“A study by the anthropologist Douglas Jones, in which he fed the images of various models into a computer that correlated the size and proportions of people’s faces to their age, estimated the models’ ages to be 6 or 7.” Via 2007: A Face Odyssey by Daphne Merkin
Excerpts from 2007: A Face Odyssey by Daphne Merkin
“We have always been slightly uneasy – notwithstanding our growing cultural obsession with youth and physical perfection …
… I suspect these reassurances never fooled any woman anxiously eyeing herself in the mirror before going out for the evening, and as we get older, this lifelong negotiation with the looking glass becomes only more fraught …
…For one thing, the promise and gradual destigmatization of cosmetic surgery has led less-than-stunning women to believe that a gorgeous countenance is there for the paying. Another, more significant reason is that the contemporary archetype of beauty, as seen on the runways and in fashion magazines, is no longer applicable or even familiar. For that matter, it’s barely recognizable …
…The Platonic ideal of beauty is now as it never was: more humanoid than human, more the product of an art director’s digitalized pastiche of desirable features than a naturally occurring phenomenon. The reasons for this include our increasingly sophisticated techniques for airbrushing flaws or imperfections out of the picture; our fascination with self-invention and technosexuality (also referred to as robot fetishism); our ever more phobic attitude toward aging and dying; and our worship of young, blank, unlived-in faces that resemble the baby-faced characters in Japanese animation films. Thanks to these influences, our aesthetic standards have mutated into an eerie image of female attractiveness that, if not unprecedented, has been relatively uncommon until now …
…The identifying signs of this change — a radical reconception of what makes for feminine pulchritude — can be readily enumerated. They include a high, rounded forehead; a giraffe neck; enormous eyes that are usually spaced low on the head and wide apart; an imperceptible nose; a pillowy or pouty mouth, but one with the lips always everted, as if ready to be kissed. Because the body on which this face is set is, needless to say, thin to thinner to twiglike, the head looks proportionally larger, even otherwordly …
… The New York plastic surgeon Yael Halaas, who notes that the laws of beauty have been “amped up,” attributes Kidman’s cyboresque look to the “Vulcan eyebrows” that can result from too much or wrongly placed Botox. It might also have to do with the silicone-smooth surface of Kidman’s skin, from which all traces of emotional expressiveness — of having laughed or cried, struggled or aspired — have been erased, leaving a blank slate onto which we can read our own scripts. In this sense, Kidman functions both as herself and as a “sim” — a simulated version of herself, much like the Daryl Hannah character in “Blade Runner.” …
… Body,” have proposed that our species’ — and especially men’s — apparent preference for juvenile features can be traced back to (or, if you like, blamed on) neoteny …
…This theory, which can be seen as a breakthrough or a bit of nonsensical speculation, depending on your view of evolutionary biology, is in truth no more than an extension of Darwin’s principle of sexual selection, which he developed to account for what appeared to be cumbersome and nonfunctional characteristics …
…Accordingly, Morris points out that women have more neotenic physical traits — twice as much baby fat, smoother skin, larger eyes and puffier lips — the better to arouse a protective instinct in males. The zoologist Clive Bromhall, in his book “The Eternal Child,” goes even further, suggesting that neoteny has been misunderstood. In a hubris-smashing moment, Bromhall claims that the entire human species has become “infantized” in order to physically survive and emotionally flourish. We have regressed, it would seem, into a state of permanent childhood …
… Are Android Beauties ahead of the pack, leaving the rest of us who have not morphed to lag behind, fated to be nonbreeding singletons with our lurking expression lines, relatively teensy eyes, prominent (or at least visible) noses and collagen-free mouths? Or do they point to an alarming future in which little girls will be eroticized without the constrictions — the civilizing restraints — of guilt or of culturally mandated taboos and in which the Humbert Humberts of the world will be just one of the gang, just another regular pervert, free to cruise the playground without pretext or disguise? …
… In a remarkable essay, “Afternoon of the Sex Children,” which appeared last spring in the journal n+1, Mark Greif makes a persuasive argument that the possibility of such a pedophilic scenario coming to pass is neither futuristic nor even all that unlikely. In fact, as Greif envisions it, the scenario has already begun without our even noticing. The trend of the last 50 years, he observes, has been toward focusing our lascivious gaze with ever greater intensity on the prenubile rather than averting our eyes from them: “The representatives of the sex child in our entertainment culture,” he writes, “are often 18 to 21 — legal adults. The root of their significance is that their sexual value points backward, to the status of the child, and not forward to the adult.” One doesn’t have to look far afield for confirmation … A study by the anthropologist Douglas Jones, in which he fed the images of various models into a computer that correlated the size and proportions of people’s faces to their age, estimated the models’ ages to be 6 or 7.”
