THE TERRIBLE TOLL OF BEAUTIFICATION SPECIFICATIONS

In today's sound-bite world, we love catchphrases and cliches. Saves on time. And on thinking...!

Here's one the east coast literati and DC think tanks love to use: counter-culture. It always sounds terribly sophisticated to decide what the flow of the national culture is. And then to decide what's going against that flow. These are the so-called experts who tell us what's the "norm," and then instruct us on why not following that is somehow "counter."

Consider such experts as the cosmetic industry and the Hollywood studios. Somehow they have taken it upon themselves -- and we have allowed them -- to establish the norms of feminine beauty in our culture. If you thought we are born hard-wired with these norms you're largely wrong. While evolutionary biology suggests our genes react pleasurably to such things as physical symmetry (ie. facial lines and body contours), the specifics to these norms change from culture to culture, from era to era.

And so the ancient Persians, Greeks and Egyptians were pleased by some very different female lines, contours, and even body weights than we are today in America. That's because what cultures consider the norm and/or its counter are not only learned experiences, but manufactured ones as well. And thus it is that the pleasures of young American womanhood have been manufactured to various specifications at various times by various men.

Turn of the century -- the Gibson Girl. The 1920s -- the Flapper Girl. The 1930s through 1960s -- the Blond Bombshells (see Carol Lombard, Betty Grable, and Marilyn Monroe for sensuous details). For the next half century the specs have continued to fluctuate according to the cosmetic impresarios who want women to keep buying their new baubles, and the movie moguls who want women to keep paying to see their latest silver screen discovery.

No big deal, right? Just good old fashioned American entrepreneurship at work, right? Perfected with the manufactured magic of promoters like P.T. Barnum and Cecille B. DeMille, right? But not so fast. Manufacturing beauty is much different than manufacturing say cars and computers. Tens of millions of little girls drenched in a sea of beautification specifications have been whip-lashed from style to style and taste to taste. So that the American Psychiatric Association continues to report serious behavioral damage to young impressionable minds and bodies that can't quite fit that dreadful notion: The norm!

And that do fit that even more dreadful notion: Not fitting the norm!