The Case for Inequality: Gorgeousness Edition
Anne Applebaum’s latest is a must-read.
To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren’t any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren’t any ratings. There weren’t many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn’t get the right sort of visa.
Moreover,
Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people’s republics.
After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, that changed.
Instructive, in this light, is the career of a real Vogue cover girl, Natalia Vodianova. Born in Nizhny Novgorod to a single, impoverished mother, Vodianova ran away from home at 15 to run a fruit stall in the local street market (successfully, according to her official biography). At 17, she was spotted by a French scouting agent and told to learn English in three months. She did—after which she moved to Paris, married a British aristocrat, and went on to become “the face” of a Calvin Klein perfume and to earn $4 million-plus annually. The fashion world is ludicrously silly and superficial, but it did get Vodianova from Nizhny Novgorod to London, far away from her mother’s abusive boyfriends, which wouldn’t have happened before 1989.
My gut instinct is to think, “I wish there were a better way to escape misery and abuse than to cultivate good looks,” and I think that’s clearly right. Yet it’s also true that in our less-than-perfect world cultivating beauty as a means of economic advancement is a tried-and-true strategy. It just happens that it is now available to millions more than ever before — or rather thousands more unusually symmetrical people. Applebaum ends on the right note.
Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune.
This is as good a place as any to note that Applebaum is married to Radek Sikorski, currently the Polish foreign minister. What’s even cooler is that Sikorski, once affiliated with AEI, is part of a liberal center-right government that is playing hardball with the United States over missile defense. Note that the Poles didn’t play hardball with Moscow when they were in the Warsaw Pact. I’d say the world looks pretty terrific from this vantage point.
“Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people’s republics.”
i know she’s an expert and all, but i thought the soviet physicists were the princes of the republic? in any case, re: slavic beauty, some things to note:
1) exoticism + still white, so marketable (half-tatar is much more acceptable than half-nigerian).
2) not as impacted by affluent ailments like obesity
3) i assume they come <i>relatively</i> cheap? i mean, the same issues above apply to the saturation of euro-porn with slavs and hungarians after the fall of the soviet bloc.
— razib · Jan 29, 07:29 AM · #
“Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius.”
This is absolutely right. The great thing about the free market is that it allows us to cultivate the gifts that nature gave us; it rewards us for doing so, and at the right price. Coming from one of the model capitals of the world and having seen a few of those Russian models up close, and having spent some time in the former Soviet bloc, I can vouch for the fact that becoming models has helped them escape from a pretty grisly fate.
The caveat is that, yes the influx of Russian (and Brazilian and Central Asian…) beauties is great for everyone involved when they become catwalk models. But the problem with amazing women (in every sense of the word) like, say, Daria Werbowy is that a whole generation of girls in those countries, has concluded that their looks — their bodies — is their ticket out. Down the line from runway modeling there’s commercial modelling, fine, then nude modelling, less fine and, in the murky area between modelling and porn/prostitution, all the girls who go husband-hunting, a milder, but no less dehumanizing form of prostitution.
Go to Kiev or Moscow (or Rio or Shanghai…) any time as a Westerner and you’ll see how widespread, and how unhealthy the phenomenon is.
Now this isn’t to bash high fashion, because it’s too easy and because supply meets demand. This is first and foremost a development issue, and a free trade issue.
Anyway, I agree with your conclusion — the world keeps getting better all the time. But there’s another side to the coin.
— PEG · Jan 29, 08:11 AM · #
Now I’ll be depressed all day….
— Freddie · Jan 29, 02:57 PM · #
It’s been speculated that post WWII, far more women survived than men. So competition for mates among women in Soviet repression (having a husband who was a good husband MATTERED in an abusive state) led to rapid sexual selection for looks among women: tall, good skin, good looks.
— Jim Rockford · Jan 30, 06:35 AM · #