+1 falcao for a very engaging and interesting post.
Yes, indeed the history of beauty is fascinating and I even thought about it earlier today. I was watching that Sylvester Stallone film from the 90s, CLIFFHANGER, --it's a TERRIBLE film, but I had some nostalgia having watched it as a kid. What struck me though was how ugly everyone, the supporting characters etc. etc. were in the film. The female lead was Janine Turner who is a natural beauty indeed, but they dressed her up to look quite frumpy. I remembered Sylvester Stallone as young, maybe he's a special case because he's an "action star" but he is one ugly dude --actually quite abnormal looking. But what I remarked to my friend was that wow, these days, for a big budget spectacle film like this everyone has, even the supporting characters have to be much better looking.
I think one of the major shifts that has happened recently, and it's due to a convergence of both the internet but also the ridiculous upsurge in everything been catered to a teen demographic (i.e. the TWILIGHT series, Harry Potter bulls**t, Hunger Games etc. etc., Mortal Instruments blah blah) --I mean ALL of these sorts of entertainment which saturate the media landscape have the most impossibly beautiful looking young people(kids basically), including the top pop stars (Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus etc. etc.) --it not only inculcates us with a very unreachable standard of beauty, but especially YOUTH. Just like porn has destroyed the sex lives of many people. The internet, the dominance of the youth market, a completely hyperbolic fetishization of celebrity and celebrity culture(intensified by the internet, sites such as gawker, perezhilton, infotainment etc..) are all contributing factors. I mean for a teenager the ultimate dream profession isn't even really to be brilliant or a great athlete or whatnot, it's to be a f**king fashion model!! a job that requires absolutely ZERO skill of any sort.
Another MAJOR shift has been that Men are subject to more scrutiny in the looks department, perhaps even worse than women now. I had a professor who talked once about this gender shift. If you look at films from the 40s or 50s, Hollywood's golden era the women (Veronica Lake, Kim Novak, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren etc. etc.) in fact they were all impossibly beautiful and impossibly skinny --much more attractive in fact than most actresses today. So female beauty was held at a premium back then for sure --in fact now there's been this sort of reaction against that with women like that GIRLS creator Lena Dunham, and Mindy Kaling and other quite ugly women being given chances to be stars on the small screen --even though of course most Hollywood actresses fit a certain ideal. But for men it's gotten much, much worse.
Both in terms of looks AND age. Have you noticed that it's become quite fashionable and in vogue for women in their 40s and 50s to date guys in their mid-20s? It's not just Demi Moore, it's become like a trend. Could you imagine guys like Spencer Tracy or Humphrey Bogart becoming Hollywood movie stars now? Or even the whole anti-hero trend from the 70s --Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Robert Deniro, Al Pacino --movies like THE GODFATHER and THE CONVERSATION with Gene Hackman were the highest grossing movies of the year when they came out!!!!These guys were the biggest movie stars of their time --but nowadays because of the ridiculous proliferation of genre movies aimed at a youth market --the "stars" are all either muscled up action types with model like faces, or teenage pretty boys and that's what sets the standard for what people find attractive.
It is perhaps the worst time to be a man ever because not only are men now being subject to the greatest scrutiny in terms of beauty, but feminism(which in theory I'm for) has given women the a more dominant role in terms of being selectors and sexual aggressors and the ones who really have the choosing power. So you tie those two things together and it creates a very emasculated and pathetic state for men.
I first noticed something was extremely f**ked up with our culture back in like 2005 when I noticed that there were all these old middle aged women reading twilight books and fantasizing about f**king robert pattinson --I mean like women in their 50s and 60s!!! And then those ideals trickled down to everything else. I was at the movies the other day and noticed there were two old women ahead of me, both alone, and both bought tickets to see some s**t called MORTAL INSTRUMENTS and they gushed to the ticket agent each in turn that they were there to see it for Jonathan Rhys Meyers --I mean it made me want to puke --because these hags must be like mothers and s**t --shouldn't they be fantasizing about Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan or at the very least people much closer to their own age.
Anyway, this has been a bit of a rant, but I've heard TONS of men talk about this, and it's much, much worse for guys in their late teens and early 20s --and which is why like 70 percent of this forum is filled with guys in that age range who have severe and debilitating BDD and anxiety over their looks and why sites like PUAHATE etc. exist.
It's a really horrible moment in history to be a man.
I just hope you're right and the revolution in genetic engineering etc.. comes sooner than later. I've been looking at a lot of Ray Kurzweil stuff and he for sure says that most of the body modification advances in terms of plastic surgery will have arrived by 2020 --I mean that's not too far away and I won't be that old really so I could still take advantage of it, cause I'll tell you, as I get older (i"m in my mid-30s) I've found I've begun to lose the desire to really even do a lot of the things I once though I wanted --by my early 40s, maybe I'll just have accepted things and not care anymore. That to me is quite depressing....
