There are some in feminism who see beauty as illusory and a function of social hypnosis. By that standard so is the rest of the social reality, including such things as status, wealth and honor. Singling out beauty for persecution without also persecuting these other things is hypocrisy. We have people confront a part of the maya without confronting the rest of the maya. That is completely wrong.
These people believe that beauty is incompatible with strength or intelligence. They obviously haven’t met many Russian or Ukrainian women. These women are stronger and smarter than most feminists. That does not keep them from being the most beautiful women in the world.
I was once with an extraordinarily beautiful woman named Julia. She was much wiser than the feminists. Although they hated her, she did not hate them back. When I was discussing feminism with her, she said that hatred should not be confronted with hatred but with love. And she made a very big effort to understand other people instead of judging them, even the people who were vicious to her.
Is beauty illusory? There is nothing illusory about the Sistine Chapel or the Burmese stupas. There is nothing illusory about Yosemite Park. There is nothing illusory about the works of Shakespeare, Keats or Akhmatova. True beauty takes talent and effort to create and deserves respect.
So we see these people claiming enlightenment for seeing beauty as an illusion. When I was 15, I was telling other kids that everything is an illusion. My stance was ridiculous, but it was more honest than that of the feminists. I saw everything as illusion. They see a part of reality as illusory and a part of reality as real. And that makes them hypocrites.
Once again, if beauty is illusory, then so is everything else we find in society. However we do not see the feminists attacking these other things. They singled out one part of social reality for persecution without doing anything about the rest.
From science, we know that these people are wrong. A face with a particular set of proportions has been found to be beautiful by people cross-culturally. This means that there is beauty that is not culturally dependent and that appeals to all people. If beauty had been an artifact of social hypnosis, then people would not be finding beautiful the people outside their society, as for example many Western men find Japanese or Iranian women. And if it were incompatible with things such as strength or intelligence, then there wouldn’t be Russian or Ukrainian women in the world.
Beauty is something that everyone wants but nobody is willing to respect. That results in abuses against those who have it. Men get what they want, but they don’t value it and treat it like dirt. They have a disconnect between their likes and their values. And that can only lead to them being miserable and making the woman miserable.
There is much more wisdom in Michelangelo, Keats or Akhmatova than there is in Andrea Dworkin. That these people valued beauty does not make them shallow and it does not make them weak. They produced far greater works than any feminist, and they did so without seeing beauty as an illusion.
The real solution is to make beauty something that’s not only wanted but also valued. Valuing beauty in art, in nature and in people is more, not less, enlightened than seeing beauty as illusory. Women should be left alone to be as beautiful as they want to be. As for nature and art, these are repositories of vast wisdom and ingenuity. They likewise deserve to be treated with respect.