If male actors had to be as blandly perfect as female ones…
I’m a funny one. My brain is wired weird, and sometimes it’s scary but most of the time it’s amusing. Take for example my response when asked what I, a hetereosexual woman, consider to be the ideal male physique. Most people would list about three traits, like “tall, broad shoulders, perfect teeth.” My list is… a bit longer. And don’t ask me where I get this stuff, because I just discovered in my psyche one day during my teen years, parked right next to my equally untraceable food and music preferences.
My unimaginably nitpicky criteria for the ideal male body:
Well-shaped butts, long legs, no chest hair and very little visible body hair, a certain length to the frame (a proportion I can’t describe, but I know it when I see it), a certain breadth to the shoulders (again, a very specific proportion), and the muscle tone has to be defined to a certain degree and no more but I’m not talking about the actual shape he’s in, but rather an intrinsic way his body arranges muscle and fat.
Yes, folks: the way a man’s skin, fat and muscle cling together is something that makes a difference in how attractive he is to me. Shut up. Da Vinci would’ve understood.
But a few days after I wrote that out last week and realized how hilariously specific it is, I had a truly sobering moment when I realized: my weird ideal for the male body is less specific than the US’s base requirements for a supporting or lead actress. Women who don’t meet those requirements get shuffled into “character acting.” A successful character actor is one of those familiar faces that’s been on all the big TV shows (and probably gets more interesting roles than lead and supporting actors), but you don’t know her name. Actresses are advised by agents whether their looks qualify them to pursue lead and supporting roles or doom them to “character actor” status.
The criteria for a lead or supporting actress runs something like this (at the moment - it changes every decade).
US Film & TV base requirements for lead/supporting actresses
(You can miss about one to three of these traits, but you must feature the vast majority to get work in the US.)
- Underweight.
- White.
- Fleshy, pouty lips. If she’s serious about an acting career, she’ll get the collagen shots. (Oh, by the way, rumor has it: pouty lips are out, cheek implants are in. Actress wannabes are advised to see their cosmetic surgeons for complete details on sucking out the collagen and stuffing the cheeks until you look you have three noses. Mmm, sexy.)
- Long legs.
- Look 30 or younger. (There will be 5 roles reserved in every generation for women who look grown up. Good luck landing them, ladies.)
- Several inches taller than the average woman (average height is just under 5′4″ - most actresses are at least 5′6″).
- Medium to largish breasts. (They don’t want her to look like a porn star, but if she’s serious about an acting career, she’ll get those A-cups bumped up to at least a full B.)
- No big noses.
- No noses with bumps. (You can maybe make get a part on a nine year old ailing Sci-Fi channel show with an imperfect nose, but you will not be deluged with offers from Hollywood.)
- No chins which seem long or short in proportion to the rest of the face (unless you’re a Barrymore or a Spelling, in which case the rules don’t apply to you, sweetie, and can we get you something else, anything else, and please remember us to your folks!).
- Perfect teeth.
- Big eyes. (Jennifer Garner is the only exception, and look how she’s got the puffy lips and all the other traits right down.)
- Long, glossy hair.
- No visible body hair (not that this isn’t an expectation for women outside of acting, too).
- Curvy, female butts are in right now. They weren’t 10 years ago. Enjoy the whiplash from trying to keep up.
Acting talent is optional. Conversely:
US Film & TV base requirements for potential lead actor:
- White.
- Perfect teeth.
You can be off on one of these, but not both.
Do you see the problem?
Among supporting and lead male actors we have a few truly fat men and a lot of chubby guys and a lot of guys who look slim in a suit but have a little extra padding around the middle. None of these guys would have the careers they have if we applied the same standards to male and female actors. We have guys with lovely glossy hair and guys with shaved heads or various stages of balding. We have guys with big noses and weak chins. Short guys like Tom Cruise. Guys with overhanging brows. Beady eyes.
I mean, if we bumped male requirements up to something as specific as the requirements for women, the US film and TV industry would lose all its leading men overnight (just “underweight” wipes out the whole brigade, though I’m sure some of them would be willing to starve if their careers were on the line). And wouldn’t that be a pity for all those people, including me, who find quite a few American lead actors attractive despite their “flaws”? Or because of them?
How does this happen?
This is all a by-product of a sexist culture, but the specific mechanism that takes place is this: when industry people look at a male actor, they see and evaluate the whole man as a total package of talent, physicality, and charisma. When they look at a female actor, they see parts. They see boobies and puffy lips and butts and legs and height and hair and eyes. If they don’t see the parts they’re looking for, they write her off. In short, they can’t see the forest for the T&A.
And don’t forget the casting couch. Women weren’t allowed to act in Shakespeare’s day, so female actors have really been fighting for inclusion for five centuries, and a lot of people in the early days of film and TV didn’t let women forget that. If women wanted roles, they could damn well go the extra mile to get them, and that meant giving someone sexual favors. And now that demanding sexual favors for roles is less common than it used to be, the attitude remains the same: those uppity females need to work harder than a man, if they want a role from me. Since acting is a subjectively measured craft, the only objective requirements men who hate women can force on them are visual. Film is the perfect place for this brand of misogyny because it’s one of the last industries where you can turn someone down for not looking hot enough.
Ever since men were oh-so-kind enough to let women have jobs as an alternative to sexually gratifying men in order to be provided for, women have been struggling with extra tough requirements. Look at the airlines, who as recently as my childhood were requiring women flight attendants to be skinnier than men. It’s all about white men seeing the world as something they own exclusive rights to, and if others want a slice they’ll have to prove they know their rightful second-class place in it by complying with a bunch of insane demands as a show of loyalty to the white male power structure.
Do real life men - you know, the audience - turn up their noses at an overall attractive woman because her lips that don’t pout, she carries a few extra pounds, or her nose isn’t a particular shape? Does anyone know a real life heterosexual man who’s that picky? …that you do not suspect of being secretly gay?
Betacandy’s proposed list of male criteria to make things fair.
- Lean physique, lean faces. No beer bellies, no fleshy faces. (Even though fleshy faces can be attractive, sorry; they’re not in at the moment. Get over it.)
- White.
- Full lips.
- Long legs.
- ETA: Tight, well shaped butts.
- Dramatic cheekbones. (Kind of random, but hey, we have to sort the winners and losers somehow, right?)
- Several inches taller than the average man (average is 5′10″, so we’re talking a 6′ minimum).
- Broad shoulders.
- No big noses (there goes 25% of them).
- No imperfect noses (another 25%).
- No weak or jutting chins (another 25% - wow, this is awesome! Soon we’ll have all those men begging us for a session on the casting couch!).
- Perfect teeth.
- Big eyes.
- Glossy hair.
- Broad shoulders.
That’s really not enough. To balance out the breast obsession, I should spell out some sort of criteria for acceptable nipples and pectoral muscle shapes. I have trouble doing that because even I’m not that picky and I know there’s no single ideal. And yet the same is true with women’s breasts, and we still have to cope with this fixation.
Imagine how many attractive, fascinating male actors this criteria would weed out.
Now imagine how many attractive, fascinating female actors you’ve never had the chance to see.
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65 comments
Great post. And if the men in movies had to behave as blandly as most of the women do, movies would be very dull indeed.
Abs? Or maybe proportions of ass? (It matters, since there’ll be a lot more nude scenes). Heck, maybe we should go with cock-size.
I’d rather go by ass-shape and proportion, I think. Although women’s crotches are shown liberally at this point (in more artsy and less in mainstream films) men’s crotches are 99.9% verboten and have higher ratings than similiar films showing women’s crotches. Meaning, a penis gets an R-17 or an X while a vulva/thatch gets an R, give or take. I’m not familiar with the current rating system to be sure, though. It gets changed every few years.
Very well put. Where is the female Paul Giamatti, Willem Dafoe, or Brian Cox? Unable to get work, that’s where.
Note to Hollywood: I like Claudia Black’s nose. It suits her.
I assume your proposed solution is just to make a point, right? I don’t think that redcuing the range of male actors to bland subset would be an improvement. Unless a backlash against the boring blandness of it all helped pave the way for seeing a greater range character types in general, including female characters.
@Kristi, another good point.
@Nick, three very good suggestions, LOL.
@Gategrrl, we should equalize the ratings systems, though, while we’re at it.
@Patrick, I hope they read it. Claudia Black is fantastic in so many ways, and yet Hollywood would want her to “fix” her nose so she wouldn’t be unique and stand out anymore. (I think it’s so women can’t be as interesting as men in film.)
@C.L., of course it was just to make a point. That’s why I said “imagine” in the two sentences afterward. But without laying out a similarly tough criteria for men, I don’t think one quite comprehends just how accepting we are of how men naturally look, compared to our requirements of women to resemble a little plastic doll from the 50’s. It was a learning exercise for me just to write that criteria out.
Hollywood and TV aim everything at their beloved 17-34 year old male demographic, who as a group are pretty well proven to be able to see better than they can think.
Yep…if the male standards were as strict as female standards, there’d be no Adrian Brody. Or quite a few other Oscar-winning actors.
What, no Tom Hanks or Woody Allen, to name a few :p
I remember seeing The Pianist and thinking Brody was insanely hot. I have a tendancy to develop a crush on an actor because I like the character I see them first in, regardless of who else they go onto play (it’s Will Hunting I keep going to see, not Matt Damon :p) but one of the thing I liked about Brody was that nose. His features were so imperfect and I liked that.
Or… it may just have been that I’m Polish and my grandparents lived through the war so a movie like that is going to resonate with me. Hence the character thing :p
I actually think we give most men far less credit than we should when it comes to body types. There are men out there who are deeply superficial about looks, for sure, but there are women out there who are the same. That’s just a superficial personality, that’s got nothing to do with gender.
The thing that always interests me is how many men can’t think of anyone hotter than Alyson Hannigan (who, I think, is the female Michael Shanks when it comes to cult status). She’s shortish, she’s a redhead, she’s freckly. Yet so many men I’ve met think she’s all that. I think it’s an illustration of how men find women who don’t have much in common with that list sexy, but TPTB keep saying ‘no, this is what you like’. Which is a disservice to everyone.
Pat, I have to disagree with you about 17-34 year-old men as a group being able to see better than they think. I’ve known quite a few men in that age group who had a fairly detailed criteria about personality as well as looks when it came to a character, a lot of men who liked so-and-so in this role because of X but not in that role because of Y. I think it’s a disservice to men to throw a narrow beauty type in front of a man and expect him to automatically find her sexy. I think men’s taste in women is just as varied as women’s taste in men (and I apologise for the obvious leaning towards hetronormativity in that statement).
Scarlett, you are so right on. About eight years ago, who was the cult favorite sex symbol for that crowd? Gillian Anderson - another short, freckly redhead.
A friend of mine and I once had a discussion of “sex symbols that aren’t” - referring to men, specifically - in a bar, and it was one of those things that got most of the surrounding folk involved. To my surprise, most folks mentioned George Clooney and Brad Pitt (too cookie cutter and “typical”) on the men’s side and Jessica Alba and Pamela Anderson on the women’s side (too generic, no brains). Responses to “well, what IS sexy?” were all over the map. There was very little that was constant - which just goes to show that the whole variety thing? Yeah…that probably would sell more than Hollywood gives us credit for, both men AND women.
But then, this was a slightly older crowd, and most people also expressed frustration with the youth-obsessed nature of what Hollywood shoves down our throats. Because, of course, if we’re being told that we can only accept someone who’s under 25 as our sex symbols, what does that say about our own relative attractiveness now that we’re (gasp) over 40?
And for the record? Big noses WIN. David Duchovny, Adrian Brody, Jeff Goldblum…I’m lookin’ at you, gentlemen…
[...] If male actors had to be as blandly perfect as female ones… [...]
Well, as far as youth culture goes, again, I think there’s a disservice being done to assume that men within a particular age group have very narrow standards when it comes to what makes a woman beautiful. I think Hollywood’s got it in their heads that this standard exists and keeps perpetuating it when in RL I’ve known men to be fascinated by all kinds of body types.
I think that younger age groups, of either sex, don’t have standards they entirely trust in, or perhaps can entirely articulate, so they easily glom onto what’s fed to them, resulting in a monotonous array of Prince Charmings and Princess Decoratives.
Off the top of my head, a dozen beautiful women I could think of are Freema Agyeman, Lena Olin, Elodie Bouchez, Bettany Hughes, Linda Hamilton, Lena Headey, Tori Amos, Grace Park, Claudia Black, Vanessa Mae, Sarah-Jane Redmond, and Michelle Yeoh. I don’t know if they’re as different from one another - or from the standards BetaCandy refers to - as I want to find them (or want to think of myself as looking). But I do think they put the lie to Hollywood’s tunnel vision.
Also, all of them are really talented, and maybe that’s the point I ought to be making - that talent is attractive - in women as well as men, and to men as well as women.
Scarlett, I honestly can’t think of anyone hotter than Alyson Hannigan. And she misses out on… what, six items on that list? So it isn’t surprising that it took a cult show for her to reach stardom.
Of course, Hannigan is a perfect example of people being attracted to qualities other than physical appearance, as both her acting style and the characters she plays are very appealing.
I can’t, I’m too depressed.
It’s long frustrated me that it’s acceptable for a leading man to have imperfections, but not for a leading woman. There are exceptions, of course.
yeah it does seem women have to look even more cartoonishly perfect and ill proportioned lately.
I say this because I was watching “Buck Rogers in the 25th century” on netflix last week and the first thing that struck me was that all the women had NORMAL sized breasts. They weren’t like, freakishly large. They were thin but I did not see ribcages. The next thing that struck me was that that was something that struck me as unusual. Having a body where everything was “proportionate” (meaning that breasts were not the size of human heads), was not something I was USED to seeing.
As an aside, Buck Rogers was also not as abysmal in the feminist department as I would have thought. Yeah, some stuff was pretty bad but Colonel Dearing is ALWAYS saving him. lol.
Nick, I used to have a huge crush on Amos, she was the woman I’d turn for. Ironically enough, it was Scarlett’s Walk which turned me off her (disliked the album enough that I just never bothered to listen to anything new of her again) which I think in itself goes back to finding talent attractive; when she and I were musically in the same place, that was so hot, when we weren’t so much, I lost interest. While she certainly has very striking features, I don’t think her looks interested me so much as her talent and mindset.
I’m optimistic enough to believe there are plenty of men out there who think the same way. I think the cult following of women like Hannigan and Anderson (Gillian, not Pamela!) is proof positive that if you give someone many of them would see as quirky and appealling without nesasarily(sp?) meeting traditional beauty standards, they’ll never be able to cite someone so hot :p I actually think all the women you’ve cited are proof of that, but Hollywood seems determined to keeping thinking ‘no, what you REALLY want are Jessica Biel clones’
Interesting. In addition to Alyson Hannigan, I do find both Tori Amos and Jessica Biel to be “insanely hot.” Like Scarlett, in Amos’ case talent is a big factor - I love her voice and her music. (Oddly, Scarlet’s Walk is my second-favorite Amos disc after Boys for Pele). And her minset is another factor there. I think my crush on Amos really took hold when I realized that lyrics like “tuna, luna, a little flubber in my igloo” make perfect and complete sense to her.
Biel is interesting because I normally don’t find women of her “type” especially attractive, and I just considered her “generically pretty” until I saw her in Blade: Trinity, for which she had gained about fifteen pounds of muscle, and suddenly she was mesmerisingly gorgeous. I think that definitely says that individual tastes (like my fondness for rather muscular women) are far, far more significant that what Hollywood tells us is attractive. (And my fondness for Biel has continued even though she has lost most of that muscle.)
For that matter, continuing using my tastes as an example: I find muscular women very attractive, but I am not attracted only to muscular women. The idea that men might not only have individual preferences, but that a given man’s preferences can vary, would probably make executives’ heads explode.
@Pat, I don’t know how much of it’s really that demographic group, or just Hollywood’s reflection of its own perpetual adolescence.
@Genevieve, I started to make a list of men who’d be out if they nitpicked at them like they do women. One of my favorites - Chris Noth - would be right out. Scrubs would suddenly have an all-female cast, except for one or two of Elliot’s boyfriends and Turk. And so on.
@Fran, ITA that more variety would result in more profit. That’s why I can’t interpret Hollywood’s refusal to chase the dollar as anything but indulging their own fantasies.
@Nick:
That’s a good point.
As for the actresses you named, I don’t know them all, but most of them come within 1-3 traits of the criteria. Grace Park doesn’t, but that may be why she’s on the Sci-Fi channel instead of embarking on a movie career or a network show of her own. While Claudia Black is on a US show, I don’t think Hollywood is making her any offers (a 9 year old Sci-Fi channel show is not considered a great achievement for an actress hoping to make it in the US). I’m hard-pressed to think of an actress whose gotten major work in the US with a nose like Black or Redmond have, and they are both very good-looking women with some seriously dedicated fans. Which is my point - had they been Americans, I doubt they’d have gotten as far as they have working in Canada.
@ThisIsEndless, OMG, I know what you mean! When I started watching Cagney and Lacey a few months ago, I had to adjust. They looked like real people. Uncommonly good-looking real people, but still: real.
Oh, man, you HAD to go and link to my favorite actress out there, one who pretty much rides head and shoulders among many others, the exceedingly talented and lovely Claudia Black.
Oy.
Listen to this woman give an interview and be discomfited by the fact that a woman who is talented but refuses the requisite surgery spends her time doing audio work.
And does it extremely well.
I will say, though, that a certain “Grey’s Anatomy” hasn’t quite bowed to the majority. Ellen Pompeo is no one’s idea of exquisite beauty, Sara Ramirez, while beautiful, is not a perfect size 1, Brooke Smith looks like a many woman you’d meet at work, Chandra Wilson has the gall to be short and overweight, and Sandra Oh is ASIAN. Asian! The only “typical” beauty is Katherine Heigel…
Oh, wait. The least talented and the one with all the movieoffers.
I stand corrected.
And Jim Belushi is married to Courtney Thorne Smith in TV land.
What is wrong with these people!
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother several months ago when there happened to be an episode of Cold Case on where the flashbacks were set in the 1970s, and my mother went off on a rant about how no one then was as skinny as the modern actress playing the main character in those sequences, or the whole group of women of roughly equivalent size in one scene. I believe it led to my pointing out an in-story reason or two that it might be acceptable story-wise in that case, and got a very prickly response to the effect of: “No. You would not have been able to find two women that skinny back then. I can count all her ribs and vertebrae for ****’s sake!” Also, several characters had described this woman as being absolutely gorgeous, which then started the rant again about how that wasn’t the norm and would have been highly unlikely back then.
I believe it was set within a year or so of when Buck Rogers was in production. Why do I feel like we’re going in reverse?
It irks me greatly to think that anyone has suggested that Claudia Black get cosmetic surgery. She’s gorgeous as who she is, and changing her appearance to meet Hollywood’s beauty standards would take something away from her.
I have to say that my admiration for Black is definitely increased by her refusal to “help” her career in this way.
Agreed. And I hope the scumbags don’t grind her down.
Claudia Black would look like 15 other interchangeable actresses if she “fixed” her nose. I find her appearance awesome. I enjoy her talent immensely. She should have her own damn show - she’s got what it takes.
@Maggie, we ARE going in reverse. In the early 80’s (Buck Rodgers time), I felt like I was expected to be bone-thin. But I didn’t see that on film - actresses may actually have been underweight, but on film they looked normal. No ribs showing, etc. Then in the late 80’s/early 90’s, as the common person was getting over the idea that she should be rail-thin, suddenly they started showing off chest ribs and breastbones and scary skinny arms. It was a big WTF, and it seemed to happen suddenly. And nothing was ever the same again.
Women in the 80’s were proportionate. There were still insane stupid criteria for them, but they weren’t expected to be skinny yet have big breasts. And I daresay cosmetic surgery wasn’t considered part of the standard skin care routine. They got surgery to look younger and I’m sure to fix “flaws”, but it wasn’t like you had to go get your lips plumped before showing up for an audition. That’s just bizarre.
Claudia Black would look like 15 other interchangeable actresses if she “fixed” her nose. I find her appearance awesome. I enjoy her talent immensely. She should have her own damn show - she’s got what it takes.
*cough*Jennifer Grey*cough* Look what happened after her nose job. More recently, it was disappointing to see Ashlee Simpson and Ashley Tisdale go the nose-job route - before, they looked beautiful and unique and after, they look like every other young Hollywood starlets.
As much as I do agree with the shallowness of Hollywood casting directors, I don’t’ think her nose is what makes her especially distinctive. Truly, I think it’s her voice and her general presence. There’s just something very regal about her, and it’s not just the heighth because being tall is sort of expected.
I think all those things that make her fantastic are exactly why she isn’t Katherine Heigl, the latest “it” girl–she’s comes across as intelligent, witty and interesting, and has a voice that carries authority.
Truly, I think that’s what scares Hollywood the most: an authoritative woman.
Ooh, let me correct my last comment–I agree with the PREMISE that Hollywood casting directors are shallow when it comes to casting innocuous females, not that I agree that this is all right.
@SBG, it’s depressing.
@EMP, yes, there’s a lot that makes her standout, and I do think an authoritative woman scares the pants off Hollywood men.
An excellent article, as usual. Though I may have to argue that while most women need to be above 5 feet, for inches, they are equally not allowed to pass 6 feet. They must not tower over the leading man! Of course, this may well be mostly a stage issue, as I have an extremely tall stage actress friend who has the hardest time getting work. In film, they have tricks to remedy this, but I still don’t see that many extremely tall women in film. (I’m only 5 foot 2, so I’m sort of at the other end of that spectrum.)
I have had such a girlcrush on Claudia Black ever since I first saw her, it’s crazy. Also, the characters that I always thought of as the most gorgeous on The West Wing were Allison Janney and Stockard Channing, and, at least at the time, Janney was viewed as too “angular” to be attractive, and Channing was apparently not thin enough.
Yep, you’re right that there’s a maximum height requirement, too. And it varies, because there are a few really short guys like Tom Cruise who’ve been megastars for reasons just not apparent to me, which means a lot of actresses are taller than they are.
But even that is sad, because I’m reminded of David McCallum and Joanna Lumley in Sapphire and Steel back in the early 80’s in the UK. They’re close to the same height in flats, so most of the episodes put her in heels to make her taller. And David McCallum was so comfortable with it, so confident, that it never occurred to you to think it looked weird or mattered in any way.
Random insertion of a favorite quote.
But people add other qualities to beauty - sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love - because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but for a little while.
W. Somerset Maugham
Since the conversation got derailed a bit to Claudia Black, I wanted to jump in for a moment and ask — has anyone, or could someone, do a writeup about the complete infantilization her character underwent during the last two seasons of Stargate? I searched but only found an initial post when she became a regular.
As a lover of the original Vala, who was intelligent, confident and self-sufficient, I was horrified when they brought her into the SG-1 team as a silly girl with pigtails (!) who cared more about her hairdryer than the success of the mission. I suppose it was their method of doing a “character arc” but I can’t believe the strong Vala would turn into such a stereotypical female so fast. That, plus the inexplicable elevation of Mitchell over Carter, really ruined much of those last two seasons for me.
Thanks! (sorry for hijack!)
Something for me to think a bit more about, then.
Katherine, we have a couple more posts than that. This one might be what you’re looking for:
Vala Mal Doran on Stargate SG-1 in Season 10 by aizjanika
There’s also 10 Things I Hate About Vala by sbg, which is not so much about the infantilizing, but I think it speaks volumes to how the writers were asking us to suddenly trust and adore this character who’d been introduced as a not-particularly-sympathetic selfish villain.
Unfortunately I stopped watching the show around the time it became apparent that they were framing her as someone’s fantasy of a molested child coming into a super-sexxxy adolescence, which I found to be one of the the show’s more disturbing missteps.
Unfortunately?
Hehe, I meant “unfortunately” for Katherine’s purposes. I consider it a very wise move on my part.
It all goes to show that with women characters, all that really counts is that the actress be charismatic, and the answer to romantic fantasies of their shippy viewers.
In this case, there are fans who are WILD for Vala simply because she satisfies that deep need for romance of any kind in any show, even when it is inapproriate for the characters OR the show.
It’s not like she was developed to be like Dexter, of the Showtime (HBO?) series who starts out as a serial killer, and yet is a sympathetic monster that you can sort-of root for, because he only goes after other “bad guys” (other serial killers or sociopaths). If Vala had been developed as a parallel to the Dexter-type of character, she would have retained her interesting facets and stayed true to her own character - and none of that shippy shit would have occured…I think.
Thanks, BetaCandy. I thought I remembered there was something else :).
Interestingly, reading those articles and the comments, it seems that a lot of people didn’t like the original Vala either. It really shows me how I wish she had developed. She could have had a character arc that dealt with her learning not to lie, to steal, and to use sex as a tool, without losing her endearing qualities: the confidence and magnetism she displayed in Prometheus Unbound. If she had, a lot more people probably would have liked her. I think TPTB underestimated the fans; lots of SG-1 fans male and female have voiced their appreciation of strong women characters.
Thanks for an interesting discussion.
Reminds me of something a friend of mine said once about thinness (he’s a male entertainer): “I keep seeing people I know who are going through chemo, and they look really good to me.”
Feministing has a post on this topic, that I thought was worth linking to:
http://feministing.com/archives/009040.html#more
Wow, that’s really encapsulates how messed up we’ve become about this issue.
[...] clothing, so women should settle for the sheep right off the bat. It reminds women that men are allowed to be incredibly shallow about women’s looks and personality traits, but if we start to think like that, we’ll be [...]
Thank you for articulating something I have felt my whole life but not been able to properly consolidate.
You must not live in New York or Los Angeles. A certain … symmetry … is almost required, even if you don’t work as an actress, or in PR.
No, LittleM, I DO live in Los Angeles but every time I talk about how insane the beauty standard is here among even the average people, people tend to dismiss it because they’ve never seen anything like that in the areas where they’ve lived.
So I decided to stop regarding Los Angelenos as human, and ever since, the world has made a lot of sense.
For example, in most regions, I’m about a 7/10 on the beauty scale - pretty, worth checking out. In L.A., I’m a 3-5 - rarely worth a second glance.
Perhaps most of the time, they don’t consciously break beauty standards into a list like the one in your post - they think “well, she has to be pretty/beautiful/sexy/hot/gorgeous” without thinking about what those concepts entail, or the degree of patterning they show in them - or “I don’t have a list, she just has to have something” without analysing the something too far. It happened to me earlier in this thread; I doubt I’m the only one.
Which goes to proving your point of course.
Something else that occurred:
In men, those five words - pretty, beautiful (or handsome), sexy, hot, and gorgeous - don’t mean quite same things. Combing Lost for examples, I could say that Boone was pretty, Charlie started out pretty and became hot, Jack is handsome, Sayid is both hot and sexy, and Hurley is gorgeous - to whom I apply those words, and even how I demark them might be subjective - but that I demark them makes sense to people.
In women, they treated as the same thing. Kate, Claire, Sun, Danielle, or Juliet have to be all five or they’re considered none. Or they have to fit one - usually pretty - and the rest are considered to follow.
Nick, I think that’s largely true, though it is my understanding that random features like “collagen lips” can become a requirement from the studio heads down to the casting people. So they DO break it down somewhat.
But after a while it’s self-perpetuating. Actresses look at who’s getting parts and notice when no one with this feature or that is getting cast. They try to have the features they see the industry casting. And then the industry can - seriously - forget that it started this crap, and chuckle about those silly gals and how obsessive they are with their appearance! (Which makes me absolutely homicidal.)
What the women all need to seem, regardless of what “beauty” word you or I might apply, is in need of male validation. That’s what Hollywood believes the young target male audience wants - it’s all about young male insecurity. Women characters who are gorgeous and enjoy casual sex enough that even insecure 16 year old boys can imagine they’d have a chance are STILL scary because they are in control, and control is the only part of security insecure young men have grasped. It’s codified in looks - big eyes and pouty lips look childlike, and therefore non-threatening. But it goes deeper than that. (I keep thinking of Teryl Rothery, who it totally hot and gorgeous and sufficiently meets the criteria on my list, but always seems to play women who are too authoritative to need validation badly enough to find themselves waking up with some guy who spun them a line that sounded good after the third tequila shooter.)
It’s interesting that while young boys’ insecurities are met by the media with carefully crafted non-threatening women characters, young girls’ insecurities are met with those same carefully crafted non-threatening women characters, and the male characters who apparently refuse to date anything that does look like those women, regardless of what else she’s got going for her.
Hmm, this might brew into a whole post someday.
[...] semi-cute at best but he’s dated a string of women who completely conform to the criteria in this post. In fact, the only particularly good-looking man on the whole show is Donald Faison, yet every [...]
[...] glasses-wearing, weak-chinned, male celebs we find crazy hot? Or should we just refer him to this post? Think about that. Men can work out all they want in the gym…but it’ll do them little good. If [...]
(Having followed link from Comments you haven’t read yet)
(i) Woo hoo, automatically going to last page of comments
(ii) Why latest at top when single pages of comments are in first-to-last order? Accidental artefact of going to last page?
Sorry about the nitpicking. Also, your “site mission” (as linked from the site menu in the sidebar) has a link saying get involved that goes to a 404 error. (I was looking for somewhere to place comments on the site as opposed to the post I just happened to be at.)
Susan, with the plugin available, it’s either/or: both comments and numbered pages in ASC or DESC. I’ve gone back to ASC order as that’s more in tune with the rest of the site. I also raised the limit for paging to 60, so it will happen on a lot fewer posts.
You forgot the butt requirement. Leading men should have nice tight butts and turn around a lot in movies.
OH MY GOD, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?
I’ve edited the post to include the butt requirement in that final list. I did mention it as my very first requirement when I was talking about my personal ideals. It is absurdly important to me that a man have a tight, well-shaped butt.
Last season on House they made the unreal gorgeousness of all the female characters into a plot point. They didn’t go so far as to include women in the cast who were equivalently attractive to the male leads, but at least they admitted what they were doing and made it a plot point.
The big thing that I get sick of (and that led me to quit acting at a young age) is seeing very very pretty women cast as plain women. Those are my roles! Why are models in my roles? I saw the writing on the wall and gave up before I started to feel too bad about myself. I didn’t want to act enough to be abused that much.
Pretty can play plain, but plain can never play pretty. Just throw a pair of glasses and a bad wardrobe on a pretty woman, and she’s suddenly “plain” or even “ugly.”
Sets it up for the big reveal about how the ugly duckling is actually swan.
::rolls eyes::
A male ugly duckling, however, can be both ugly and hot, with no magical physical transformation at all.
Just from a viewing perspective I get really irritated seeing a pretty actress cast as a plain Jane. It’s not a feminist or political objection - it simply pulls me out of the story like a badly executed stunt. My eyes know I’m not seeing film wants to believe it’s shown me.
Or perfect, white teeth of all characters in a period piece.
For me it’s a glasses = ugly thing. I like the way I look in glasses, while I’m being shown everwhere (except ads for LensCrafters) that glasses are not attractive. Heh.
I obviously can’t speak for anyone else, but that is one anachronism that I’m totally willing to overlook. I’m not saying the whole world needs caps or veneers, but let’s not go crazy, ‘kay?
That sort of thing doesn’t usually stick out to me unless I’m already looking for it, because most of the people they cast in those roles are so similar looking that I do find them boring. This is why I’m much better at identifying the Hey It’s That Guy/Woman than the parade of cookie-cutter 20 to 30 year olds who show up in larger roles– there’s so little that’s distinctive there. Which is very sad, for them and for the people who aren’t getting cast.
I can think of a few times where I’ve even spent half a show trying to figure out if they recast some random recurring guest star because while I remember the character vaguely, I have no recollection of the actor. (CSI leaps to mind, thanks to Sara’s seasons 2-3 boyfriend Hank. Seriously never had any idea when some tallish, kinda blondish guy was going to turn out to be him, even when he was in uniform.)
It’s not the teeth, per se, it’s the whole peroxide-blonde tanning-booth Surfer Boy/Babe look on someone who’s supposed to be from someplace/somewhen else than Southern California, 1940-2008, and yet this supposed Faerie Queen/Amazon Shaman/Warrior Poet/Dragonrider/Merman/VikingHero looks like someone yanked out of Baywatch and hastily shoved into some costume duds and a prop sword stuck in their hand, grinning coyly at the camera in the only way they know how… Boris Vallejo’s illustrations are REALLY bad for this, but an awful lot of cover artists have this problem with their chosen models, and of course it’s epidemic in Hollywood historicals/fantasy shows.
(I swear that’s one of the reasons for Buffy’s cult following: here were all these people with interesting faces and voices who didn’t all look just like everybody else on TV! Likewise, Dr. Who, whichever version…)
Or perfect, white teeth of all characters in a period piece.
“I obviously can’t speak for anyone else, but that is one anachronism that I’m totally willing to overlook. I’m not saying the whole world needs caps or veneers, but let’s not go crazy, ‘kay?
”
I love how we all sit around patting ourselves on the back for not being culturally indoctrinated about physical appearance, but somehow it is still acceptable to demand everyone we see on TV to have perfectly straight and bleached teeth. Hygiene is one thing, but parents being made to believe they have to put themselves into huge debt just to be sure their children have perfect teeth is not right.
Many people rationalize their discrimination against people with imperfect teeth by saying it’s unhygienic (which is untrue), but they are really indoctrinated with the stereotype that people with imperfect teeth are stupid, dirty, and uneducated. The truth of course is the placement and strength of one’s teeth is mostly genetic and without COSMETIC surgery, you can’t fix it.
Sorry, I just HAD to rant about that because it’s so prevalent in otherwise anti-lookism/racism/sexism/abilism communities. I think it is the result that most people in these communities are middle-class and educated and thus have access to orthodontic care and are surrounded by others who are the same.
Otherwise, I really like the post and most of the comments have been insightful.
P.S. - I noticed for the first time while watching “The Dark Knight” that Morgan Freeman has far less than perfect teeth. I don’t have any conclusions to draw from that, but it is something to think about.
I think you completely missed the tone of my comment. I thought both the part about not going crazy and the
made it clear that this is not what I was talking about. When I said that what I had in mind was actually an episode of a show where the idea that it was a time before mass produced toothpaste was taken to an insane (and obviously badly faked) extreme in my opinion, given that the lack of modern dental practices doesn’t imply a complete lack of basic hygiene, and the character in question was supposed to have been reasonably well off until fairly recently.
My argument is not that everyone needs to look like a Crest commercial, but when someone decides to try to address this issue with something set in Ye Olden Days they always do so badly and never apply it to their blandly pretty lead. It’s jarring when the hero obviously had extensive work done and the minor characters didn’t. I also felt I made it clear that it was a personal preference, something this thread is full of.
I didn’t think Maggie was saying she demands perfect straight white teeth. I thought she meant she doesn’t want to see a perfectly realistic representation of what some mouths must have looked like before humans had developed any sort of dental care, dentures, etc.
I actually prefer the British idea of good teeth. They don’t aspire to this unnaturally straight, white, veneered look Hollywood encourages, where a smile begins to look like comic art. Many British actors have teeth that are fairly straight, reasonably white - and that’s more attractive to me than a smile that no longer looks human.
That said, I know some dentists and orthodontists pressure parents to do unnecessary work on their kids’ teeth, but it’s not ALL unnecessary. Braces can contribute to hygiene if your teeth are so closely packed that some of them are getting shoved into a second row out front where the toothbrush and floss can no longer reach them, as was my case. Mine were never “perfectly” straightened and I honestly didn’t want them to be - I wanted them to still look like teeth.
Braces can contribute to hygiene if your teeth are so closely packed that some of them are getting shoved into a second row out front where the toothbrush and floss can no longer reach them, as was my case.
Or teeth sticking out where they tear at an upper lip - I’ve seen that too. Or causing massive amounts of pain and failure to chew (and hence digest) food properly.
This is because we are an evolutionary kludge, not a perfect design. Whether or not your teeth will fit is determined by whether or not you’ve got a genetic matchup between the size of your jaw and the size of your teeth, and since most of these problems are non-lethal in the sense that they won’t kill most sufferers off before they’ve had a chance to breed (although dental cause a huge number of deaths among working class and poor people that usually go unrealized by the middle class) they haven’t (and wouldn’t) be eliminated by Natural Selection any time during the past few hundred thousand years of the species (any more than smokers will be eliminated by natural selection, as I used to frequently hear highly-educated idiots aver on Usenet as reasons why they didn’t support medical care for smokers, or assistance for getting off tobacco dependency. No, fools, by definition what which does not kill you off until after you are old enough to have grandchildren is unable to have the LEAST bit of evolutionary impact…)
OTOH, the bit about so-called progressives sneering at people with bad teeth in an unreflective revelation of their entrenched classism is spot on. It doesn’t just happen with straightness either: I stopped paying attention to what Shakespeare’s Sister had to say after she defended her guest poster Watery Tart for expelling a bunch of putrid ly-vile mockery of people too poor to go to the dentist, and therefor missing teeth, a few years back.
I think it’s a bit naive to believe that one’s concept of physical attractiveness has nothing to do with gender. I think the reality of all of this is summed up with Jennifer’s amazingly accurate, couldn’t have said it better myself, quote…
“She really needs to wear some makeup or something, she’s got all those pits and dark circles and stuff on her face…” says a male friend of mine whose own skin looks like the bad side of the moon. Meanwhile, every girl who sees him thinks he gorgeous and never mentions his skin.
“Dude, her breasts are sagging down to her stomach, hasn’t she ever heard of a pushup bra?” says an overweight male stranger waiting for the bus with me whose own chest sagged lower than the woman’s chest he was commenting on. Meanwhile, his wife/girlfriend was kissing and stroking him as if she had never known anyone so hot in her life.
But they’re guys. They’re allowed to be imperfect, allowed to have a belly, bad skin, balding or thinning hair, to be flawed, to be natural, to be human. It doesn’t make them less of a man, but a woman - well - a woman can be flawed and even possibly likable that way… she just needs to do something about those flaws at some point and she really needs to be spectacular in other areas to make up for them.
It’s like some strange unwritten rule.
If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard a man say something to the effect of, “But I’m a guy. Guys are supposed to look like shit. Women are supposed to be hot.” I’d be typing this on a golden keyboard with diamond keys - and this concept seems to be echoed throughout society.
Sure, some women say, “I like a man who is well groomed and well dressed and muscular and handsome and all around perfect”, but when the general population sees men like that, the first thing they think is, “He must be gay”, because apparently, a heterosexual man isn’t supposed to care about his looks and certainly not to the extent that a woman is supposed to obsess over hers - so if he does look just a bit too perfect, he must not be a “real man”.
A woman who looks perfect, however, is just the perfect woman.
It’s not that men aren’t attracted to women who don’t fit the “ideal” image of beauty because they are - just not for their looks.
We could say that hollywood is just forcing males to “think” that they find certain things attractive, but I’m pretty sure no one is putting a gun to the heads of the millions of subscribers to magazines like Maxim and FHM and the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated who couldn’t care less about the articles…
Men are given much more slack, even to the point where their “ugliness” can be what makes them attractive. Women aren’t afforded that same luxury.
How often have you heard women remark, “Scars are really sexy on a man!” Sure, maybe what they really mean to say is, “I like rugged, dangerously mysterious men with a dark and brooding past and scars remind me of that.” Nevertheless, on a man, something “ugly” like a disfiguring scar can be beautiful.
It’s not the same for women. For women, ugly physical traits are never anything other than ugly. A man may find her attractive, he’ll just find her attractive in spite of that ugly trait or even go so far as to remark that, “She’s hot, but she’d be hotter if she didn’t have that XYZ.”
We may speak of how many men we’ve known who found short red heads with freckles attractive, but those aren’t traits that are considered ugly, just traits that aren’t used as the model for the ideal and women with those traits can still fit the ideal in other ways, so that’s a bad example.
Look at the male singer Seal. Everyone who knows him is familiar with the huge birthmark/burn whatever it is taking up nearly half of his face. I can’t even count how many women think he’s just so handsome and that the mark on his face somehow makes him even more so.
If you put that same mark across a woman’s face, how many males do you know who would say she was pretty? If you say any, you’re lying lol
Yes, men and women have very different opinions on what’s “acceptable”. Women are set against much higher standards than men because men are much pickier about the way that women look than women are about the way that men look. And while there are women who are also that superficial, they’re still fewer in number and they don’t chase that superficial ideal the way that men do.
A woman may walk into a bar and see a really hot guy and maybe try to talk to him, see what he’s all about. If his personality sucks, she’ll more than likely walk away. A man may walk into a bar and see a really hot girl and if she says, “Let’s go back to your place”, more than likely, the guy will do it. She doesn’t need to be intelligent or funny or charming. It would be nice and he may prefer that for a relationship, but who’s talking about relationships, right? She’s hot, let’s do her!”
A woman may walk through the door, look at her average overweight hubby/boyfriend and think for a second, “I wish he looked like Adrian Brody”. Then she’ll think about all of the reasons she loves him in spite of him not being a sexpot and somehow, appreciate him more in that moment for it.
A man may walk through the door, look at his average overweight wife/girlfriend and think for a second, “I wish she looked like Jessica Alba”. Then he’ll go watch porn for an hour starring women who do look like Jessica Alba, then turn on the TV to watch a show he mostly watches because of that really hot actress who has the most amazing body he’s ever seen while he talks to his buddy on the phone about that waitress with huge tits who served them at the restaurant three days ago.
Sure, not everyone is like this, but the majority is what one must focus on when trying to disect problems and the majority of men have a more narrow-minded view of what makes a woman physically attractive than women do of what makes an attractive man. The fact that we may know exceptions to these rules in our personal lives doesn’t mean the “rules” don’t exist.
[...] of a theme going on here. Women are welcome in front the camera - if they’re young, meet the insane beauty standard, and are willing to be depicted not as sexual beings but as objects intended to rally Our Boys into [...]
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