As a result, conversation around modern female beauty and ideals of femininity in
Asia appear relatively anxiety-free. There are fewer axes to grind, by either women or
men, fewer gaping divides of opinion, and also very significantly, far less of a moral
point of view on the very practice of engaging in being beautiful.
This last, historical, difference goes back a long way. In Western culture, the idea
that physical beauty is visible evidence of spiritual beauty can be traced back at least
as far back as Plato. Sappho wrote that ‘what is beautiful is good’. Later during the
Renaissance, when many of these ideas resurfaced, Castiglione was of the opinion in
1561 that ‘beauty is a sacred thing...only rarely does an evil soul dwell in a beautiful
body’. Likewise, he wrote, ‘for the most part, the ugly are also evil’. In Western
thought, ugliness was a sign of the bad, the mad and the dangerous. Deformities,
ugliness and disease were seen as stigmata branded on to the body by a wrathful
God (as in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch). In the absence of a lasting JudaeoChristian
moral legacy and the existence of an absolute moral arbiter in Asia (at
least across non-Muslim Asia), this sort of interplay between ugliness and evil simply
did not exist in Asian thought. In the same way, the moral overlay regarding the
wearing of cosmetics, common throughout the Western world up until the coming
of Christianity, but since then looked down upon as sinful and later associated with
‘fallen’ women, did not exist in Asia. The conversation around beauty in Asia today is
therefore relatively free from the moral weight it continues to carry in the West, as well
as from the more recent ambivalence it has created with regards to the status of men
and women post-feminism.
