre phenomenon appears to have gone completely unnoticed by art historians and their students, and there seems to be a massive blind spot in general among evolutionary psychologists regarding our (quite literally) unsightly past. I must confess, I am astonished that not a single paper has been written that even acknowledges this phenomenon. Photographs from the 19th century seem to corroborate my theory that women in past eras had much lower estrogen levels. Incidentally, not only are they physically more masculine, they also look older than they actually are. I recall one photograph of a mother and daughter, standing beside each other with dour expressions, and they appeared to be the same age! I know the living environment in those days was far from ideal, but this seems to indicate that something was wrong at the genetic level. It could be possible that men in those days were much more masculine on average, and the high levels of testosterone had a catastrophic effect on the female gene pool.
I would love to hear your thoughts on all these points, and I’m sorry this email has turned out to be so long, but I didn’t want to leave anything out.”
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One difficulty with interesting people is that they are often cranky. Not going along with the mainstream is part of how they get to have interesting ideas, and having interesting ideas can attract a lot of harassment, which also makes people quick to crankiness.
I hope you get your Twitter straightened out. Your comment is long, so I’ll respond to the rest of it later.
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Okay. Read it all. It was, indeed, very long.
Just a writer’s tip: queries get better responses when they’re shorter, chiefly because they’re less work to read and so just more likely to actually get read and responded to, and because conciseness can make your point clearer.
You’ve written a lot, but I’m not sure what your actual question is. (Try searching for question marks in your letter–you’ll find that the ratio of setup:questions is very high.) You’ve also made a lot of factual claims–about science, art, beauty, etc–but haven’t provided much evidence for your claims. Again, you’re more likely to get positive responses if you provide evidence–even just a link to a picture of the Venus de Milo. This makes it easier on the reader, because they don’t have to go looking things up on their own. I know, people are lazy.
I assume you already saw my responses on Twitter, even if you couldn’t respond to them.
So a proposed simplified version:
1. Objective beauty: defined and sourced
2. Examples from art history that are not beautiful
3. Example photographs of non-beautiful people
4. Comparison with modern people
5. Question?
Have I summarized accurately?
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I get what Simon is saying. I have noticed the same thing but it never…surfaced in my mind as a big conundrum. I can see why it would bother him of he’s aspy.
I have to protest his attacks on small breasted Women. I have nothing against big breast but I like small breast.
evolutiontheorist,”One difficulty with interesting people is that they are often cranky…”
HAHA true!
kn83″…The idea that all embryos/eggs begin as female is feminist pseudoscience…”
Keep in mind that fertile eggs can be produced from skin cells but as of right now only sperm can make a egg into a zygote and then a baby. Subject to change I’m sure as the feminists will have a cow until this is changed.
Simon,”…female remains the peacock of our species…”
Poor pic of an example as it’s only the Male peacock that has all the brilliant plumage.
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The amount of nonsense in your post is hilarious.
1. There was no lack of femininity in pre-modern art of women, especially Renaissance art which featured women with highly dimorphic traits (wide hips, young faces, curves, perky breast, round butts, etc.).
http://www.femininebeauty.info/
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2009/10/facial-skin-color-and-sexual-selection.html/
2. You failed to actually point out exactly what feminine features were lacking in pre-modern art.
3. You like many pseudo-intellectualls, you are under the biologically false notion that masculinity and femininity are opposites and that one is a “distortion” of the other. The reality is that both masculinity and femininity are coexisting and complimenting elements that necessarily exist in all sexually reproducing beings.
4. All living things contain degrees of both masculinity and femininity in their being. In all sexually-reproducing species, females also naturally produce testosterone/androgens and males also produce estrogens too. There is no such thing as a living thing completely lacking in either. Also, there is no absolute standard in nature of how masculine or feminine a creature “ought” to be: nature is not normative nor teleological.
5. The idea that all embryos/eggs begin as female is feminist pseudoscience.
http://www.sciencevsfeminism.com/the-myth-of-equality/female-is-not-the-default-sex/
In reality, they begin sexless until the exact chromosomes are implemented. There is nothing biologically “toxic” about masculinity, you failed to point out exactly what is “deadly” genetically masculinity.
6. The reason why in humans (particularly non-African) are one of the few (about 9%-17%) species where the females are more visually appealing is because non-African humans are one of the few species were women go through more sexual-selection than men, while the opposite is true for Africans and most species.
7. Some ethnic groups are genetically more androgenic or dimorphic than others, which influences their preferences and art.
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The man who runs the femininebeauty.info site, Erik Holland, is one of my main sources of data. And yet I find it odd that he has not addressed the lack of phenotypical femininity prior to the mid-20th century. I tried to contact him twice, but the site has been inactive for some time, so I have no idea what’s happened to him.
Renaissance artists were still largely adhering to the (incorrect) Greco-Roman canon. The women are not hyper-feminine, as is clear from the small, pursed lips and often aquiline noses depicted in the art of the era. The preference for a pointed, painfully straight nose descending vertically from the forehead is a quintessentially Greco-Roman aesthetic, and a bizarre one at that.
Yes but estrogen is what makes something female, so the higher the estrogen levels, the more female it will be, in terms of secondary sex characteristics. Don’t give me Hume’s is/ought crap. His principle is anti-scientific.
Feminist pseudoscience? Then can you explain to me why all men have nipples? Nevertheless, the female remains the peacock of our species.
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Also:
1. Contemporary fashion models, with their anorexia and lack of fertile physical features, are much less phenotypically feminine than virtually any pre-20th century art of women. Its no wonder straight men are generally not interested in super-models, an industry ran by gay fashion designers.
2. Men in ancient and medieval times were not exceptionally more masculine on average than modern men, especially in the upper classics. Also, your fail to take in account ethnic differences in average degrees of masculinity and femininity, as some ethnic groups today are actually more masculine on average today than they were in pre-modern times.
3. Your autism and lack of common sense is loud and clear in your long post.
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No straight man looks to anorexic fashion models to get an erection. Ever hear of glamour modelling? Pin-up art? Yeah I have Asperger’s. You are overly confrontational.
Pre-20th century women, especially neoclassical statues and the women of the Victorian era, are depicted with recessed mouths and protuberant chins and noses. See the famed “Gibson girl” popular during the 1890s up until the end of the first world war.
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You are overly confrontational. Hyper-feminine features, features dependent on high estrogen and paedomorphy, are what’s missing from the historical record. These features include full lips, a small and non-protruding chin, a small, often pert nose, and large, wide set eyes.
Neoclassical statues and the women held up as “the ideal” of female beauty during the 19th century have none of them. On the contrary, they have recessed mouths and protuberant chins and noses. Here are some paintings of Dorothy Dene, who was proclaimed to be “the most beautiful woman in England” by many artists during the 1890s:
Needless to say, she looks like a bloody man. If you look up the works of the pre-Raphaelites, they are all in the same vein as this. I think a solid case can be made for the homosexuality, or at the very least bisexuality, of the artists of past eras.
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Come, now, #3 is uncalled for.
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Quick point of techno-determinism: television’s spread (maybe movies in China?).
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@evolutiontheorist I was unable to respond directly to your above replies, as the “reply” option was not there. I can indeed support my assertions with ample evidence, but I didn’t think I needed to when I emailed, Buss and Sapolsky, because they are already familiar with the biological and neural correlates of beauty, as I’m sure you are as well. Asking me to provide objective definitions and sources, even though these correlates are well known among HBD bloggers, is peculiar of you. Am I expected to believe that you are unaware? If, somewhat astonishingly, that is the case, I shall attempt a brief summary.
Good genes and high estrogen, the female sex hormone, are the sole determinants of female beauty. High estrogen indicates optimal fertility, and it affects facial features and body proportions in the following ways: the features are soft, delicate and rounded; the eyes are large, the brows are high and flat, the nose is small and often pert, the lips are full, the jaw and chin are small, and the neck is slender; a high waist-to-hip ratio, full breasts and slender limbs are defining characteristics of a youthful female body with high estrogen. In women of optimal fitness, the nose, brows, jaw and chin do not project outwards as they often do in men (heavy facial features are caused by testosterone, the male sex hormone). Estrogen is what produces the “babyish” look we see in beautiful women’s faces, a phenomenon known as neoteny, or paedomorphy, which means the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. So it should come as no surprise that this collection of features (referred to in geneticist parlance as a phenotype) correlate with 100% accuracy to what men perceive as attractive in women. These facts have been known by biologists for many decades, so the tired cliché “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is the sort of patronising feel-good platitude that really has no place in the vocabulary of a learned individual in the 21st century.
For more detailed information, read the books and studies by David Buss, Robert Sapolsky, Nancy Etcoff, Vicki Bruce, Judith Langlois, Leslie Farkas, Steve Stewart-Williams, Erik Holland, et al.
Here are a collection of pictures from various eras, including one taken during the construction of the Statue of Liberty, and a spine-chillingly ugly effigy on an 1890s era silver dollar. You’ll notice they all have non-neotenous, low estrogen features, as exemplified since antiquity by the Greco-Roman canon. Large nose, retruded mouth, pursed lips, prominent chin, etc. Why artists have been so enamoured with this aesthetic… I’m at a loss. It seems utterly inexplicable. Depictions like that on the silver dollar have been etched on coins consistently throughout history.
I also include here a video, showing what the Venus de Milo would look like if she were a real woman. Butch, matronly, and utterly horrendous.
Incidentally, I see I’m already getting some flak from one of your regulars on here. Solid confirmation regarding your “crankiness” observation, methinks. I will provide more evidence in follow up posts, if you reply to this one, which I sincerely hope you do.
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1. Most of the women you posted don’t look exceptionally butch. In fact, they actually look no different from the average (key word-average) women of NW European descent, especially White American women. Same with these women:
Genes go both ways. In ethnic groups where those facial features predominate in men, most of the women will have them too. You seem to be relying on an extremely ideo-centric standard of femininity that the vast majority of women don’t match.
2. Have you ever considered the fact that the average person in pre-industrial times was much less attractive (in addition to being shorter, dumber and with a smaller life-span) than the average of today’s world and that the women of earlier art were in fact well above the average in looks compared to their contemporaries?
3. I wouldn’t be quick to muse on the sexual orientation of the artist of the time. You are also failing to take in account the figure of the women in question. None of the women posted seem to have butch-masculine body proportions. Also, some men (more so in certain ethnic groups) are more attracted to a women’s figure than merely her face, with Black males being the most body-oriented while Asian males tend to be the most face-oriented.
4. You didn’t address the facts in this article:
http://www.sciencevsfeminism.com/the-myth-of-equality/female-is-not-the-default-sex/
The argument of men having nipples falls flat. You can just as easily point to the pubic hair in females and, better yet, the fact that women produce androgens to argue that men are the “default” sex.
5. Hume is/ought distinction is one of the fundamental principles of scientific inquiry. Any attempted to bridge the two leads to pseudoscience and ideologies. For example, that some people are taller than others is a fact. Whether things “ought” to be that way is scientifically meaningless because there is no teleological/normative force that dictates there ought(not) to be any equality in height.
6. I’ve already explain why humans are a species where females are the more attractive sex: degree of sexual selection compared to the opposite sex. This is settled science among evolutionary biologist, no mystery.
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Are you friggin kidding me mate? They’re butch as hell! look at the massive chins! Not only are do they look like men, but they look like ugly men! This is totally inexcusable, and I hate our ancestors for this. God knows how much ammunition this has given the postmodernists. Thanks a lot, dipshit ancestors.
The pre-Raphaelites are some of the worst offenders, at least of the Victorian era. And if the Venus de Milo, with her man-face and butch build, represents the best looking woman of that time, I can’t begin to imagine how hideous the ugly women of that time were. Christ, I’ve never been more glad to be living today, instead of back then.
Ideals don’t aspire to mediocrity, and whether you think it’s ideo-centric or not, at least our modern standards are supported by biology and evolutionary psychology, which no previous beauty standard ever has been based on until now. And I see many young women on a daily basis who do tick most of the boxes, so I don’t know where you live, but you have my pity.
Blacks are physiologically and psychologically closer to our archaic hominid ancestors, so with that in mind, what they find attractive doesn’t count. I predict Kn83’s response will be something akin to the following:
“Dude, are you implying that stages in evolution can be ranked hierarchically?! That view has been, like, totally debunked, man! Evolution is non-linear and arbitarary! There are no immutable standards of beauty that transcend our current biological make-up! If in ten thousand years time humans had become red and had horns, then that’s what we’d find innately attractive, and you wouldn’t have any grounds to object! It’d just be your personal opinion, man!”
Ah but of course, it is as I predicted all along. Cognitive relativism is jumping ship, from the cultural paradigm into the biological paradigm. It’s disturbing how postmodern some HBD types are beginning to sound. But it’s interesting to note that we humans do, in fact, rate the (non-sexual) attractiveness of other species. Lions and tigers, for instance, are symbols of strength and majesty. Insects like flies, on the other hand, we detest, for both their form and function. We do not consider it fallacious to compare and contrast the attractiveness of two entirely different species which were subject to entirely different environmental pressures and wildly different evolutionary histories, so I don’t see why we should consider it fallacious to do so in regards to different races or “stages” within our own species.
Female is still favoured by nature. We have XX chromosome, XXX chromosome, XY chromosome, and XYY chromosome. We don’t have any examples of YY or YYY chromosome. X is present by default, whereas Y is negotiable.
Postmodernists love Hume, and it’s easy to see why. According to Hume, the scientific method, which relies on repeated experimentation and consistent results, is invalid. Hume says that just because the sun has always risen, doesn’t mean we can say with 100% certainty that it will rise tomorrow. He has aided and abetted the postmodernists, maybe not intentionally, but still, the damage has been done.
There is a qualitative difference in the traits exhibited by femininity and masculinity. Masculinity manifests phenotypically as angular, harsh and aggressive. Femininity manifests as soft, rounded, friendly and nurturing. The qualities represented by phenotypical femininity are qualities that we prize highly in another paradigm: that of personality. Femininity embodies the best of human traits, and masculinity, for the most part, the worst. This is why the value of the two cannot be relativized or equalized, and it explains why the most attractive men often have some feminine features, such as full lips and expressive eyes; the excessive harshness of unbridled masculinity has been (slightly) diluted by the addition of some feminine features, thus making it more aesthetically tolerable and less intimidating. It’s XY after all, not YY.
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I think you are cherry picking.Like today a lot of famous artists in the past were gay and had no handle on the female form, never got what the big deal of the Mona Lisa was about. But when I look up portraits from different centuries I think I see a fairly normal distribution of dowdy and pretty faces. Hatsheput has a quite feminine face in some of her statues despite often having the strap on beard of a pharaoh.
European skulls have become more neotenous over the last millennium
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4643312.stm
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According to the two months of art history class I took, Mona Lisa is considered remarkable because it was the first time someone really got shading down instead of just drawing an outline and filling it in. Which is kind of important in the development of art kind of way, but not really a big deal from the layman’s POV.
I saw the Mona Lisa while in France as a kid. It was a big let down.
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You know there was some Latin American dude on Twitter who said “women were more masculine in the past? that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! If anything, studies report exactly the opposite” and he linked some study on the exhumation of centuries-old bones in some Spanish town, and according to the anthropologists, the female skulls had gotten less neotenous over time. And so I said to him, how do you explain the fact that paedomorphic, high fertility women are completely absent from the historical record in terms of artistic and photographic representation? And he was like “hmm, art history vs cranial fossils… gee, this is a tough one.” Well, I’m pretty sure they’re bones, not fossils, but still, how does he explain the lack of representation? And the fact that today’s women are clearly, CLEARLY hyper-feminine in comparison to the women of merely a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand! He wouldn’t answer, he just called me a lunatic and subsequently blocked me. What a prick.
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Look how big Marie Antoinette’s head is. It’s huge. If you look around you see the intelligent upper class Caucasians have a high forehead and long skull vertically. Jews have a skull that’s more elongated in the back. More like Neanderthals’s.
Examples
More round and angled in front. Most of his “extra” brain is in the back.
Benjamin Disraeli
Henry Kissinger
http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/former-united-states-secretary-of-state-henry-kissinger-visits-fox-picture-id501878196
This is a caricature of him that accents the features.
Here’s more European type heads with high skulls.
Andrew Jackson
Talleyrand
Duke of Wellington
I post these because…you’re not supposed to notice skull shapes.
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I don’t really see what your point is. None of that refutes the fact that neotenous, high fertility women are completely absent from the historical record. I blame intralocus sexual conflict, homosexual arists, and religious misogyny. It’s probably a combination of all three.
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It’s a little tricky at this point to keep track of all of the different points, so I’d like posit a modified summary version
1. Objective beauty: definition?
2. Link between beauty and fertility
3. Examples from art history that are not beautiful
4. Example photographs of non-beautiful people
5. Comparison with modern people
6. Question?
Am I correct?
I was really hoping for something like a mathematical model of which skulls and figures are loveliest so we could then just run a representative sample of art and statues through it and see how close they fit. (Yes I want to math attractiveness.)
One of you linked to this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4643312.stm
“Researchers have found that the shape of the human skull has changed significantly over the past 650 years.
Modern people possess less prominent features but higher foreheads than our medieval ancestors.”
which seems very relevant to our present discussion if you ask me.
I don’t think it’s fair to drag poor Marie into it, as she’s a real person and real people can be ugly.
I would also posit that “beautiful” women in art are not necessarily supposed to be erotic. A painter depicting the Virgin Mary wants to paint her as a beautiful woman, not give erections to all of the men in the audience.
I am going to post some selected art pieces for the gallery to judge:
Botticelli’s Venus and Mars
Portrait of a young woman
Totally off topic, but also Botticelli
For neoteny, I offer Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Apollo and Diana
(Diana, a virgin goddess, would of course not have the oversized breasts associated with nursing a child.)
Aphrodite Ourania
Similar but more recent Birth of Venus by Bouguereau
Venus untying her sandal, Pompeii
Minoan fresco
Chins, yes, but the artist clearly emphasizes the ladies’ figures.
This Minoan snake goddess is well-endowed
And then there’s this: Artemis statue
Um.
Apparently lactating statues are a thing
Back to the Renaissance, Raphael’s Madonna dell Granduca
Ancient Egyptian statuette
Nefertiti
Russian Empress
Delacroix
Death of Sardanapalus
Giacomo’s lacemakers have normal chins
Greuz’s landuress
Well that is perhaps enough. I should note that the artists of the past labored under a variety of constraints we moderns don’t–women wore more clothes than we do today, it was probably harder to find a woman (much less an attractive one) to model, life was harsh, women married younger, and cheap makeup that didn’t contain lead wasn’t invented until the late 1800s.
In conclusion: This Year, Venuses Again?
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I have given ample definition already. Female beauty is determined by high estrogen. High estrogen = high fertility. Mathematical proportion and symmetry are also important. In short, there is no great mystery here.
http://www.femininebeauty.info/ethnic-comparisons/beauty-elements
http://www.femininebeauty.info/feminine-vs-masculine
This is just the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg of evidence, all of which will be hand-waved away by the postmodernists, no doubt. Ah, I can hear the anthem of the uglies as we speak. “Consensus fallacy! Evolution isn’t teleological! Changing beauty standards! Nero-plasticity! Cognitive relativism!”
Those lactating statues you linked… they have male faces. How did you not notice? Well, it seems humanity didn’t notice for over 2000 years, for some reason. I guess I must be a genius to have figured it out. And that one painting you say appears neotenous, well the thing is, back in medieval times, there was what I like to call the “baby alien” phenomenon in art. They have some babyish features, like large heads and eyes, but at the same time they look profoundly unsettling, like aliens. Your painting is an (admittedly more mild) example of that style. But for the overwhelming majority of Western history, it is the Greco-Roman canon (large, sharply vertical nose, small, pursed lips, protuberant chin) that reigned supreme, completely unchallenged. The evidence we have amassed over the last 80 odd years is utterly incontrovertible, it is scientifically accurately beyond dispute and logically sound, and yet… all of history seems to contradict us. WHY? What the hell was going on inside our ancestors heads? God damn them.
Plenty of photographs of Victorian and Edwardian era “beauties” are available online. Many of them are matronly wenches who look much older than they actually are. Compare and contrast them with the sex symbols of the glamour and pin-up industries. The differences are startling, to say the least.
Here are some glorious examples of true phenotypical femininity in full bloom, by some of my favourite artists (Luis Royo, Victoria Frances, Howard Rogers, John Lloyd Strevens), who specialise in drawing seductive, hyper-feminine women.
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Wearing makeup. Cheap, non-toxic makeup was invented in the late 1800s.
Wearing makeup.
Wearing makeup
Not even remotely normal human coloration, but also wearing makeup.
I think you’ve noticed the invention of good, cheap makeup.
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evolutiontheorist,”…Objective beauty: definition?…”
There is most definitely such a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio#Aesthetics
I can’t find a link but there’s also a relationship between the function “e (mathematical constant)” and plants. It also seems to please the eye when paintings are done with these ratios in mind. Someone also mentioned that using pi as a ratio in painting was attractive in the comments on the book linked above.
If you wanted to do some painting learning these could be a big step towards making your works look great. I took a art class once, needed a credit, and it’s amazing what you can do if you take into account perspective. It makes scenes come alive. I used to be good at drawing when I was a kid but hit puberty and stopped. sigh…
Here’s a trick I came up with while taking the class. I was trying to shade a drawing of a towel on a concrete block. It was really difficult to make it look real. I happened upon the idea to limit the number of shades, because my skills weren’t up to full shading. So I looked at what I was drawing and just used three shades with a pencil. It came out really good. I think the eyes neural system is very good at taking the three shades and visualizing it as more or maybe seeing it as a three d pleasing picture when in actuality it was extremely compressed in information..
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Fascinating! Thanks for all of the information.
I used to draw a lot in color (think colored pens) but after a while I decided that was bad and limited myself for a couple of years to black and white. Just not letting myself get distracted by all of the colors helped a bit. Ah, but then I found more colors…
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You fail to address any of my points and continued to strawman.
1. “Ideals don’t aspire to mediocrity, and whether you think it’s ideo-centric or not, at least our modern standards are supported by biology and evolutionary psychology, which no previous beauty standard ever has been based on until now. And I see many young women on a daily basis who do tick most of the boxes, so I don’t know where you live, but you have my pity.”
Nobody said ideals aspire to mediocrity (learn how to read). The fact that the women depicted were above the average of the time shows that.
“which no previous beauty standard ever has been based on until now”
Most previous beauty standards WERE subconsciously based on evolutionary impulses (especially those outside of Europe, which you neglected to examine), you sound delusional.
2. “Blacks are physiologically and psychologically closer to our archaic hominid ancestors, so with that in mind, what they find attractive doesn’t count.”
Didn’t you say beauty standards are universal and biology based? So why would their tastes not count? And you didn’t address my main point: you focus too much on faces yet ignore a woman’s overall figure (which is something homosexual men ironically do, guess that speaks volumes about you lol), and there’s nothing particularly masculine about the figure of women in ancient Greco-Roman art.
3. I predict Kn83’s response will be something akin to the following:
“Dude, are you implying that stages in evolution can be ranked hierarchically?! That view has been, like, totally debunked, man! Evolution is non-linear and arbitarary! There are no immutable standards of beauty that transcend our current biological make-up! If in ten thousand years time humans had become red and had horns, then that’s what we’d find innately attractive, and you wouldn’t have any grounds to object! It’d just be your personal opinion, man!”
Ah but of course, it is as I predicted all along. Cognitive relativism is jumping ship, from the cultural paradigm into the biological paradigm. It’s disturbing how postmodern some HBD types are beginning to sound. But it’s interesting to note that we humans do, in fact, rate the (non-sexual) attractiveness of other species. Lions and tigers, for instance, are symbols of strength and majesty. Insects like flies, on the other hand, we detest, for both their form and function. We do not consider it fallacious to compare and contrast the attractiveness of two entirely different species which were subject to entirely different environmental pressures and wildly different evolutionary histories, so I don’t see why we should consider it fallacious to do so in regards to different races or “stages” within our own species.”
Again with the stupid strawman. NOBODY here said beauty can’t be objectively measured. And the notion of evolutionary “stages” and “hierarchy” was dismissed by Darwin himself and even most Eugenicists. Natural Selection simply doesn’t work that way. These are the facts found by objective science, not “relativism” of any sort (projection much lol?)
4. “Female is still favoured by nature. We have XX chromosome, XXX chromosome, XY chromosome, and XYY chromosome. We don’t have any examples of YY or YYY chromosome. X is present by default, whereas Y is negotiable.”
Your autism reveals itself again lmao. And you show extreme ignorance of basic biology. What makes a male or a female has less to do with the chromosomes themselves than how they are patterned. Both X and Y chromosomes are absent in most non-mammalian animals, yet both males and females still exist in them:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4105922/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-incredible-shrinking-sex-chromosome-20151201/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system
So to conclude that female is favored is stupid.
5. “Postmodernists love Hume, and it’s easy to see why. According to Hume, the scientific method, which relies on repeated experimentation and consistent results, is invalid. Hume says that just because the sun has always risen, doesn’t mean we can say with 100% certainty that it will rise tomorrow. He has aided and abetted the postmodernists, maybe not intentionally, but still, the damage has been done.”
Another stupid claim you made, showing you ignorance some more lol. Hume never said the scientific method was invalid (in fact, he stated that it was the only truly reliable source of knowledge). The rejection of the is/ought distinction is exactly how the postmodernists, SJWs, most ideologues and yourself think how they do and reject science.
6. “There is a qualitative difference in the traits exhibited by femininity and masculinity. Masculinity manifests phenotypically as angular, harsh and aggressive. Femininity manifests as soft, rounded, friendly and nurturing. The qualities represented by phenotypical femininity are qualities that we prize highly in another paradigm: that of personality. Femininity embodies the best of human traits, and masculinity, for the most part, the worst. This is why the value of the two cannot be relativized or equalized, and it explains why the most attractive men often have some feminine features, such as full lips and expressive eyes; the excessive harshness of unbridled masculinity has been (slightly) diluted by the addition of some feminine features, thus making it more aesthetically tolerable and less intimidating. It’s XY after all, not YY.”
Pure nonsense
A) Women themselves are NATURALLY more attracted to men with more masculine psycho-phsyical traits, not less. And men naturally seek to become more masculine.
B) Over half of all personality traits valued by most people and cultures (like assertiveness, courage, confidence, tenacity, strength, humor, etc) are biologically masculine.
C) Since #4 to debunk your nonsense on chromosomes.
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1. Well if that’s the best they had back then, they have my pity. Jesus, talk about rotten luck. In this picture you can see, on the right, a living example of the Greco-Roman facial morphology, which we observe in both male and female depictions from the era. Prominent nose, prominent chin, regressed mouth. The nose is pointing downward and the chin appears to be curling upward, like a pincer movement, forcing the mouth to regress. It’s an aged, witchy look, approximating tooth loss. Hideous!
To the flame with this, I say! Kill it with fire!
2. Primitive peoples are not a concern to me or any serious person, for the very fact that they are primitive. In many Greco-Roman depictions of women, their bodies are disproportionate and they look like they were the victims of a botched boob job. The breasts are often either too small or unnaturally shaped. Perhaps this is due to the homosexuality of many artists in classical antiquity.
3. I make no apology for my having my own value system, and I shall not depart from it. There comes a point when one realises that a disinterested attitude with respect to science does not serve one’s interests.
4. Some parts of the human body are clearly female-oriented from the ground up, such as the nipples, which serve no function in a male. Paradoxically, the genitalia appears to be male-oriented, since the bi-potential nub that develops into the clitoris (which serves no essential purpose in the female) forms into the glans penis in the male, which is essential for reproduction. Maximal development of the sexual organs is thus male, not female. Very bizarre indeed.
5. Hume never said it, but his critique certainly implies it.
6. Woman are attracted to (objectively ugly) hyper-masculine facial features at their peril. They are exposing their potential daughters to huge risk. Far better to choose a soft-featured pretty boy than a man with mature, protrusive features. Just look at who the model Adriana Lima got married to. Is the woman insane? Quite possibly, yes. Her potential daughters will curse her for her lack of aesthetic discernment. Masculine-faced men beget masculine-faced daughters. Intersexual conflict 101.
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Sorry I got distracted. This is an excellent essay. I say a review of the book “Days of Rage” that talks about this. I haven’t read the book yet but this guys review is really good. You might or might not want to see it.
https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
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@SamJ I don’t recall making attacks on small breasted women. But you must surely understand that larger breasts are objectively more feminine, cased by high estrogen. It only makes sense for men to be attracted to larger breasted women, since a flat chest is more similar to a prepubescent male. I can see why the classicists liked this look, what with them being a bunch of closet homosexuals and all.
I know it’s the male peacock that has the plumage. I’m not an idiot. I’m using Steve-Stewart Williams metaphor, from his book “the ape that thought it was a peacock”. In our species, the female is the aesthetic equivalent of the male peacock. As I said in my enquiry, humans may be the odd one out in this regard, compared to most other species on this planet, but sexual dimorphism that favours the female does make more logical sense.
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If I may interject, back before birth control and rampant obesity, big breasts on a woman were a sign that she recently gave birth and is nursing a child. Smaller breasts–on a younger woman, anyway–were a sign that she has not yet had a child.
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Okay thanks.
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I realise that all of my examples of hyper femininity are wearing make-up, but it’s their facial features you should be paying attention to, not their make-up. But even so, cosmetics accentuate facially fertility cues, and a paper has been written arguing that cosmetics, jewellery and fashion constitute an “extended phenotype” among humans.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0025656
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[…] to recent conversations (see here) on the subject of phenotypic femininity and older art, I decided to try to put makeup on the Venus […]
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