Fertility and Femininity

So the Daily Mail has this article today about how women who wear make up mask their “feminine glow”. While the sarcastic part of me wants to say something along the lines of “Yes, that’s true. It’s called oil control and a good powder works wonders for that.” The article isn’t dealing with skin problems and how to fix them, it opens with the comment: “Make-up, scientists believe, interferes with the most basic and instinctive lines of communication between male and female. It masks the natural feminine glow which, through centuries of evolution, has been the signal to a man that a woman is fertile.” It then goes on to say that prior studies had shown that more fertile men were considered to have more attractive faces and this was the basis for a similar study in women. They then extended the study to see what impact make up had.

At the end of the day, it seems that if you’re ugly and you put on make up, you can confuse men into thinking you’re more fertile than you actually are and therefore do the world a huge disservice by attracting a mate that you otherwise would not have managed to snag. Fortunately, if you’re already beautiful (and thereby fertile, according to the study) make up doesn’t diminish your ability to do your part in the survival of the species.

The author details some of the “scientific” proceedings that were undertaken to show this, wrapping up with comments from one of the “researchers”, Miriam Law Smith: “Our findings could explain why men seem to universally prefer feminine women’s faces.” And “In evolutionary terms, it makes sense for men to favor feminine fertile women – those that did would have had more babies.”

So, automatically women who are generally perceived as pretty are more fertile – and therefore more feminine – than everyone else? I have issues with this on so many levels. Let’s just throw out the whole “scientific” process used and go with the idea that it’s a valid process. However, we’re now saying that femininity is defined by a woman’s beauty and her fertility?

In a previous post, I discussed some of the issues surrounding femininity, and fertility is one I purposefully left out. Sure, good ol’ Webster defines female as “of, relating to, or being the sex that bears young or produces eggs”, and feminine as essentially referring to things female. So yeah, the dictionary ties this all up with your fertility. And yet, I have to believe there’s so much more to it.

Beyond that, there are women in Hollywood who seem to be fairly universally regarded as attractive by the male of the species who have issues with fertility. And there are a host of women in the world – famous or not – who don’t rate high on the attractive scale (even with make up) who have no problem popping out kids every time they blink.

It seems to me to be a rather huge stretch to tie fertility in to “beauty”, when so much of beauty really is perception. With the infertility issues that run rampant in society, along with the host of other self image issues women face today, do we really need another “scientific study” giving us one more reason to be critical of our bodies?