Picture ©Lightworks-Gallery, V. Schrader
A small series of articles by Dr. med. Margrit Lettko (Medical Director of the Network Aesthetics) and Dirk Brandl (Speaker Network Aesthetics)
In aesthetic medicine, we are dealing with the optimisation of various factors that our counterpart perceives as “beautiful” or “attractive”. Beauty always has a social meaning and can never be seen in isolation from social conditions. We do not only look at our reflection with our own eyes, but above all with the eyes of others. This shows the social significance of something deeply personal. Aesthetic medicine can only work successfully if we look behind the facade and understand why people want to become more attractive. That is the purpose of this small series of articles.
Aspects of globalisation
Karl Marx characterised our economic system as one in which workers and employees were made free to sell their labour as a commodity. If only it had stayed that way! It is true that the commodity character of the workforce is still the basis of our developed economies, and today, in the age of globalisation, this characterisation may still be particularly true for the manufacturing industry, which has now outsourced to the Export Production Centres (EPCs) in China, North Korea or Bangladesh (Naomi Klein “No Logo”). The marketing departments that develop and design these products, create demand and convince us consumers to buy them, are still located in the metropolises of money in Europe and the USA. And the companies that optimise production are still to be found in the centres of power. Those who want to work here have to sell more than just their labour or qualifications. Personality is bought here, and anyone who wants to settle down at these meat pots has to do a lot to be attractive, i.e. satisfy the beautiful pretence of the goods. These are the economic reasons why more and more people are working to become more attractive. Can you relate to this? Do you feel the same way?
Attributes of attractiveness can be very diverse, depending on who is looking at us: For the boss of a construction company, a worker who owns mountains of muscle is attractive; for the boss of a telemarketing company, appearance is almost irrelevant, but the voice is all the more important. Wherever there is direct contact between customer and salesperson, more diverse attributes are required.
But how does it work if we judge someone to be beautiful or attractive? What are the reasons why one person is regarded as attractive and another as unattractive? This article deals with these questions.
Catherine Hakim, sociologist at the London School of Economics, recently published the book “Erotic Capital, the Secret of Successful People”. The reason for this was her realisation that attractiveness is becoming increasingly important in public life. By erotic capital she understands “an elusive mixture of external beauty, social attractiveness and sex appeal that makes some people particularly attractive”. The importance and value of erotic capital would grow enormously in our sexualised and individualised modern society and is, in her opinion, no less important than economic (goods and money), cultural (what we know) and social capital (who we know), whereby the term “capital” is used here in a misleading way.
In the end, Hakim says nothing else but that attractiveness is our most important interpersonal currency. This statement is certainly correct, even if everyone lets the filter attractiveness work, guided by their own interests.
Part II of the series is about why attractiveness is so important to us. An overview of all the works discussed or quoted in the article series can be found at the end of part 6.