We really are stupid

As a father of a soon-to-be-teenaged daughter, I share the common angst of worrying that my girl is worrying about how close her appearance comes to the archetypes portrayed in the media. The fact that every image is carefully constructed, edited, air-brushed and blow-dried is neither here nor there; the teens want to look like our publicly produced images, viz:

That's right. Every young woman should be doing something vaguely pornographic to a palm tree while her boyfriend plays the bongos on her back and a large, out-of-context national monument emerges quietly from the ocean in the background. Happens all the time!

But the monument in the picture started a train of thought. Have we always been this stupid? Have we always thought that we should actually look like our public art?

It must have been hell for women in the stone age.

This kind of look is possible with a deep commitment to fast food but not so easy to attain when drive-through means that the men have scared the bloody prey back towards the camp again. Calories were in short supply for these gals. Did mothers comfort, by the dying light of the campfire, teenage daughters who just couldn't get enough food to look like an inflated dugong and were sure no boy would ever love her?

Worse yet for the youth of Egypt.

I studied some history at university many years ago but I don't claim expertise in Egyptology. Did they have chiropractors back then? Certainly if misguided Egyptian adolescents were doing that to their spines, they were either the beneficiaries of some excellent cosmetic surgery or were setting themselves up for a lifetime of deformity that would make wearing stilettos look positively benign. And, as for getting those horns on their heads ...

Across the Mediterranean, things weren't all that much better - even amongst the great civilizations of Greece. I think we can discount even the most desperate-for-acceptance teenager doing whatever illegal thing it is you need to do with a cat to achieve the sphinx look

But, for the athletic adolescent of Athens, it would take a fairly specific training regimen to get thighs like a shot-putter, calves like a ballet dancer and feet like a set of diving flippers - to say nothing of the amount of damage you'd get from enough sun exposure to get skin anything like that colour.

Much later, evidence emerges of the invention of the cosmetic pencil sharpener by the Vikings. Apparently HB-head was de rigueur for the Vikings sacking Lindisfarne in 793

 While the same race had developed a fashion for legs that end at the kidneys by the time they were involved in the events of 1066.

And Africa and Europe are not alone in setting very poor role models for their youth. Can you imagine the kind of mischief a young Australian Aboriginal male might have done himself if he walked around for any length of time in this pose

with what appears to be a goodly amount of his skeleton visible? You can just hear his father now, "You young people have no idea. You'll regret it when you get older, you know!"

 And if you think I've excluded Asia, you're wrong. I won't show you any here - it's not that kind of blog - but if you look at the membrum virile on some of the men in the more adult Ukiyo e art from Japan, you can see how so many of the males of that culture might have developed nasty, lifelong inferiority complexes.

No, it would seem that only in this period - when the full gloss photos and moving pictures of our various media make it seem more real - have we become stupid enough to believe that we should actually look like our public art.

And we're the enlightened ones?

Notes:

"membrum virile" is the a polite old Latin term for penis. The use of the term was recently made famous in Australia by a very funny TV series called Rake - recommended viewing. Be careful not to get the American remake; it's nothing like as good.

Here are some outtakes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0G9YnqjG8

If you'd like to watch an excellent talk from an A-list model on just how fake it all is, I thoroughly recommend this TED talk

http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_russell_looks_aren_t_everything_believe_me_i_m_a_model

Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday morning - Australian Eastern Standard Time. Please share this with your friends.