A class on beauty

I’m constantly boggled by the huge amounts of skin whiting creams you find in stores in China. Pond’s, Nivea, Oil of Olay and the numerous Chinese brands all have lines of moisturizer, lotions and other products claiming they’ll lighten your skin.

What’s the deal? Well, obviously, fair, as opposed to tan skin is the hot thing here. Why? My theory is the poor peasants work outside and get tanned skin, while the wealthy sit inside in the shade with their pale skin. Ergo, pale better. But I thought I’d ask my students what they thought.

So, as one of my lessons, we talked about beauty. In some classes, I showed the “Beauty” segment of a BBC documentary called “The Human Face” to get the ball rolling. Then we talked about what my students considered beautiful. White skin, big eyes, small mouth, long hair, slim figure (this was all for women). We compared this to previous ideas of beauty. In the Tang dynasty, beautiful women were fat, had white skin, big eyes, small mouth like a cherry, and incredibly tiny feet from foot-binding.

I asked them to consider why certain characteristics are more beautiful than others. Why do concepts of beauty change, why are there different “beauty standards” between cultures. For skin tone, one student echoed my theory, others shrugged and said they didn’t know, one explained it by saying, “There is black, yellow and white skin. We are yellow. We want to be white.”

Probing further, I asked how beauty, whether it’s skin tone, eyes, body-shape, the whole package, is important. Does beauty matter?

I admit that I wanted them to admit that people who do not conform to society’s beauty standards (for whatever reason) are treated differently by society as a whole. That assumptions (positive and negative) are made about people because of their looks and it can be challenging to move past these assumptions.

There was one incident I thought of aside from the profusion of skin-whitening creams. Back in the fall, a young woman, Lou Jing, appeared on an American-Idol like TV show here, which opened a deluge of racist nastiness because her father is African-American (her mother is Chinese).

To be clear: I wasn’t prodding because I wanted them to admit their country is superficial or racist– and the U.S. is far from saintly when it comes to healthy ideas of beauty or race (one obvious example is the perpetual fair-skinned, skinny, cis-gendered, able-bodied model). My purpose was to challenge their assumptions and get them to think outside the box a little.

This met with mixed results. In one class, I had to goad them into saying anything beyond, “inner beauty is most important.” To which I replied with yes, yes. We all know that, probably, rationally. But what about before you know if that person is beautiful inside? What about when you first meet a person? Would you treat a beautiful person differently from a person who is not?

This proved tricky. Some were adamant in their “no, inner beauty is most important.” Others noted more career success and money and boyfriends go to the beauty. One student said that beautiful girls got into more “trouble,” perhaps because of their extra boyfriends, though she couldn’t be more specific. (I guessed the "trouble" meant sex).

What about people who are not beautiful? (We didn’t get specific about who or what that was). I pressed on and one student said seeing a an ugly person might make her feel danger and she’ll run away. A couple others said they might feel afraid, but if they got to know that person’s “inner beauty” they wouldn’t feel afraid.

And they stuck to that “inner beauty” line. I don’t know what I expected them to say. The cynic in me scoffs with a, "yeah right." In the real world, most people don’t care a lot about your inner beauty. Tabloids, gossip, nasty comments all over the Internet about that butterface or this fattie or whatever. Not to mention the research showing that attractive people do make more money. The other part of me knows they’re right, inner beauty is more important. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to work past assumptions to discover it.

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