Beauty: Not just cultural, not just biological, but integral

A large scale body image study done in 1997 found that 24% of women were willing to give up more than 3 years of their life if they could achieve their goal weight (Garner, 1997)... a percentage that I would speculate has sharply increased in the last 10 years...

Each year Americans spend nearly $40 billion each year trying to loose weight and approximately $45 billion on cosmetics and toiletries ( Sawer et. all).

As many of you know I have a deep interest in beauty and body image and how the struggles with beauty that women go through (both young and old) can be better understood using an integral framework. (This is not meant to exclude men; I imagine that will come out more in my later work, but right now I am pretty focused on women's relationship to beauty as it has been such a deep part of my own struggle and spiritual path).  In the article I wrote on Integral beauty (currently in editing with AQAL journal), I delve into the many contentious issues surrounding beauty and try to make sense of them using the AQAL map. I was and continue to be really interested in the interrelationship of the four quadrants and how they effect and "construct" how we see the beautiful.

One of the biggest divisions that we see in our modern and post-modern world in our theories on beauty today is the division between the feminists and those of the evolutionary biologists. The feminists tend to favour the position of beauty as  pure socio-cultural construction (i.e., Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth"), and the evolutionary biologists tend to favour scientific explanations (i.e., Darwin's notion that beauty is a biological recognition of desirable reproductive traits, what he termed sexual selection).  These are very roughly the LL/LR and UR perspectives on beauty. There are also, of coarse, the "Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder" theorists (UL) These theorists tend to be more the philosopher types who believe that beauty is generated by one's own subjective experiences and biases and that subjective perception often fluctuates with the shifting of psychological or spiritual states (i.e., you can notice that your perception of beauty in the exterior world shifts with the movement of your own interior states and moods).

My point is that all of these are true, but of coarse partial. I am currently doing a paper for my Psychology of  Sexuality coarse and I'm investigating the discourse of the UR quadrant. Looking at a lot of psychological studies that show how certain physical attributes certainly do effect many areas of our lives, everything from everday social interactions to getting hired for a job, and even getting lighter jury sentences. There is no doubt that things like Waist-to-hip ratios (a sign of reproductive capacity) do effect our "attraction" scale. But to me this perspective on its own is so limited in that it not only misses taking into account the huge effect of the other three quadrants but also excludes development.

This is why I am so interested in really teasing out the Aesthetic line of Development in Wilber's model, something which is still in its baby stages. I am interested in both how we develop in what we are attracted to as well as in what we feel is attractive about ourselves. This accounts for both the masculine and feminine poles of the aesthetic experience (What is attractive to me? is more a masculine question of the watcher and What is attractive about me? is more a feminine question of the dancer, and of coarse these are not to be conflated with men and women, we all have both). Development is both a dynamic affair between the masculine and feminine and a four quadrant affair.

When we miss asking or exploring any of these dimensions we immediately suffer from our own limited perception of the beautiful. When we try to either elevate beauty as a purely objective reality(UR) or when we reduce it to a pure socio-cultural construction (LL/LR) we do injustice to the breadth of beauty's embrace and when we ignore both masculine and feminine aesthetic development we stifle the natural unfolding of beauty's expression.
 
All that said, I would love to hear (either as public comments or through private message sending) about your own relationship to beauty whether you are male or female. I would love to get others insights into this issue and also hear about your personal experiences if you wish to share them.