The Role of Gender in Perceiving Beauty

The Role of Gender in Perceiving Beauty

The definition of beauty varies across people. Couples may have different preferences for furniture, teenagers may have different idols, and western and eastern people may pursue different body shapes due to factors such as race and education. This essay demonstrates that gender is a very important one of them, presenting the differentiated criteria of beauty across genders, analyzing how the difference of focus of vision and thus perception of beauty is attributed to the biological differences between men and women, and addressing that cultural backgrounds does not interfere the role of gender in the perception of beauty.

The difference in concept of beauty for men and women can be observed ubiquitously regardless of the subject being judged. As indicated by a survey conducted in the UK, men and women have different criteria about ideal female face. Men generally prefer shaper features and blonde hair, while women prefer softer features and dark hair which seemed to be more attainable and realistic (Willett, 2013). Similarly, men and women have different ideal body shapes. The ideal female body shape for men is plumper than it for women and the ideal male body shape for men has more prominent muscles than that for women (Rasimaviciute, 2015). The difference exists even for most attractive color for one’s car, women prefer neutral colors while men prefer conspicuous colors, like orange (Bureau, 2015). The marked contrasts between men and women shown in the above surveys suggest that they have their own standards of beauty and this difference exists pervasively in daily life, especially for aesthetic issues.

Behavioral and biological evidence in the difference in image processing also suggests the existence of different measures of beauty between male and female. One research studying participants’ concentrations on photos shows that men mainly observe the faces of the people in pictures while women pay more attention to lower body parts and are able to discover more than men do (Lee, 2012). This finding implies that men and women have a significantly different focus when searching for attractive elements. Men look for straightforward information by directly concentrating on some obvious components, for example the main character in a picture or the tallest building in a painting. On the contrary, women tend to view and evaluate those beautiful images from a more comprehensive perceptive. In addition to this, it is found that man handles beauty using the right brain while woman utilizes the entire brain when they are exposed to the same image (Sample, 2009) and the different process of images among brains may contribute to men and women’s different appreciation of beauty.

Some may argue that gender doesn’t alter the definition of attractiveness and it is the culture that matters in the formation of the concept of beauty. In Mauritania, Africa, rotund women are adored, as fatness is regarded as the symbol of wealth and fertility (Harter, 2004). While in Asia, being as skinny as possible is considered to be attractive. There is no doubt that cultural diversity results in a difference in people’s definition of beauty, but this difference is now becoming smaller, thanks to the prevalence of the Internet and mass media. Curvy girls used to be popular in Japan, which was opposed to the Western standard of being skinny, but the percentage of underweight Japanese girls has been rising rapidly in the past decades under the influence of Western media (Zeilinger, 2015). This indicates that although culture may have an impact on people’s perception of aesthetic, the impact is weakened nowadays. However, the influence caused by gender difference would not change as it is endogenous.