Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Root by Peter Frost

Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Rootby Anonymous

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June 24, 2005: A couple of decades ago, I began noticing that the leading lady in a movie was almost always fairer-skinned than her leading man. It appears filmmakers and their audiences subconsciously associate lightness of complexion with femininity. Yet, nobody ever seems to talk about it. Medieval Europeans referred to women as 'the fair sex,' but in contemporary discourse, skin color is associated only with race, not with sex. We don't behave like that, however. My impression is that female fans are more insistent than male fans that their favorite actresses be fair. Conversely, male fans don't much like pale actors, as Jude Law's problems shedding the dreaded 'pretty boy' tag demonstrate. When the Internet came along in the 1990s, I discovered that an anthropologist at Universit? Laval in Quebec named Peter Frost had been researching for years this question of why actresses were so fair, and much else besides. His findings are quite extraordinary. He's finally published a lucidly written and wide-ranging book entitled Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice. It proves well worth the wait, shedding light on a broad array of contemporary social issues. It turns out that this favoritism toward lighter skinned women is not an invention of Hollywood. You'll note that conventional 'social constructionist' thinking can't explain this phenomenon. The standard academic's logic would predict that, because whites rule and men rule, therefore the whitest men would be the most popular. But pallid blonde actors of the James Spader ilk typically play evil preppie-yuppie villains, not heroes. Conversely, the movie industry is responding to a fondness for fairer females found in almost all cultures across almost all eras. In his foreword to Fair Women, Dark Men, U. of Washington sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe, author of one of my favorite books, The Ethnic Phenomenon, summarizes: 'Although virtually all cultures express a marked preference for fair female skin, even those with little or no exposure to European imperialism, and even those whose members are heavily pigmented, many are indifferent to male pigmentation or even prefer men to be darker.' Frost reports that out of 51 different cultures in the anthropology profession's famous Human Relations Area Files, 44 cultures favored lighter complexions on either only women (30) or on both sexes (14). In only 3 cultures was fair skin preferred on men only, and in just 4 cultures was darker skin desired. Lighter ladies were favored in many countries with little exposure to Western beauty standards, such as medieval Japan, Ethiopia, Aztec Mexico, and Moorish Spain, where the dominant culture was darker skinned than the conquered natives. Frost discovered that the reason women were called 'the fair sex' is because women are indeed fairer on average after puberty. He notes that 50 out of 54 anthropometric studies from around the world have shown that women's untanned skin, such as under the upper arm, reflects more light than men's. Women have more subcutaneous fat, which gives them a lighter look. The gender difference in color is not large, but before Europeans came into frequent contact with sub-Saharan Africans and others of highly different hues, it was noticeable. Frost writes: 'When one?s social horizon takes in a limited range of observable skin tones, small gradations of color take on more importance?. A 'white' person was simply...