Well, if it is the prettiest who survive, my chances are not good! Still Shakespeare was surely onto something when he wrote in Sonnet 1, lines 1-2, kicking things off: “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.” Earlier the ancient Greeks held that the beauty of mind, body and soul is what constituted true humanity. For Plato, beauty was the pathway to the good and true, and the true, such as in mathematical forms, was beautiful. John Keats (1795-1821) agreed that truth as beauty and beauty truth, an essential unity.
Yet, in this sage of Left-wing deconstruction, ideas of beauty have gone the way of morality, all socially constructed and not universal. While not as radical as some more recent texts, Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth (1991), did the critique thing, proclaiming that there was no universal conception of human beauty, and in the West (the East, China, Japan?) existed to keep “male dominance intact.” Yep, male dominance no matter how many female politicians, prime ministers, business leaders. You name it. Male dominance, maybe even if no males even existed, I suppose. It is amazing that the feminist conspiracy theory, that almost everything is a plot by men to keep women down, seldom gets public challenges, while every other conspiracy theory does. Surely the feminist conspiracy theory would have the intrinsic weakness of all the others, one would think?