Women compete with other women to be attractive to men. Men compete with other men for positions of power and dominance to be attractive to women. So you see, even years ago we already distinguished between ugly and beautiful people. For instance, a woman's long shiny hair is not necessarily more beautiful than short hair. Healthy, shiny hair just symbolised a healthy, well-nourished body and that meant stronger genes. In fact beauty does matter. It is a noble idealism which says that it should not. And our society can prove this argument:.
1) Their partners tend to be more attractive; .
2) They are thought to be more intelligent and sociable by their teachers who tend to give them better grades in school; .
Of course we can't attribute the whole beauty- problem to the primitive human beings; it's just a part of it, because all through history, people had the most peculiar ideas of the perfect body. In the already mentioned early cultures an obese woman was the common female ideal. A similar look developed in the 14th century: small breasts, a large belly, fat thighs and short legs described the perfect woman. The Greeks loved long upper parts of the body, where the navel was exactly in the middle between the breasts and the genitals. During their cultural reign over the rest of Europe, the well known sentence "blondes have more fun" was created Greeks preferred fair haired ladies. In the 19th century, the cadaverous and fragile look was modern. A tiny, shy woman who looked like a child was perfect in the eyes of men during these years. In this society anorexia developed.
But some things never changed over the years. Nefertiti is still one of the most beautiful faces in the world, as an advertising icon for the perfect symmetry of her face. Proportion and symmetry in an object seem to be nearly always essential to our visual perception of that object as being beautiful. Symmetric objects are usually more pleasing to look at than asymmetric ones.