Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lucid, short, and important, June 23, 2005
A couple of decades ago, I began noticing that the leading lady in a movie was almost always fairer-skinned than her leading man.
It appears filmmakers and their audiences subconsciously associate lightness of complexion with femininity. Yet, nobody ever seems to talk about it.
Medieval Europeans referred to women as "the fair sex," but in contemporary discourse, skin color is associated only with race, not with sex.
We don't behave like that, however.
Audiences famously want their leading men to look "tall, dark, and handsome" (a phrase first applied to that epitome of male glamour, Cary Grant) when they embrace their leading ladies. But, apparently, "dark" is even more important than "tall."
My impression is that female fans are more insistent than male fans that their favorite actresses be fair. Conversely, male fans don't much like pale actors, as Jude Law's problems shedding the dreaded "pretty boy" tag demonstrate.
When the Internet came along in the 1990s, I discovered that an anthropologist at Université Laval in Quebec named Peter Frost had been researching for years this question of why actresses were so fair, and much else besides.
His findings are quite extraordinary.
He's finally published a lucidly written and wide-ranging book entitled Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice. It proves well worth the wait, shedding light on a broad array of contemporary social issues.
It turns out that this favoritism toward lighter skinned women is not an invention of Hollywood. You'll note that conventional "social constructionist" thinking can't explain this phenomenon. The standard academic's logic would predict that, because whites rule and men rule, therefore the whitest men would be the most popular. But pallid blonde actors of the James Spader ilk typically play evil preppie-yuppie villains, not heroes. Conversely, the movie industry is responding to a fondness for fairer females found in almost all cultures across almost all eras.
In his foreword to Fair Women, Dark Men, U. of Washington sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe, author of one of my favorite books, The Ethnic Phenomenon, summarizes:
"Although virtually all cultures express a marked preference for fair female skin, even those with little or no exposure to European imperialism, and even those whose members are heavily pigmented, many are indifferent to male pigmentation or even prefer men to be darker."
Frost reports that out of 51 different cultures in the anthropology profession's famous Human Relations Area Files, 44 cultures favored lighter complexions on either only women (30) or on both sexes (14). In only 3 cultures was fair skin preferred on men only, and in just 4 cultures was darker skin desired.
Lighter ladies were favored in many countries with little exposure to Western beauty standards, such as medieval Japan, Ethiopia, Aztec Mexico, and Moorish Spain, where the dominant culture was darker skinned than the conquered natives.
Frost discovered that the reason women were called "the fair sex" is because women are indeed fairer on average after puberty. He notes that 50 out of 54 anthropometric studies from around the world have shown that women's untanned skin, such as under the upper arm, reflects more light than men's. Women have more subcutaneous fat, which gives them a lighter look.
The gender difference in color is not large, but before Europeans came into frequent contact with sub-Saharan Africans and others of highly different hues, it was noticeable. Frost writes:
"When one's social horizon takes in a limited range of observable skin tones, small gradations of color take on more importance.... A 'white' person was simply a fair-complexioned individual; a 'black' person, a dark-complexioned one. This old way of seeing things persists today in surnames that once referred to the normal range of skin color in Europe, [in] surnames like White, Brown, and Black among the English..."
Could it all just be social class prejudice? Traditionally, wealthier women who didn't have to work outdoors could avoid tanning more than poor women who had to slop the hogs. That plays a definite role in maintaining the bias, but the cultural fondness for fairer women is even found among hunter-gatherer tribes where all women have to be outdoors every day finding food.
Frost also points out a corollary of this sexual selection for lightness:
"Since higher-ranking men marry the more attractive women, the upper classes tend to lighten in color with each passing generation, as in India."
This seems particularly true in Latin America, where the elites remain quite white-looking despite almost 500 years of intermarriage. The trick is that the most successful short, dark men often wed tall, blonde women and have more European-looking offspring, thus replenishing the caste system.
Frost's short but mind-expanding book shows once again how much more fascinating the study of humanity can be-when freed of the boring old prejudice that biology has nothing to do with human beings.
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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Truth Hurts: There Is a Most Beautiful Race, June 18, 2009
ntuitively one would think that every race would've evoloved their own standard of beauty. Africans evolved without seeing a European or Asian female for tens of thousands of years. They would be expected to prefer their own race. On the other hand, races do obviously look different and it seems unlikely that there haven't been any populations that developed traits that are more universally appealing. Scholar Peter Frost's Fair Women, Dark Men takes a look at the anthropological data and sees how the findings fit with modern science.
In the classical world calling a woman white or fair was a compliment. People were more ambivalent about color in men. In the Old Testament Ham saw his father drunk and naked and was cursed with darkness. This is the biblical theory of the origin of human races. Thousands of years later original Christians were Medeteranians/Semites of an intermediate color between Northern Europans and Africans. "Ethiopians," as they called black Africans, were used as the symbol for ugliness and sin. An early Christian wrote "What is more lowly, what is more like Ethopia, than our bodies, blackened, too, by the darkness of sin?" Satan would often appear as an Ethiopian. The black woman was the antithesis of beauty. A story reaches us about monks wanting to turn themselves off sex. They were encouraged to think of something disgusting. One thought of the Ethiopian woman.
The rise of Islam cut Europe off from black Africa. Color stopped being connected to ethnicity and was instead used to describe individuals. When there wasn't any contact with other races, variation between Europeans became more salient. So a "black" personwas a relatively darker white. This is where the English surnames of White, Brown and Black came from, along with the French Leblanc, Lebrun, and Lenoir, and the German Weiss, Braun and Schwartz.
Europeans weren't neutral with regards to the differences that they noticed. In Old English literature white was synonymous with beautiful and in Old German light skin was the feminine ideal. A 10th century Welsh epic describes a beautiful woman "Whiter were her breasts than the breast of the white swan, redder were her cheeks than the reddest foxgloves." In the Scottish ballad Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, Lord Thomas is getting ready to marry a wealthy "nut-brown" woman when the poor and white Annet arrives at the chapel and steals him from her.
Once it's established that Caucasians have had a pretty consistent standard of beauty, the question becomes whether this biological or cultural preference extends to the rest of the world. The author shows a chart noting skin color preferences for fifty cultures looked at. 88% favored light skin in women, 34% light skin in men and only 8% were listed as "doubtful or negative cases." Social scientists have speculated that the cause has been European domination but the universality of the phenomenon rules that out. In ancient time, "Wherever the art of painting existed, women were portrayed as being fairer-skinned than men, in regions as far apart as Ancient Egypt, Japan, and the Aztec Empire."
A cultural domination theory would predict that if a darker people conquered a lighter people darkness would become the standard of beauty. That didn't happened. White female slaves in the Muslim world were more expensive for reasons of physical attractiveness. Attraction to dark skin was considered a sort of fetish. The Arabs conquered the lighter skinned Spaniards and fair skin was still preferred in Al-Andalus. A great book for those interested in racial attitudes in a different time and place is Race and Slavery in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis.
In the appendix there are quotes from anthroplogical sources on non-Western cultures that had limited or no contact with Europeans all showing variations on the same theme.
Tests have shown that within every race women are lighter-skinned than men. While these differences have become much less noticeable in our multiracial societies, for most of history people lived among others who looked closer to themselves and were more conscious of subtle variation. Women's lighter skin arrives in puberty due to increased estrogen. As a signal of fertility it's more attractive to the opposite sex.
They can keep telling us that "black is beautiful," but we'll never be made to believe it. Liberals say one thing and nature another in one the many battles of the war between PC and healthy human instincts.
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8 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
This is just a propaganda piece, September 20, 2006
for racialists and conservatives who want to prove that black and mixed race black women are less attractive than other women. It's been peddled by so-called scientists from the 18th century to the present. This book ratifies alot of racist/sexist stereotypes of people of color and women I read since high school.
I'm just not feeling this book. Sorry!
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by Linda A. Mooney
by Bernard Lewis
by Anthony David
