A few years ago, blogger Tamara D., known as Plaqueta, was walking down the street when a taxi driver shouted, “Hey, beautiful!” at her. Plaqueta retraced her steps and reproached him for his attitude: “Who asked you for your opinion?” she said. He brushed off the girl’s unexpected reaction with a bit of mockery. So, she, aware of her rights, decided to report him to the authorities. Another unexpected reaction: a judge ruled in Plaqueta’s favor and held that, under the law, the taxi driver had committed an administrative offense and would have to pay a fine or serve a day in detention. The man chose the latter.
Many men and women alike thought (but I’m sure that, above all, they felt) that this had been a senseless overreaction on Plaqueta’s part and, in the end, an injustice, so they proceeded to flood her social media and various media outlets with abuse and threats. It seemed, they complained, as if the taxi driver had shouted an obscenity at her, but all he did was call her beautiful! So, men can no longer express their admiration for a woman, not even in that way? What an inflated person, they added, to be bothered by having her beauty praised! Surely, they concluded, Plaqueta had done it for attention and publicity! Moreover, they continued, what a strange judge! Would the law really begin to qualify a simple compliment as “harassment,” or worse, a groping or a crime? Wasn’t it the height of terribly misguided feminism to prohibit men from expressing a natural impulse as simple as physical attraction to someone? Besides, why would anyone be offended by praise for the gift of their simple, natural beauty?
Tamara’s explanation was very clear: even a compliment can create a climate of harassment and vulnerability that women do not have to endure. If they can react without putting themselves in danger, they should do so; remember that placing someone in a vulnerable situation can be the start of greater violence.
As easy as that. Enough for all of us to applaud her decision. For me, it also serves to introduce a topic I consider highly relevant. It seems to me that, in order to give this anecdote its due importance, we must begin by realizing that Plaqueta and the judge were the first to shine public light on actions that we all, theoretically, know flourish in patriarchal structures, but that until now we have refrained from implementing safeguards. In addition to further underscoring the protection that women need from all of us, these actions open the opportunity to see the harm done to our community by continuing to guide our relationships according to stereotypes of beauty.
It is not easy to admit it. The attraction that the body and appearance of certain types of people exert on us is shaped by social factors so subtle that they go undetected. We all believe that our appreciation of what we call “physical beauty” is a biological fact, without noticing how deeply rooted it is in our patriarchal system. These roots are a kind of cultural algorithm that convinces us that a small group of people, because of their physical appearance, are a greater source of pleasure than the rest and that, therefore, we should desire their attention, their company, and, if possible, their sexual reciprocity. These expectations, however, are the source of much suffering for everyone (both the desired and those desiring). Unfortunately, it is a suffering that is practically impossible to renounce because, as I say, it is always accompanied by a blinding, sweet hope of fulfillment. (For example, it is impossible to think that physical beauty is a problem for the people who “enjoy” it: We all assume that they receive enormous benefits; those who do not enjoy having this gift are in fact labeled as self-conscious, too shy, and, if their discontent is violent, crazy and hysterical).
I don’t know if it’s a legend that one day Aristotle was asked to define beauty and he answered, “That’s a question that only a blind person can ask.” I think that is too simple a response, considering the many things one can philosophize about regarding beauty.
Let’s start by questioning its biological nature. Maybe it’s just my idea, but I’ve always thought that attributing physical, sexual attractiveness to certain types of people is a social mechanism to exert control over the sexual desires of the masses, stigmatizing some specimens of the species with the badge of beauty. Let’s sacrifice some people, we tell ourselves, to bring order! Let them specialize in handling the public bombardment and deal with it in a way that articulates desire, leaving enough room for the rest of us to attend to the productive processes that benefit the group!
Foucault, the French philosopher, explained how this works by regulating another intense human drive: the desire to know. According to him, if school education is tedious, it is for a reason like the one I have discussed: if it were not, if we could all freely express our thirst for knowledge, the whole of society would eagerly go to its classrooms, resulting in great disorder. That is why it is necessary to articulate a complicated model of academic selection that alienates most applicants and imposes sufficiently discouraging challenges on those who insist, to filter and hierarchize them according to what the social organization requires of them and can offer them.
Returning to the beautiful women and the handsome men, their function will be to articulate the multitude’s desire, which will clearly be a titanic task for them. These people will receive continuous attention and admiration; they will be singled out and imitated, followed and persecuted; they will become examples, patterns of behavior: their every move will be scrutinized and judged, for better or worse; they will suffer constant bombardment, harassment, unparalleled competition; they will be objects of envy and jealousy.
It is clear, then, that they must be provided with all the tools they need to carry out such a mission. Let us surround them with as much security as they require and grant them privileges to compensate for the burden they bear! To begin with, they must be endowed with features of authority, so their physique must evoke that of men and women with clear social superiority. Thus, the physiognomies of people who represent dominance will be archetypes of beauty, namely (depending on the era): rulers, priests, soldiers, rebels, merchants, explorers, teachers, businessmen, artists, and athletes, both male and female.
In addition, since these archetypes will also tend to permeate the representation of divinities (in their anthropomorphic form, of course), beautiful people will end up being compared to gods, demigods, mythological heroes, angels, and even demons when the aim is to highlight the threatening nature of their authority.
Beautiful people are not only queens, kings, princesses, and princes (charming ones, preferably) but also gods and goddesses and angelic figures.
Thus, the social algorithm of beauty is projected and nourished by images that are repeated everywhere, passing information from one medium of communication to all others, fostering admiration for a select few. When Jennifer Lopez first became famous, the beauty of her Latina face was not an international archetype of beauty, but as we all know, widespread exposure began to give her that prestige. I remember that at the time, I was on a plane, and a girl who looked very much like the actress was walking up and down the aisle. I got the impression that she was starting to revel in the admiration of those around her, something she was not used to, which had seemed to have fallen from the sky, surprising her; that is, she was inexperienced in the art of being beautiful.
But why do beautiful people need power?
Desire concentrated in archetypes has a disadvantage: if animal competition can be inherently oppressive, then it is surely unbearable when it occurs between humans who all desire the same person (imagine this!). Those supposedly statistical calculations that say that there are “X number of men for every woman,” or vice versa, are nothing more than a vain fantasy. Most people, in most situations, desire the same person (or, at most, two or three). Thus, human desire, from the time we are very young, becomes—in addition to being very focused on certain types of people—very competitive, possessive to the point of compulsion: we want that person to “be ours,” to confirm that we have defeated the rest. “Making her mine” is the dream—conscious or not—of every desiring being.
The siege, then, must find a counterweight so that beautiful people can protect themselves. That counterweight is the aura of power we endow them with. Thus, desire becomes veneration, which intervenes to create distance (Maiden, all will make way for you because beauty repels and desire makes one retreat, I wrote many years ago, and I think that, although paradoxical, it is true).
That is not to say that mere mortals cannot aspire to divinity. After all, as we have been told ad nauseam in the system we live in, any of us can aspire to become a social achiever and even an archetype of beauty. But as we well know, achieving this means accepting that we will face intense competition.
Our need to possess them is an initial advantage for beautiful people. As a need, it plays as our weakness; converted into an irresistible need, if it is well managed by the desired person, it can make the desiring person surrender to their service: to do whatever is asked, to give gifts and companionship, and even to postpone the fulfillment of their desire while are given the hope of one day having it fulfilled (we are, of course, talking about what happens in a context of relative equality, since we all know that, under conditions of programmed violence, the above does not occur: there the desiring —who is usually a man— fulfills his desire by force).
Since, especially for women, the risk of harassment can escalate to danger, the strategies they articulate to protect themselves also have to be multiple and very empowering: one is to exaggerate their beauty. Why do some women who are considered extremely beautiful put on makeup, dress themselves up, and increase their attractiveness? In part, to become even more dominant and to be able to defend themselves. Almost all of us, whether attractive or not, do this for similar reasons: not only to be attractive, but also to strengthen ourselves and avoid being hurt. If someone attracts me, I can try to attract them as well, and in this way, regulate the approach. If I fall for someone, I can try to make that person fall too. However, for beautiful people, this challenge is constant: they continually face demands for encounters from others, so they’d better have the upper hand, at least in the vast majority of cases.
Fortunately for all of us, there is a mechanism that ensures our desire does not have to override others. I am talking about the process we call sublimation. To explain myself, I will give an example accessible to everyone: that of an artist. When I see a beautiful dancer performing a dance in which she expresses her inner richness (that is, her human complexity), she immediately ceases to be, for me, just a body and, above all, just an algorithm of physical beauty on which my trained desire is unleashed. Instead, a kind of balance arises within me, between my possessive impulse and the dignity of that person, which shines through her dance. Now, she is equal to me; she is my fellow human being. I can desire her without intending that she lose her freedom, and I can expect the same from this exchange for myself. This mirroring of freedom is the magic of the artistic moment. In it, the desire to possess is “sublimated,” giving way to the much more satisfying need to preserve the other person’s freedom (which is also my own).
But what happens in the artistic field is only, as I say, an example, because sublimation can occur everywhere and at any time: in any place where we recognize human dignity and with every person with whom we feel equality and whose freedom we admire, which is ours. While the arts allow us to sublimate desire, any moment in which we respect, care for, know, and take responsibility for the other’s freedom makes it possible.
If pornography is not sublime, it is because in it, human beings are treated like objects for appropriation. Its harmful character lies not in showing naked bodies or an overflowing sexuality – of course, as long as the scenes do not represent abuse – but in preventing us from seeing people as complete beings, with an inner self with which we can humanly identify.
Well, the same thing happens with the desire stirred in us when we see some people on the street, to whom we feel attracted by a kind of imposed algorithm, by a stereotyped impulse. Sidewalk pornography, we could call it, and it is important to resist it.
When a man shouts, “Hey, beautiful!” at a woman, it is not a free way of treating each other. Freedom, of course, is not about repressing the shout (though that may be where we must start), but in learning to enjoy the dignity of the other person.
Reacting as Tamara did, directly, is to defend oneself without concealment or retaliation; it is to appeal to equity, even through legality, if necessary. It is to cast off, once and for all, that burden of stereotyped beauty, which has accustomed us to something terrible: our easy propensity to exalt, seek out, and even be grateful for relationships of domination.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
