Unpopular opinion: Beauty standards are supposed to be unrealistic, that’s the point

There are always going to people who have things you don’t, whether by birth or achievement. There is value instead in being grounded – knowing who you are, what you are capable of, your strengths and weaknesses and the like.

The Bulimia Project recently asked three Artificial Intelligence Image Generators to create their vision of the “ideal body.”  As they put it, “Social media’s impact on children’s mental health has been a hot topic among psychologists lately, with some pointing to it being a source of body image and self-esteem problems. Although young users might be the most impressionable, the pervasive promotion of idealized body types on these platforms also takes its toll on adults.”  (For my opinion on social media and child mental health, read here and here.) Therefore, they selected Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney to produced images based on prompts that took into account social media specifically or online images generally.  It should not be a surprise to anyone with the slightest bit of awareness of the world around them that all three programs depicted men and women you aren’t likely to see outside of a movie theater, if even then.  This did not prevent the Bulimia Project from providing what can only be construed as a trigger warning before showing the images, “Warning: Their results were largely unrealistic.”  According to them, 40% of AI-generated images overall depicted unrealistic body types including 37% of women and 43% of men.  They continued, “The main difference we noticed between AI’s collection of social media-inspired images and those based on everything else it found on the World Wide Web was that the first set was far more sexually charged. But it was also more unsettling, with largely disproportionate body parts.”  The Bulimia Project is not the only group interested in unrealistic beauty standards.  A month ago, USA Today reported on Kylie Jenner inviting the Kardashians to “talk beauty standards,” noting “that’s big.”  The media organization pondered the burning question, “The Kardashians have served as the standard for beauty and body image for most of the past decade. Are they finally going to have a real discussion about the unrealistic ideals they’ve perpetuated?”  Two weeks ago, The Mercury News wondered, “Does Martha Stewart’s Sports Illustrated cover promote unrealistic beauty standards for older women?”  There are also numerous scholarly articles on the topic including “Social media and its effects on beauty,” “Altered images: understanding the influence of unrealistic images and beauty aspirations,” and more.

Overall, it’s enough to make one wonder if anyone even knows what “beauty” is anymore. No ideal of any kind, whether related to appearance, cognitive ability, or athletics, is supposed to be “realistic.”  If everything was beautiful, nothing would be.  The whole point of beauty and why it is so remarkable is because it is exceedingly rare and unattainable.  Otherwise, it would be merely average like the rest of us.  We see something and remark on it as beautiful – or its inverse ugly – because it is fundamentally different from everything else.  The beautiful man or woman is not commonplace, someone you see everyday pumping gas or driving a garbage truck.  If they were, they wouldn’t be special.  They are special specifically because they are rare, possessing qualities most do not have, even if those qualities are hard to define.   The same, of course, is true of all human ideals.  When you consider the ideal athlete, you are referring to a man or woman far faster, stronger, and more agile than 99.9% of the people on this Earth can ever hope to achieve, unless you think most of us are only a little practice short of playing Major League Baseball or in the NBA.  Beauty might be harder to define given there are no professional beauty teams like we have in sports, but the same principle is at work.  Genius might be a closer analogy, though we don’t generally use the term “ideal” to describe thinkers.  The presence of true genius, however, is exceedingly rare just like beauty, unless I am missing all the fan-fiction out there that rises to the level of Shakespeare.  Some artistic geniuses like Shakespeare himself create works of beauty beyond the ability of the rest of us.  On a more positive note for the average person, the inverse of these ideals is equally rare.  Irredeemable ugliness is as uncommon as ideal beauty, abject stupidity as hard to find as pure genius (though it may not seem that way), and so on.  Most people, of course, spend their lives firmly in the middle of these extremes, and that should not be surprising given that every aspect of human capability and experience can be described by the classic bell curve.

The bell curve is also known as the normal distribution because it visually captures the idea that most of the data clusters around the mean or average, and the further to the left or right from the center, the less likely those values are to occur.  The area under any point of the curve represents the number of people in that percentile, and the total area of the curve sums to one.  In other words, if you are of average looks, intelligence, or athleticism, you will be right in the middle of the curve, the thick part that helps give the bell its name.  If you look to the right and left, you will find many like you both slightly less and slightly more so in whatever criteria you are evaluating, but the further out you get to the extreme ends, the lower the number of people within the area under the curve.  Mathematics aside, this should be evident from your own experience in high school, where there are far more average classes than Advanced Placement or honors and remedial.  Fewer people were on the varsity team as compared to playing in gym class, and fewer still were the Prom King and Queen.  This is because a full 68% of people fall within what is known as one standard deviation from the mean or average; standard deviation is just a term that measures the variability in any given data set, the higher the deviation, the more extremes are present and the flatter the bell curve.  For example, the average IQ (on certain scales) is 100 with a standard deviation of 15 or 16.  This means that more than two thirds of people you will ever meet have IQs between 85 and 115.  Further, 95% of people fall within 2 standard deviations of the average, placing 950 out of one thousand people between 70 and 130 on the IQ test.  99.7% of people fall within 3 standard deviations, placing 997 out of 1,000 between 65 and 145.  Genius, in this example, represents less than 1.5 out of a thousand people.  If you went to a small high school, you might never have met a true genius in your scholastic career, the same way you might not know anyone who went on to play in the NFL.

Beauty works the same way, even if it’s more subjective.  In fact, almost everything human trait or attribute works this way from your body mass index to the size of your bank account.  Humanity as a whole is clustered closely around the average and then rapidly falls off toward the extremes where fewer and fewer people are that many standard deviations from the mean.  We might consider ourselves unlucky by birth that we aren’t Albert Einstein’s or Grace Kelly’s, but luck being as fickle as it is, we could just as easily be their opposite extreme.  Whatever the case, the great majority of people – more than two thirds – have always needed to accept the fact that they are average.  They will not be athletic superstars, world renowned poets, or beauty icons.  Instead, they will be like everyone else and greatness in those senses will be forever beyond their reach, unattainable no matter what they do.  This is the reality that well-functioning people have had to deal with since the dawn of human civilization.  We can bask in the reflected beauty of greatness, but not directly access it for ourselves.  As Henry David Thoreau put it rather bleakly, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  This should not necessarily be considered a bad thing.  Greatness throughout human history has never come without baggage, frequently lots of it.  Pick up any biography of a world-changing figure, and you will likely read about the sort of person most of us would never want to be and a life most would never want to live.  From Teddy Roosevelt to Thomas Edison, the greats rarely sleep, much less enjoy anything they obtain.  Obsessive, neurotic, driven beyond all rational return, not to mention hounded by the public, it’s a life much better off in theory than practice.  The average might not achieve those things, but are likely to live more peaceful, anonymous lives that can be meaningful nonetheless.  This is because for most people meaning doesn’t necessarily come from achievement.  It comes from relationships with our loved ones, the dignity of work, enjoyment of our hobbies, and hopefully having the time in general to enjoy the things we have rather than obsessing over those we don’t.

Rather than attempt to redefine beauty or any other ideal trait, we would be better off telling kids the truth:  Chances are, they are average, nothing more, nothing less, and there are things that will be unattainable for them whatever they do.  They should not look to the Kardashians or some other celebrity, or even worse some comic book hero or computer generated image, and aspire to be like them.  That’s a fantasy for 99.9% of us and it always will be.  If children (and adults) cannot accept that, they are unlikely to be able to cope with the million other vicissitudes that define a human life.  There are always going to people who have things you don’t, whether by birth or achievement. There is value instead in being grounded – knowing who you are, what you are capable of, your strengths and weaknesses and the like.  This doesn’t mean that children and adults shouldn’t dream, shouldn’t have goals, objectives, and plans.  They can have all of those things and more, some of which they might well achieve, but the reality is they are likely to remain right in the middle of the bell curve and there’s nothing wrong (along with a whole lot right) with that. The alternative is to be like Kurt Vonnegut’s classic Harrison Bergeron and attempt to bring everyone down to the average rather than to aspire to achievement, a world where we would all be diminished. I’m reminded of Rush’s classic 2112: Just think about the average, what use have they for you.