The beauty of light skin
Do we all like pale women? This
article in the
New York Times talks about the preference for light-skinned women in Africa. This paragraph is interesting:
To social critics on this continent, skin lighteners are merely another negative legacy of white colonialism. After all, to be white was long an essential passport to power and wealth. Such bleaches are not unique to Africa, but it is in Africa — a vast continent with a black population in the hundreds of millions — that the products seem most absurd.
To get more information on this topic, I suggest this
highly informative site. The general conclusions are pretty obvious-but this a representative sample of the text:
Some data point to such a behavioral difference. Feinman and Gill asked 549 male and 482 female white college students to indicate the complexions they liked and disliked in the opposite sex. The men tended to prefer lighter shades of skin in women whereas the women tended to prefer darker ones in men. The contrast was more striking when the subjects stated their dislikes. While 30% of the men disliked a black complexion, only 10% of the women did so. Similarly, 82% of the women disliked the two lightest shades, while the corresponding proportion for men was only 56%.
When I went to Bangladesh in 6th grade, it was strange to hear people talking about complexions all the time. The first thing that people would ask about someone is "what color are they?" There was an obvious judgement here-black was bad, fair was good. People would often sneer when they said someone was black-while they would smile when they said someone else was fair. These weren't conscious acts, the colors had such strong connotations that they didn't even think of it (by the way-if you see a personal in a South Asian newspaper-if they say someone is "wheatish," that means they're butt-black. It's kind of like the equivalent of "having a good personality").
Why so extreme? In places like Bangladesh field workers get darkened by the sun rather strongly. The wealthy classes on the other hand can maintain a pretty pallid light brown complexion. Of course over time, darkness becomes associated with the lower classes, while lightness the upper classes. Add to the fact that lower class women almost certainly married up if they were
genetically fair-skinned enough to look attractive to an upper-class suitor-thereby imparting their descendents with a genetic as well environmentally fair complexion-you have a layer cake of color that might smear at the borders though it always maintains its integrity. Of course, skin tone is important in
the black community as well.
In the end, one of most irritating issues when talking about aesthetics is that it always comes back to hegemonic European standards. Certainly this might have an influence (
eye-lid surgery anyone?), but it's kind of patronizing to think that non-whites can never make their own aesthetic judgements that might continue after the age of European colonialism.
But make sure you read the site mentioned above-it has lots of nice evolutionary psychologically oriented speculation. But just remember, babies are pale. That's the basic track.
Related note: See Steve Sailer's
articles on blondeness.