Looking Good

When an image of a beautiful woman holding a supine man is painted on an altar piece or carved for a chapel, it is understood to be Mary holding the body of Jesus. These are not ordinary people; to believers, they are the Queen of Heaven and the Son of God. People don't typically see them and think, "I'd like to look like that," or, "Where can I get those clothes?"

But a similar image of a man resting in a woman's embrace, presented in a magazine or on the side of a bus, is usually trying to convey the opposite message. It's saying, "This could be you."

What's more, beauty is now a mass phenomenon, almost as ubiquitous as electricity or water. Hard to remember, but high-speed, high-quality color printing is only about 50 years old (the same is true for color television). Our world, in which ordinary people view hundreds of lifelike, full-color, drop-dead gorgeous images daily, is entirely the product of that brief period. For most of history, ordinary people saw few, if any, deliberately beautiful images in their entire lives. Paintings and sculptures were for palaces and cathedrals; most human beings until recently lived on farms or in isolated villages. If they visited town and saw a beautiful statue in the square, the sheer rarity of that experience would heighten the sense that this beauty was in no way related to their common lives.

Now, movies and television give us beauty as an everyday experience. We watch stories set in offices, schools, hospitals, neighborhoods just like the ones we inhabit ourselves. We're encouraged to relate as peers to the beautiful people who act out these stories. That's my life up on the screen! Or, I feel as if Julia Roberts and I could be best friends. Or, why can't the boys at my school be more like Zack and Cody? Other media, using still more beautiful models (airbrushed and Photoshopped), cheerfully explain to us how to eat, exercise, dress and groom so that we can be beautiful, too.

Democratizing beauty has all sorts of effects . The one that gets talked about the most is a negative. Studies suggest that the more saturated society becomes with images of beautiful people, the less satisfied we are with our own bodies. Somewhere between half and three-quarters of young women in America, depending on the survey, are unhappy with the way they look. Young men are catching up. Obsession with appearances is blamed for maladies ranging from eating disorders to steroid abuse to depression.

Author Naomi Wolf made a splash as a young woman when she theorized that beauty was a "myth" fostered by society and the personal appearance industry to keep liberated women insecure and shopping. Modern women were gaining more power in the workplace, in politics and in their personal lives, Wolf maintained, but beauty was their Achilles' heel.

She was followed up by another bestselling author, Susan Faludi, who asked what was up with all the weight-lifting, body-waxing, bulge-obsessed young men in America. Their fixation on appearance, she explained, could be traced to society's failure to honor such traditionally masculine achievements as fatherhood and physical labor.

Since those indictments were published in the 1990s, other trends have emerged to make some people wonder whether beauty is really so oppressive and morbid. Anorexia was the danger that haunted Wolf's book, but in fact the epidemic among Americans today is the opposite: obesity. Perhaps for most Americans, images of beauty have become so commonplace that they are like the weather -- everyone talks about it, but nobody ever does anything about it.

In his History of Beauty , Eco rejects the idea that Americans are tyrannized by rigid and impossible standards of beauty. Having traced thousands of years in which the ideal body types celebrated by artists waxed and waned -- the women going from full-figured to gamine and back again; the men fluctuating between lithe and muscular -- the Italian philosopher concludes that today's mass media have no "unified model, any single ideal of beauty. They can retrieve . . . models from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s . . . the Junoesque opulence of Mae West and the anorexic charms of the latest fashion models; the sultry beauty of Naomi Campbell and the Nordic beauty of Claudia Schiffer . . . George Clooney with his short hair, and neo-cyborgs who paint their faces in metallic shades and transform their hair into forests of colored spikes."

Ours is a culture in which "60 Minutes" profiles an actress from India, Aishwarya Rai, as "the most beautiful woman in the world"; other candidates proposed by assorted media for that title include the African American Halle Berry, Asian American Lucy Liu, Mexican-born Salma Hayek and German-born Heidi Klum. Eco luxuriates in the variety, hailing "the absolute and unstoppable polytheism of Beauty."

But how does this "orgy of tolerance," as Eco puts it, coexist with the rigidly intolerant rules of visual symmetry? Here we run into the difference between those closely related concepts of beauty and fashion. Beauty speaks to our instincts; fashion is more calculated. For most of history, clothing, cosmetics and even preferred body types have been signs of class.

Take skin color among Caucasians, for instance. It's no accident that rich women (and sometimes men) powdered their faces stark white in an era when the typical poor person labored on a farm. Suntanned skin was the mark of poverty. But with the industrialization of Western life, the poor moved indoors to work in mills and factories. They lived in cramped, dark tenements in newly packed cities. As poor people turned pale, cosmetic powders turned bronze. Now a tanned look was a token of leisure time, a hint of yacht clubs, lawn tennis and afternoons by the pool. You can read similar messages in clothing styles: Hoop skirts and powdered wigs were obviously not designed for physical labor. Even body types: Plumpness can signal wealth in a country of starving people. At other times, skinniness delivers that message. The Duchess of Windsor's famous remark, "One can never be too rich or too thin," could only be spoken by a person who never endured a famine.

For most of history, images of beauty itself were a sort of class marker. The jasper queen at the Metropolitan was immortalized for her looks, yes -- but also because she was the queen. You need only to spend a few minutes in the galleries of a good museum to see that for many centuries artists found their subjects almost exclusively among kings, popes, duchesses and princesses. Whether they were beautiful or not.

Why would an artist, who knows beauty when he sees it, paint a homely rich person when he could spend his days with a peasant beauty? Economics. Someone has to pay the artist. There were no magazine publishers, advertising firms or pinup calendar makers. Art required rich patrons, and they wanted pictures of themselves. Displayed in town squares and guild halls, these images were propaganda for the ruling family or class. Displayed at home, they stroked the owner's vanity.

What would have happened if the artists had set out in search of beautiful nobodies? They might have had a long hunt. Life was rougher then. Work was physical and grinding. Disease and injury were routine and disfiguring. Nutrition was poor, dental care virtually nonexistent. Today's profusion of beautiful faces can be interpreted as a sign of human progress. More people are living healthier lives and enjoying the resources necessary to maintain their beauty. And anyone -- rich or poor, black or white or brown, woman or man -- in today's America can dream of citizenship in the democracy of beauty. For most, of course, it will never be more than a dream, but it is the dream that sells mountains of diet books, lagoons of face cream, acres of Calvins and boatloads of Botox.

An Epilogue

For all this theorizing about the big embrace of America's beauty obsession -- whether we call it democracy or use one of Eco's fancier term, "syncretism" -- there is one quality we will not abide.

Age.

This dawned on me as I tried to test the claim that today's beauty ideal is dangerously skewed toward skinny. You hear this all the time from critics of the fashion industry, who rightly point out that the stick-figure look known as "heroin chic" is unattainable for most people, short of malnutrition. At the recent Madrid fashion week in Spain, organizers took the unprecedented step of banning severely underweight models.

These critics sometimes refer longingly to earlier times, when Rubensesque nudes and Marilyn Monroe bombshells rang the beauty bell without starving themselves. When I really studied those earlier pictures, though, it struck me that the issue isn't really weight, but maturity. The 17th-century women of Peter Paul Rubens are often described as plump, but notice the slender waists and hourglass figures. They aren't fat; they're grown-ups. They are women who appear to have borne children. Something similar appears in the Greek and Roman marbles. Older gods remained fit and powerful, but their bodies were broader and fleshier; Zeus wasn't trying to fit into the same jeans he wore when he was Mercury's age.

Our era is sexually candid but chronologically dishonest. A recent ad for anti-wrinkle cream in a major fashion magazine employed a model who appeared to be in her teens. Countless ads for men's underwear feature slim bodies, taut as a Renaissance Saint Sebastian. The skivvies, bulging like a one-pound bag toting a two-pound puppy, shout all man. But the inevitably hairless bodies whisper still boy. The most widely circulated magazine in the country is published by the AARP; its standard cover image is a movie star or other celebrity who has managed, with the help of a stylist and modern technology, to look 20 years younger than the truth.

If today's Americans are uniquely obsessed, it's not with beauty, but with youth. The aging baby boomers who have shaped so much popular culture for such a dreadfully long time are now pondering age spots, varicose veins, worry lines and droopy breasts. Vogue's August effort was titled "The Age Issue," but it could have been called "The Fear of Age Issue." Along with the article on cosmetic surgery for feet, ("I will always feel young as long as I can wear heels"), the magazine promoted human growth hormone for "an ageless body," detailed the merits of vascular surgery for younger-looking legs ("the bruises have faded almost completely within two weeks") and explained why a 48-year-old woman decided to get braces on her teeth -- for the second time.

"How sad it is!" lamented the handsome young Dorian Gray. "I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day in June." As Oscar Wilde knew, an aging person's obsession with looking young has less to do with beauty than with the realization that beauty dies.

Time waits for no one, no matter how many sets of braces one wears. The struggle to preserve the physical bloom, whether through single-minded obsession or through artifice, is a fight that can never be won, for human beings are made of flesh, not stone.

David Von Drehle is a staff writer for The Post's Style section. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 11 a.m. ET.