Depression:
I subscribe to Anthony Stevens and John Price's Rank Theory of Depression. "SRT proposes that low mood and submissive behaviour are involuntary yielding responses to defeating competitive situations (i.e., in the competition for resources, such as for food or mates, with dominant others), and these responses are as a means of inhibiting an aggressive ‘comeback’, communicating a ‘no threat’ status and facilitating acceptance of the situation. This is reflected in the submissiveness, withdrawal and self-criticism that are indicative of depression states (Gilbert, 2001)." [Source]
This affects me because:
1. Physical attractiveness is the primary female status indicator
2. I am physically unattractive
3. Therefore, I have low social status
I feel that in many cases the life of a low-status, reproductively unfit person is so inadequate as to be not worth living. Long-term social subordination is immensely psychologically distressing for social primates like humans.
OCD(?):
- I'm very prone to feeling 'contaminated', especially by food, water, plastics, air pollution, perfumes etc. In particular, real or imagined carcinogens. Foods are deemed accptable on an often arbitrary basis.
- I feel anxious about aging and go to great lengths to manage this anxiety. This is because youthfulness is an important aspect of female attractiveness, and as I am otherwise physically unattractive, it is an especially load-bearing characteristic for me. UV radiation is widely believed to contribute to visible skin aging, so I avoid sunlight in order to preserve my only positive characteristic. However, I am aware that the extreme lengths I go to in order to avoid even incidental sunlight exposure/marginal gains in attractiveness are irrational.
- I often don't have a very strong sense of the boundary between myself and my environment.
- I do not perform any repetitive or ritualistic behaviours.
- I do not experience 'intrusive thoughts', as I understand the term.
Overall, I'm not sure if I meet the DSM criteria for OCD.
Some thoughts on 'Body Dysmorphic Disorder':
Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD): "a mental disorder characterized by the obsessive idea that some aspect of one's own body part or appearance is severely flawed and therefore warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix it."
My concern with this diagnostic framework is that it doesn't seem to accommodate the fact that 1) some people are actually ugly, and 2) ugliness incurs real social penalties (please see below where these two points are discussed in depth).
1. BEAUTY HAS OBJECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS ASSOCIATED WITH FERTILITY. THERE IS A HIGH DEGREE OF AGREEMENT ABOUT WHO IS ATTRACTIVE AND WHO IS NOT.
"Averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism are good candidates for biologically based standards of beauty. A critical review and meta-analyses indicate that all three are attractive in both male and female faces and across cultures."[Source]
1.1. Sexual dimorphism
"In women, estrogen-dependent characteristics of the female body correlate with health and reproductive fitness and are found attractive”. These features include:
- smaller than average nose
- smaller than average chin
- high forehead
- full lips
- large eyes
- low waist-to-hip ratio [Source]
- neoteny: the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. A neotenous face is one which combines a high ratio of neurocranial to lower-facial features with a small nose and ears and full lips. In other words, features are clustered towards the bottom of the skull and the skull itself is round and shortened.
- fair, smooth, unlined skin
- pedomorphic traits such as hairlessness
Sources:
The Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness, 1998]
Preferences for sexual dimorphism on attractiveness levels: An eye-tracking study, 2015
1.2. Symmetry and averageness
It is widely accepted that symmetrical bodies are considered the most attractive. “…preferences for facial averageness and symmetry are not restricted to Western cultures, consistent with the view that they are biologically based." [Attractiveness of facial averageness and symmetry in non-western cultures: in search of biologically based standards of beauty]
1.3. Cross-cultural consistency
Contra social constructivist theories of beauty, beauty ideals are actually relatively stable across the world. For example, “mean facial attractiveness ratings were highly correlated, with a correlation coefficient of 0.94” in this study of faces judged by Asian and Hispanic students and White American students.
This is well-attested in meta-analyses: [Source] and [Source]
2. ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE ARE TREATED MORE FAVOURABLY THAN UNATTRACTIVE PEOPLE.
2.1. Biases towards the attractive, or, ‘the halo effect’
The so-called ‘halo effect’ refers to the phenomenon in which desirable attributions are preferentially ascribed to attractive people.
Accordingly, attractive people:
Sources:
Influence of children's physical attractiveness on teacher expectations
2.2. Romantic Love
These kinds of biases make sense when we consider that looking at attractive faces is rewarding. The nucleus accumbens is believed to be responsible for making judgments of beauty and producing the neurological rewards (dopamine and other neurotransmitters) for finding it. “When men were shown faces of beautiful women while their brains were scanned by fMRI, the attractive faces specifically activated the nucleusaccumbens in the caudate region of the brain, when compared to viewing average faces.”
"Functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T shows that passive viewing of beautiful female faces activates reward circuitry."
The nucleus accumbens is also associated with the development of romantic love.
”To establish whether the ventral midbrain activation occurred because our participants were feeling romantic passion or were stimulated by an aesthetically pleasing face, we correlated facial attractiveness (as rated by others) with neural activation. This correlation showed that those with more aesthetically pleasing partners compared to the Neutral stimulus showed greater neural activity in the region of the left VTA than those with less attractive partners compared to the neutral stimulus.”
So, whether or not others will experience love towards a person is intimately connected to the attractiveness of that person's face. There are multiple mechanisms suggested for this phenomenon, one being that average faces are simply easier to look at due to the way the brain processes information.
Sources:
Perception and Deception: Human Beauty and the Brain, 2019
Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love, 2005
2.3. This effect is amplified if you are female
"Ugliness in a man doesn’t matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life."
— Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless
"In emphasizing differences in the importance of men and women’s physical attractiveness, Joyce Carol Oates (2002) expresses a sentiment that scientists across numerous disciplines accept as fact.”[Source]
“Buss (i 989) reviews survey data from 37 population samples from 33 countries and finds that in every sample males are more concerned than females with the physical attractiveness of a potential mate…. In other words, human beings seem to be an exception to the general rule among animals that male attractiveness matters more than female attractiveness.”