These are not uplifting times for those who believe that, all things considered, it would be nice if looks weren't absolutely everything. The tidal wave of analysis about Madame Sarkozy's Dior (air hostessy or not air hostessy?), Madame's cheekbones (natural or enhanced?), Madame's nude portrait (arty or tarty?) was merely a sand-marker.
This level of debate is played out weekly in the celebitchy magazines, and hourly on countless websites such as thesartorialist.com, an almost elegiacally earnest and tastefully laid-out pictorial blog dedicated to what stylish members of the public are wearing, or the slightly less tastefully laid-out forums with names such as rate-my-rack.org.
"Looks," as the novelist Fay Weldon says, "are still the most important thing for women. Nowadays, all little girls are told that they're beautiful by their mothers, even when they're not. We're terribly conflicted. We don't want appearances to be important, but almost everything we do reinforces that they are. Awful? Yes, if you think that there's such a thing as justice or people being born equal.
"But there are lots of things that are unfair about birth. Every small girl has to come to terms with the way she looks. In a way it's better now, because everyone can make themselves look better with cosmetics and surgery, but that in turn leads to an obsession that's becoming almost dystopian. Look how aspirational the WAG lifestyle has become -- a lifestyle that's entirely predicated on how good women look and their ability to snare a man. We are in a moment of severe backlash against everything that feminists fought for."
If you were a raging optimist, you might interpret the tireless chronicling of Posh's nail extensions and Hermes bag collection as a victory against those doom-mongers who claim that these days we all have the attention span of a pair of hotpants. Not when it comes to arguing the case for and against the ones that Britney Spears recently wore, we don't. You would dismiss theories that the media's saturation coverage -- and the public's devouring -- of the McCanns was partly a result of their being photogenic.
There is absolutely nothing new about "lookist" societies. Certainly since Chaucer, who wasn't exactly backward about coming forward with scathing descriptions of people's appearances, British and Irish literature has teemed with the pulchritudinous. Nora Joyce was less than flattered by her husband James' depiction of her in Ulysses -- the character of Molly Bloom being closely based on her. Nora complained: "What do you think of a book with a big, fat, horrible married woman as the heroine?"
Beauty was the only currency a woman could call her own. Hence this 140 years later, from George Eliot (a woman who was definitely more of a thinker than a looker) on Dorothea Brooke on the first page -- in the first sentence! -- of Middlemarch: "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress." Or this -- from the first line -- of Jane Austen's Emma: "Handsome, clever and rich." Where the plain are allowed to exist (Jane Eyre, Northanger Abbey) there is, alas, often a whiff of disingenuous Ugly Betty-itis.
We don't need Desmond Morris to tell us that good looks are a biological preference, denoting good health and a gene pool that is generally innocent of cross-pollinating brothers and sisters. We also don't need me, a fashion editor who has done her share of critiquing other women's appearances (only those, I hope, who were fair game, although occasionally I have done the Devil's work) to tell us that henceforth we should repent our superficial ways and never speak harshly of TV presenter Carol Vorderman again.
And the reason we don't need me or Dr Morris to point this out is because we have our Better Natures, which for centuries have been engaged in a duel with our instincts on this very subject.
Better Nature advises you not to go for a man who looks like Brad Pitt but has the brains of a flower pot. Instinct says what glorious-looking children you will have together. Better Nature is the recent call for an industry watchdog to curtail the amount of airbrushing in magazines in an attempt to present women with more realistic images. Instinct means that a woman with even mildly unconventional looks on the cover of a glossy magazine can have a deleterious impact on sales. Better Nature is society placing gags on itself under the aegis of political correctness.
If a balance is more or less achieved between these conflicting impulses, then that, arguably, is the best we can hope for. Let's not forget, as Michael Herz, the head of design at luxury clothing manufacturer Aquascutum, says, "the huge enjoyment to be derived from taking an interest in how you and people around you look. Fashion and make-up can be power tools. The problem is that everything is increasingly bound up with appearance."
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