What if sexual attraction were the engine of art? It’s hardly a novel idea: if anything, it’s the starting point of aesthetics, vividly illustrated in Plato’s Symposium and taken up in different ways by Ovid and Dante. It’s inescapable in Renaissance culture, as in the Bronzino painting above, or the poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Donne. Sexual desire as the burning core of beauty, the awesome power allied, for better or for worse, with art.
That was then. In the modern era, post-Kant, sex generally hasn’t been at the center of theories of aesthetics, though it’s remained essential to literary scholarship. As in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case, art works have to demonstrate their cultural value despite, not because of, their erotic appeal. A century later, pornography is still more likely to be contrasted with high art than to be seen as an overlapping category. There’s a gap here, which becomes very obvious when you try to teach Bronzino to a room full of undergraduates.
Enter Richard Prum, an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist at Yale. Prum’s 2018 The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — And Us is first and foremost an intervention in evolutionary biology. But it’s also, by its conclusion, a theory of sex, beauty, culture, and the relations between human men and women. The argument goes like this: Darwin’s theory of natural selection by the differential survival of inherited traits—the survival of the fittest—remade our understanding of the natural world. But, as he himself was the first to realize, it also left some important questions unanswered. Above all, there was the problem of the peacock’s tail: if environmental fitness were the mechanism of selection, what explained the existence of beautiful, but decidedly impractical, adaptations? “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail,” Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend, “makes me sick!”
To answer this question, Darwin formulated a theory of sexual selection to complement his theory of natural selection. On the one hand, animals, typically male, compete with one another for access to and control of mates. On the other, animals, typically female, select mates based on their own preferences. The power of these preferences to shape evolution is the “forgotten” theory of Prum’s subtitle. Mate choice, he argues, is vital to understanding how traits are selected and passed on. It’s also the key to beauty: in his interpretation, animals choose mates based on their own inclinations, rather than simply with an eye to fitness. Beauty is magnetic because it’s beauty, the evolved result of millions of creatures’ preferences, not because it’s a proxy for strength, health, or hardiness. Released from strictly utilitarian imperatives, sexuality looks a lot more like the phenomenon we recognize, and Prum has some interesting, if tentative, remarks about non-reproductive forms of desire, including homosexuality. The peacock’s tail isn’t practical, but it is gorgeous. It’s survival of the loveliest as a complement and counterpoise to survival of the fittest.
I can’t comment on the value of Prum’s intervention within his own field, evolutionary biology, except to say that his framing is decidedly polemical. It’s him and Darwin (and perhaps Ronald Fisher) against the world. The Evolution of Beauty is a book designed to make enemies rather than friends, and by that measure, it appears to have been a success. Sexual selection, reviewers retorted in scholarly journals, is hardly forgotten among evolutionary biologists.
For those of us who work on culture, however, the ideas Prum describes are likely to be a lot more novel, and they’re certainly fascinating. Prum gives us a picture of the history of populations in which biology and culture are inextricable, and culture isn’t a kind of junior partner in the pair, but equally determinative. Beauty as the key to sex and sex, again, as the key to beauty. This stands in contrast to the usual models of evolutionary psychology, which treat biological imperatives as determining forms of culture, but never vice versa. Yet the most cursory reflection makes it obvious that human culture has everything to do with the history of populations and reproduction—and perhaps, in that respect, we’re not as unique as we tend to think.
Last year, I had the chance to meet Richard when he came to give a talk at Duke's Center for Science and Society. Afterwards, a group of us went to dinner. Over oysters—we were all much too polite to comment on the significance of the choice—the conversation turned to beauty. My colleague Rob grilled Richard on Kant and whether, according to his theories, sunsets, like the one that was slowly turning the horizon orange, could be beautiful. As the sky darkened and the dinner ended, we tried to tie our last, meandering reflections together, without very much success. As interesting as the conversation was, we had gotten approximately nowhere, at least as far as the creation of a unified field theory of literature and biology went. But over the past year, as I try to think about literature and demography in a way that shifts between culture and population history, I often find myself thinking about Richard’s ideas. The theories he proposes reveal countless parallels with literary history—speculative, to be sure, but intriguing. Here’s one with which to conclude:
Prum’s theory emphasizes male beauty. In conditions in which female animals have a great deal of choice, he posits, they’ll often gravitate to gentler, lovelier mates. The ideally attractive male, on average, isn’t a charismatic brute in the style of Heathcliff or Rochester (thanks, Brontës), but someone more closely resembling a singer in a boy band. I think this is precisely what many classical, medieval, and Renaissance writers imagined women would want when they thought about female desire, especially adulterous desire, released from the practical considerations of matrimony: the handsome page, the smooth-faced apprentice.
In fact, it’s a vision of female attraction and male beauty that’s there at the beginning, in Homer’s Iliad, with Helen’s love for Paris: “so handsome,” Aphrodite says in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, “never could you imagine the man came / just now from combat; one would say he goes / to grace a dance.” There’s a fascinating, if flawed, book on the Iliad, sex, and evolution, which analyzes the epic in terms of male competition for women in conditions of scarcity—a topic I plan to write about later, when I discuss another neglected aspect of cultural history, sex-selective infanticide. But its author, Jonathan Gottschall, can’t explain why Helen should be attracted to the beautiful Paris rather than the fierce Achilles, because female sexual selection isn’t part of his evolutionary picture. Of course, there are a lot of layers between the biology of desire and the Homeric imagination. Still, this is a strain in premodern literature that’s probably received less attention than it deserves. I suspect that reflecting on the deep entanglement of culture and biology in the history of reproduction can open up many others.