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By Root 496 0

dominant men chose beautiful wives and together they lived off the toil of their rivals – then in each generation women became that little bit more beautiful and men that little bit more dominant. But their rivals did too, being descendants of the same successful couples. So standards rose, too. A beautiful woman needed to shine still more brightly to stand out in the new firmament. And a dominant man needed to bully or scheme still more mercilessly to get his way. Our senses are easily dulled by the commonplace, however exceptional it may seem elsewhere or at other times. As Charles Darwin put it:

If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters in our women a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.40

This, incidentally, is as concise a statement as could be made for why eugenics would never work. A page later, Darwin describes the Jollof tribe of West Africa, famous for the beauty of its women, which deliberately sold its ugly women into slavery. Such Nazi eugenics would indeed gradually raise the level of beauty in the tribe, but the men’s subjective standards of beauty would rise as fast. Since beauty is an entirely subjective concept, the Jollofs were doomed to perpetual disappointment.

The depressing part of Darwin’s insight is that it shows how beauty cannot exist without ugliness. Sexual selection, Red-Queen-style, is inevitably a cause of dissatisfaction, vain striving and misery to individuals. Everybody is always looking for greater beauty or handsomeness than they find around them. This brings up yet another paradox. It is all very well to say that men want to marry beautiful women and women want to marry rich and powerful men, but most of us never get the chance. Modern society is monogamous. So most of the beautiful women are married to dominant men already. What happens to Mr and Ms Average? They do not remain celibate; they settle for something second best. In black grouse, the females are perfectionist, the males indiscriminate. In a monogamous human society, neither sex can afford to be either perfectionist or indiscriminate. Mr Average chooses a plain woman and Ms Average chooses a wimp. They temper their idealist preferences with realism. People end up married to their equals in attractiveness: the home-coming queen marries the football hero; the nerd marries the girl in glasses; the man with mediocre prospects marries the woman with mediocre looks. So pervasive is this habit that exceptions stand out a mile: ‘What on earth can she see in him?’ we ask of a model’s dull and unsuccessful husband, as if there must be some hidden clue to his worth that the rest of us have missed. ‘How did she manage to catch him?’ we ask of a high-flying man married to an ugly woman.

The answer is that we each instinctively know our relative worth as surely as in Jane Austen’s day people knew their place in the class system. Bruce Ellis has a way of showing how we manage this ‘assortative mating’ pattern. He gives each of thirty students a numbered card that they stick on their foreheads: each can now see the other’s number, but nobody knows his or her own. He tells them to pair up with the highest number they can find. Immediately the person with thirty on her forehead is surrounded by a buzzing crowd: so she adjusts her expectations upwards and refuses to pair up with just anybody, settling eventually for somebody with a number in the high twenties. The person with number one, meanwhile, after trying to persuade number thirty of his worth, then lowers his sights and goes progressively down the scale, steadily discovering his low status, until he ends up taking the first who will accept him: probably number two.41

The game shows with uncomfortable realism how we measure our own relative desirability from others’ reactions to us. Repeated rejection causes us to lower our sights; an unbroken string of successful seductions encourages