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.The truth of the mask is concrete: It expresses a meaning withinthe logics, materials, and purposes available at some particular place and time.To consider masks in the abstract, apart from their relationship to some par-ticular culture and moment, is to sever them from the context that allowsthem to mean anything at all.19So, too, with concepts of human beauty, which also frequently involve in-scriptions on the face, extensions of the body, imaginative elongations of thehair, colorful paint across the topography of the flesh, and masklike adorn-ments.If the divers and sundry practices of beautification and adornment, inall their spectacle, gore, and glory, were laid out in one global constellationfoot binding alongside plastic surgery; beads, bangles, and feathers along-side bodybuilding all the juttings and indentations would likely cancel eachother out, and the resulting composite would likely come to resemble the generic human forms of classical beauty, all symmetry and proportion.The resulting picture, however, still would not amount to an adequate sketchof universal, human beauty, because all the idiosyncrasies, all the partic-ulars, all the specificities would be lost, vaporized in a cloud of generality.20The same process of averaging that both extinguishes cultural specificitiesand denies history also abstracts and disembodies everything that is really 130 / Venus and Mars at the Fin de Sièclemeaningful about beauty, its perception, and its fashioning, in any actuallyexisting place.By the same token (and contrary to the generic compendia of suppos-edly universal traits brandished by sociobiologists in recent texts), one can-not discern a single or unequivocal human nature lurking beneath the dap-pled details of cultural diversity.All that we can say without distortion isthat human nature is nowhere simply given, but that it is everywhereendlessly elaborated (as the chapters in the following section, Varieties ofHuman Nature, themselves elaborate).If we were quadrupeds rather thanbipeds, if we had thick hair covering most of our bodies, if we had the mor-phological characteristics of amoebas, undoubtedly our perceptions of beautywould be very different from what they are, with all their present varietyand splendor.(We would also likely have very different cultural historieswithout upright walking, a need to keep warm, and more or less stableshapes.)21 In this narrow, even frivolous, sense which plainly admits no test case it might even be said that certain biological givens constrain the parameters of beauty (and much else besides) insofar as it is in ourgenes that we are creatures with a front and back, top and bottom, rightside and left.All that has really been said is that all other things being equal(and this is to say everything), human beings, in that they are symmetri-cal and proportional, find the human form beautiful.But what is most precisely not in our genes is the creative, intelli-gent perception that finds form, coherence, value, and beauty not to sayattraction in human bodies, and in so much else besides.And what is notsimply given in the basic and unreflective processes of our bodies is theactive, improvisational desire that inheres in our every encounter withthings, such that it makes a sense of nature and thus gives coherence to theworld.visualizing sexThe unabashed eugenicist tilt of biological research on beauty was distilledwith spectacular vulgarity on the ABC news program Day One, which airedin April 1995 and included an interview with David Buss, author of The Evo-lution of Desire.22 A portion of that program is described here by MarthaMcCaughey:As Buss elaborates in the interview, our evolutionary forebrotherswho did not prefer women with high cheekbones, big eyes, lustrous Biological Beauty / 131hair, and full lips did not reproduce.Buss explains that those men whohappened to like someone who was older, sicker, or infertile arenot our ancetors.We are all the descendants of those men who pre-ferred young healthy women and so as offspring, as descendantsof those men, we carry with us their desires. On that same show,Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccioni says that men are simplybiologically wired to enjoy looking at sexy women: This may bevery politically incorrect but that s the way it is.It s all part ofour ancestral conditioning. 23Much has been written and said about the supposedly visual nature of men ssexuality and the supposedly nonvisual nature of women s.According tothe old Darwinian formula, eager, aggressive men see beauty, whereas coy,choosy women calculate value.Stephen Pinker reproduces the much-repeated proposition: The maleof the human species is aroused by the sight of a nude woman.In for-aging cultures, young men make charcoal drawings of breasts and vulvason rock overhangs, carve them on tree trunks, and scratch them in the sand. By extrapolation, pornography a ten-billion-dollar industry in the UnitedStates alone, grossing almost as much as spectator sports and the moviescombined is much the same now as it always was, a succession of anony-mous nude females eager for casual, impersonal sex. But, Pinker contin-ues, from an evolutionary perspective, it would make no sense for awoman to be easily aroused by the sight of a nude male. Instead, she seeks the best husband available, the best genes, or other returns on her sexualfavors.If she could be aroused by the sight of a naked man, men could in-duce her to have sex by exposing themselves and her bargaining positionwould be compromised. 24I sometimes wonder whether evolutionary psychologists can see at all.Pinker overlooks the obvious in his brisk invocation of primitive art, hisquick leap to modern pornography, his outlandish claims about what menand women universally feel.The substantial presence of homoerotic themesin modern and classical pornography might indicate some caution towardthe unqualified claim that the male of the human species is aroused by thesight of a nude woman. And men with erections, or even just erect phal-luses with no men attached, are by no means absent in the primitive art heselectively cites.Are these phallic figures to be understood as evidence ofprimitive homosexuality or of the inherently bisexual nature of men? Per-haps one, perhaps the other.But perhaps neither.We do not even knowwhether it was men or women or both who left the cave drawings, wall paint- 132 / Venus and Mars at the Fin de SiècleFigure 17.Upper Paleolithicivory carving, c.25,000 b.c.e.,discovered near Dolní Vestonice,Czech Republic.Sometimes describedas an abstract female form or as a rod with breasts. FromAlexander Marshack, The Roots ofCivilization (New York: McGraw-Hill,1972).© Marshack 1972.ings, and fetishes Pinker selectively invokes.25 We cannot even be sure thatthey were experienced as sexual representations at all, a point developedby archaeologist Margaret Conkey in her essay Original Narratives
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