Divided, we stand united

Just be yourself. Natural is in right now. How often have we heard the pleas not to change your body or your personality to fit others’ expectations? Yet there are still definite trends in our expectations of these things, and definite pressures to conform to those trends. What are we missing?

First, I want to talk about body shape. Women certainly suffer from the pressure to look a certain way (only a lunatic would deny that). But what’s particularly crazy is the changing fashions in what we are pressured to look like. Not just in terms of clothing, hairstyle, having or not having a tan, etc., but in terms of much less transitory things. Relatively recently, we've undergone the shift from skinny straight-up-and-down, to curvy hour-glass. This is insane. Your weight might be under voluntary control to some extent, but your body shape – short of surgery – is not. For this reason among many others it is just not the sort of thing that should be subject to fashions.

Men haven’t got away scot free on this one either. There has been a shift in ideal from lean muscular to more beefy bulked-up muscular, and that is just as damaging and ridiculous as the corresponding shift for women.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with having ideals. It’s just that any person’s body ideal should only ever be the healthiest version of themselves, not a picture of someone else entirely unlike them.

What is perhaps even more disturbing is that personality suffers from the same fashion trends. In the modern Western world, it is said that a slight hint of mania does you some favours (see e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19entre.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0), and that many successful people score a little higher than average on the scales used to test for psychopathy (see e.g. http://fortune.com/2012/10/26/do-psychopaths-make-good-ceos/). There has also been a little flurry recently over how under-rated introverts have become (http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts), and this seems in danger of descending into a competition over whether introversion or extraversion is “better”.

As with body type, the traits at issue here are often not really under an individual’s control. One argument is that it is useful to know that extraverts are more successful in a particular situation, so introverts could to better by “faking” extraversion. That might be useful advice in the short term, but really, why should anybody have to fake anything? We can all benefit from a little pretence at times, for example feigning sympathy rather than admitting we don’t really care about an acquaintance’s misfortunes. But pretending to be someone else is taking this to a whole new, and worrying, level.

What happens to you if you’re not a curvy extravert, or a mildly psychopathic beefcake? You can either fake it (with the help of surgery or drugs if necessary), you can bemoan your own inferiority and spiral into depression and self-loathing, or…you could try a little self-acceptance. This is really hard, given the social pressure to take one of the first two routes, but it is surely obviously better. And the main thing that makes self-acceptance easier is if we all practice a bit of other-acceptance too. People are different. Get over it.

We have been led to expect people to behave in certain ways, and to deride them for not doing so. We want everyone to be confident (by which people usually mean loud), brim full of energy, and at least making an effort to look how you’re supposed to look (control pants, chicken fillets, fake tan, etc.) But why do we think these ways of being are better than others? They might be better on average in certain types of situations, but they are definitely worse in others.

The really tragic thing here is our total inability to celebrate and respect diversity. Our diversity is our great strength as a society. In evolutionary terms, groups that are too uniform don’t last long. This is because organisms that all have the same weakness are vulnerable to entire populations being wiped out at a stroke. There are plenty of evolutionary facts that don’t translate up to the social level, but I think this one does. Any group that has variety of skills, interests, etc. is much more robust than one where everyone is the same. And it’s so much less boring.

When it comes to physical attractiveness, not only is it ok to be attracted to a look that isn't currently the fashionable one, it’s ok (in fact I think the healthiest thing) to not have a “type” at all.

What is interesting about a new person when you meet them is what makes them unique. That can be both physically and in terms of personality (depending on the context of meeting). So take the time to find out who people are, and don’t do this with a check-list of fashionable attributes that you think they ought to have.

There are many ways of dealing with a problem. There are many ways of being attractive. There are many ways of being good company. There are many ways of showing you care. There are many ways of being in charge. There are many ways of being a useful member of a team. Next time someone does one of these things in a non-standard way, look at whether it actually works, not at whether you have always been told that this is the way to do that thing. Practice other-acceptance. And next time you do one of those things in a non-standard way, think similarly. Practice self-acceptance. By accepting and even accentuating our diversity, we can stand together as a more robust, better functioning, and happier society.