On any given day, I receive at least 1 or 2 articles in my feed about some beauty pageant going on somewhere in the world. Because I’m traveling today, I have a bit of time to look over all the articles that I’ve catalogued for “later,” many of which are about pageants, of course. And then I saw this new concept of the beauty pageant. A TV show has hit the airwaves called: “Gusto Kong Maging Beauty Queen.” It is essentially a show in which not-so-pretty gals compete (after major instruction and help) over their physical beauty.
I’m not judging whether this show is good for man(or woman)kind or not. It just intrigues me HOW MUCH we feel compelled to judge whether something/someone is beautiful, or whether something/someone is more beautiful than the next thing/person.
What gives?
We know there are tons of academic/scientific studies on why we’re attracted to things of beauty. But what drives us to want to evaluate one’s beauty vs another’s?
Then I started thinking, so much of our attraction to beauty hearkens back to caveman days. Perhaps we’re dealing with same thing here. Maybe we hardwired to seriously evaluate mates before launching into procreation, and it’s this wiring that compels us to do it with all things/people of beauty today?
Ok, so if you buy my argument, then you’d think once we’ve determined our mates, we would no longer need to engage in these beauty evaluations. Of course we don’t lose our appreciation for beauty once we get hitched. But this compulsion to evaluate beauty is going a number of levels deeper. To expend effort evaluating people’s beauty — – whether its watching a beauty pageant or reading about it, seems pretty wasteful. And yet, societies around the world ALL do it — A LOT.
Hmm….I’m stumped.
If you have any ideas, lob ‘em over!
