May 2, 2005.

Thе Myth of "Natural" Beauty

by Lеаnnе Bеll

I was surfing through some nude art sites the other day when I came across yet another series of naked women lounging on boulders or sprawled in trees or arching their backs against cliffs - all of which where shot in moody black and white and all of which were described, with a fair amount of awe, as 'natural' beauty. Some even went so far as to praise these works because they showed a "beauty found only in things that weren't man made." This line of thinking is completely wrong, and I think the reasons for it ought to be explored.

First of all, I should hardly have to even make this point, but there would be no beauty without the presence of man. Man is the only creature on the planet capable of even perceiving beauty, let alone creating it. Who else in the animal kingdom can shed tears at an aria, or stare transfixed at a painting in a museum, or be moved by the graceful curves and warm smile of a beautiful person? Animals don't find anything 'beautiful' - they are attracted to health or special talents in a potential mate, but there isn't an animal alive that would even be able to differentiate between the attractive and the unattractive, let alone be moved by one over the other. In that sense, all beauty, from a gorgeous girl to a glowing sunset, is 'man made', because without man there would be no one to appreciate it. Arguments that claim there is a beauty 'beyond man' are simply looking for a way to belittle mankind.

But if we're going to examine an image of a 'naturally beautiful woman', let's closely examine what's really going on here. It means you have to take out any reference to anything man made, and deal only with things supplied by nature. So let's start with the smooth bodies that feature so prominently in these pictures. Nature gives women thick patches of hair under their arms and over their vulvae and all over their calves, and no way of removing it. It takes an invention of man - a razor or a depilatory crème - to remove it. But we don't want anything to do with man in these pictures, so removing unwanted hair is out. A natural woman is quite hairy, and like men, smells pretty bad too without the benefit of deodorant.

Nature may make a woman's hair grow, but it also provides wind, rain and sun to mess up that hair and matte it, and it certainly doesn't provide shampoos and conditioners to make it shine. Neither does it provide combs or brushes to make that hair look so pretty. Those are all inventions of man. Without them, 'natural' girls should have mangy, matted hair, not the long, smooth, clean and shiny locks that these natural pictures feature.

Nature gives women breasts from girlhood, but it does nothing to support them and keep them firm throughout adulthood. Man invented corsets and brassieres to help support the breasts. If you want to see what happens to even a young woman's breasts after years of going braless, check out a Nаtіоnаl Gеоgrаphіc sometime and see the floppy, sagging breasts of the African bush women. That is what 'natural' women look like, not the finely sculpted specimens we have in the civilized world.

Nature doesn't provide much in the way of dental care, either. Those perfect, glowing white rows of teeth you see on these 'natural' girls are the product of generations of dental and medical science, again, achieved solely by man. Toothbrushes don't grow on trees, braces don't spring from the ground and fluoride, in its elemental form (if you were enough of a chemist to even know where to find it) would burn through your skin. What does nature do to teeth? Check out the before and after pictures at your orthodontists office sometime and you'll see what I mean.

In order for any person to grow more than, say, five feet tall, proper nutrition in childhood is essential. And it should be more than obvious to anyone who has ever seen clothing, suits of armor or even houses that are five hundred years old or so that human beings did not always have the benefit of sound nutrition. Most of us live in climates that do not, on their own, provide food with the full range of vitamins and minerals that we need for optimum growth. Man is responsible for developing agriculture, for cultivating foods he needs and importing those he can't grow, for developing vitamin pills and breaking down foods into their necessary components to better understand why we need them. Any healthy, robust, clear skinned, tall and well developed woman you see in photos got that way because her parents fed her properly, from birth, using medical science and the accumulated knowledge of mankind to make their daughter grow up much healthier than nature would have allowed her to. Nature would have given her scurvy, rickets, and a host of other potentially deadly childhood diseases, if she even lived past her first birthday - which only one in five children did five hundred years ago.

Nature also makes women quite fertile, and so unless every woman you see in these photos is supposed to be a virgin, then chances are good a 'natural' woman would have four or five children by the time she was 22 or 23, and probably wouldn't have that slender waist and perfect bottom anymore. Only man has developed methods of birth control that allow women to be sexual and childless. And for those models who do have children and have retained their figures - they probably had their children using modern medical procedures that helped them deliver safely and with little pain. Nature routinely kills mothers and babies in childbirth, and so many 'natural' women don't even live to see their 23rd birthday.

Last, but certainly not least - how is it we get to see these images? These 'natural' images are all taken with a camera and film, invented by man, to be displayed on a computer screen invented by man and beamed throughout the world via the internet, also invented by man. Where exactly is nature in all of this?

No doubt rocks and trees and waterfalls can be spectacular, and a beautiful woman in these settings can be just as spectacular. But it isn't the nature that makes it wonderful - it's the whole picture, the whole contribution of mankind, from the very perception of beauty in the first place, to the health and optimum beauty of the well groomed and cared for woman, to the equipment devised to capture such an image. When you see such a picture, you shouldn't be inspired by the beauty of nature, you should be filled with the wonder of mankind that can create all this beauty out of thin air.

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