"All you need is money or power, the notion goes, and beautiful lovers present themselves to you for the taking." Well, not so much.

For the majority of men and women, the major factor in choosing a partner is twinship (to use a Self Psychology term), meaning "this person is like me," and companionship - we want someone who's company we enjoy.

I suspect there are people of both sexes who choose partners for wealth or beauty, but those relationships are probably not going to last very long.

The Myth of Wealthy Men and Beautiful Women

Similarity and companionship are the currency of attraction, for better or worse.

James Hamblin | July 15 2014

Francis Cugat/Wikimedia

In one illustrious study of love (“human sexual selection”) in 1986, psychologists David Buss and Michael Barnes asked people to rank 76 characteristics: What do you value most in a potential mate?

The winner wasn’t beauty, and it wasn’t wealth. Number one was "kind and understanding," followed by "exciting personality" and then "intelligent." Men did say they valued appearances more highly than women did, and women said they valued "good earning capacity" more highly than men did—but neither ranked measures of physical attractiveness or socioeconomic status among their top considerations.

People, though, are liars. Experiments that don’t rely on self-reporting regularly show that physical attractiveness is exquisitely, at times incomparably, important to both men and women. Status (however you want to measure it: income, formal education, et cetera) is often not far behind. In real-life dating studies, which get closer to genuine intentions, physical attractiveness and earning potential strongly predict romantic attraction.

While people tend to prefer people similar to themselves in terms of traits like religiousness or thriftiness, when it comes to beauty and income, more is almost always seen as better. On these “consensually-ranked” traits, people seem to aspire to partners who rank more highly than themselves. They don’t want a match so much as a jackpot.

The stereotypical example of that is known in sociology as a “beauty-status exchange”—an attractive person marries a wealthy or otherwise powerful person, and both win. It’s the classic story of an elderly polymath-billionaire who has sustained damning burns to the face who marries a swimsuit model who can’t find Paris on a map but really wants to go there, because it’s romantic.

All you need is money or power, the notion goes, and beautiful lovers present themselves to you for the taking.

When Homer Simpson once came into a 500-pound surfeit of sugar, his id instinct was to turn it into fortune and sexual prosperity. “In America," he said, half dreaming after a night spent guarding the mound in his backyard, "first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.” That’s an homage to Scarface (in the movie the quote was “money” instead of “sugar”), and it’s where both Simpson and Tony Montana went emphatically astray.

University of Notre Dame sociologist Elizabeth McClintock has done exhaustive research on the idea of people exchanging traits. Her work was published last month in American Sociological Review, looking at data from 1,507 couples in various stages of relationships, including dating, cohabiting, and married. “Beauty-status exchange accords with the popular conception of romantic partner selection as a competitive market process,” McClintock wrote, “a conception widely accepted in both popular culture and academia.” She referred specifically to the gendered version, “in which an economically successful man partners with a beautiful 'trophy wife,'" as commonplace.

But McClintock found that outside of ailing tycoons and Donald Trump, in the practical world it basically doesn’t exist. Where it does, it doesn’t last. The dominant force in mating is matching.

What appears to be an exchange of beauty for socioeconomic status is often actually not an exchange, McClintock wrote, but a series of matched virtues. Economically successful women partner with economically successful men, and physically attractive women partner with physically attractive men.

“Sometimes you hear that really nice guys get hot girls,” McClintock told me, “[but] I found that really nice guys get really nice girls. [Being nice] is not really buying you any currency in the attractiveness realm. If the guys are hot, too, then sure, they can get a hot girl.”

Because people of high socioeconomic status are, on average, rated as more physically attractive than people of lower status, many correlations between one partner's appearance and the other partner's status are spurious and misconstrued.

“Women spend a lot more time trying to look good than men do,” McClintock said. “That creates a lot of mess in this data. If you don’t take that into account then you actually see there’s a lot of these guys who are partnered with women who are better looking than them, which is just because, on average, women are better looking. Men are partnering 'up' in attractiveness. And men earn more than women—we’ve got that 70-percent wage gap—so women marry 'up' in income. You’ve got to take these things into account before concluding that women are trading beauty for money.”

The study concludes that women aren’t really out for men with more wealth than themselves, nor are men looking for women who outshine them in beauty. Rather, hearteningly, people really are looking for ... compatibility and companionship. Finding those things is driven by matching one's strengths with a partner who’s similarly endowed, rather than trying to barter kindness for hotness, humor for conscientiousness, cultural savvy for handyman-ship, or graduate degrees for marketable skills.

At least partly because physically attractive individuals are treated preferentially by the world at large, they enjoy improved school performance, greater occupational success, and higher earnings. So these variables can be hard to isolate.

“It would be very hard to separate out class and attractiveness,” McClintock said, “because they’re just so fundamentally linked. I can’t control for that—but I don’t see how anybody could.”

Past research has found that both physical attractiveness and education “help a woman achieve upward mobility through marriage (defined as marrying a man of higher occupational status than her father),” McClintock noted in the journal article, “and help her marry a man of high occupational status, in absolute terms.” But these studies regularly excluded any evaluation of the men’s physical attractiveness, and so didn’t address the simple fact that it might just be two attractive people being attracted to one another, probably in attractive clothes in an attractive place, both perpetually well slept. Any “exchange” was an illusion.

McClintock has also found that the pervasive tendency toward rating higher-status people as more attractive seems to perpetuate itself . "Because of that," she said, "there’s a bias toward seeing women who are married to high-status men—who are themselves high-status—as being more attractive. It creates this self-affirming circle where we never even stop to ask if we perceive the man as good-looking. We just say she’s good-looking, he’s high status—and she’s good-looking in part because the couple is high-status."

“Assuming that the importance of beauty and status is gendered may cause researchers to overlook men’s attractiveness and women’s socioeconomic resources,” Eli Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern University, told New York magazine, praising McClintock’s work. In so doing, scientists misidentify matching as exchange.

“Scientists are humans, too,” Finkel claimed, “and we can be inadvertently blinded by beliefs about how the world works. The studies that only looked at men’s (but not women’s) income and only looked at women’s (but not men’s) attractiveness were problematic in that way, as was the peer review process that allowed flawed papers like that to be published.”

“Controlling for both partners’ physical attractiveness may not eliminate the relationship between female beauty and male status,” McClintock wrote, “but it should at least reduce this relationship substantially.”

Even as its pervasiveness in popular culture is waning, the gendered beauty-status exchange model is harmful in several insidious ways, McClintock said. “It trivializes the importance of women’s careers in a social sense: It’s telling women that what matters is your looks, and your other accomplishments and qualities don’t matter on the partner market. The truth is, people are evaluating women for their looks, and they’re evaluating men for their looks. Women are as shallow as men when it comes to appearance, and they should focus on their own accomplishments. If women want an accomplished guy, that’s going to come with being accomplished.”

So this is just one more place where upward mobility is, it seems, a myth. But in this case, no love is lost. Within the gendered beauty-status exchange model, physical attractiveness “might enable class mobility for women,” yes, McClintock wrote, but not without ensuring the women’s economic dependency on her husband and anachronistically ignoring her valuation of his physical attractiveness.

“It also sets up this idea of marriage being mercenary,” McClintock said, “which doesn’t fit with our usual conception that we kind of like our spouse and we want someone that we get along with. It’s not just this trade of his money for her beauty, and he’s going to dump her as soon as she starts to get some wrinkles around her eyes.”

From The Onion, America's Finest News Source, satire is often more telling than reality. In this case, making fun of men having to deal with how women really look in advertisements. With 67% of the population either overweight or obese, skinny models and actresses are certainly not the norm.

Increasing Number Of Men Pressured To Accept Realistic Standards Of Female Beauty

ISSUE 50•13 • Apr 2, 2014



More men are speaking out against the pervasive depictions of average women in the media, which have left them feeling demoralized and compelled to accept unwelcome ideals of beauty.
NEW YORK—Confronted on a regular basis with images of women who represent a diverse array of body types, a growing number of American men are reportedly feeling pressured to accept the increasingly realistic standards of female beauty now depicted in the media, social scientists confirmed this week.

“More and more, men today find themselves bombarded with un-retouched images, and with that comes the considerable mental burden of trying to reconcile what they see in these ads and magazines with their personal perceptions of beauty,” said sociologist Cliff Hillard, who studies attainable ideals of female attractiveness in the media and how they can create an overly realistic sense of what women ought to look like. “For most men, it’s very discouraging. Instead of seeing only rail-thin models, they’re now exposed to accurate representations of women whose proportions mimic those of actual human females.”

“Think about the average man flipping through a magazine that features pictures of women who haven’t had their cheekbones raised or their noses reshaped with Photoshop,” Hillard continued. “How is he supposed to feel when he sees something like that?”

Every day, according to Hillard, men are faced with “inescapable” displays of average-sized women, women who are representatively diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, and women who are not professional models. According to one recent study, the average man sees photographs of women without digitally exaggerated bust-to-waist ratios dozens of times per day on TV, billboards, and the sides of buses, which the findings suggest has a demoralizing effect on the male psyche and has been shown to negatively influence men’s self-esteem and mood the more often they view such images.

Hillard noted that major companies like Dove, H&M, and Ralph Lauren now use nontraditional models in their advertising campaigns, an increasingly popular trend that, according to the sociologists’ research, ultimately serves to make men feel upset and frustrated when the women in commercials don’t live up to their own personal fantasies.

“Nowadays I can’t even leave the house without seeing an ad featuring properly proportioned women of statistically normal weights,” said San Diego–based civil engineer Spencer DeLane, adding that some of the models’ bodies are “startlingly average.” “Sometimes I don’t even want to go online or turn on the television because I know I’ll see a regular, healthy-looking woman. Don’t these advertisers understand how deeply depressing that is for me?”

“It’s not fair to me, and it’s not fair to other men like me,” he continued. “Having to live with society’s expectations that I accept women just the way they are takes an enormous toll.”

In a recent USA Today poll, 87 percent of men said that in the past month they’d seen an ad that made them feel inadequate by challenging their conceptions of physical beauty. Within that group, 74 percent said they’d seen a model posing without makeup and 83 said they’d seen visible blemishes, with a further 62 percent reporting that they’d seen a model with slight wrinkles around her eyes that “could very easily have been digitally or surgically removed.”

Armed with mounting evidence that men can feel crushed under the heavy mental strain to appreciate all types of women, Hillard questioned the costs of depicting them in a sensible way that reflects their natural physical variance.

“Here you’ve got a generation of boys who will grow up looking at women in the media and seeing flaws here, flaws there, flaws everywhere—what are they supposed to think?” said Hillard, who noted that his 12-year-old son is just now beginning to objectify women and that such portrayals could grossly alter what he perceives as an idealized female form for the rest of his life. “That’s why it’s more important than ever to empower men so they can teach themselves to ignore these ads and images.”“We men simply need to have conviction in our own ideas of what makes a woman beautiful,” he added.

Was President Obama's "Best-Looking Attorney General" Comment Sexist?

I pay very little attention to most political news, so I missed President Obama's "best-looking attorney general" comment (on Thursday, April 4) in reference to California Attorney General Kamala Harris. However, one of my female clients brought it up in her session, so I looked into it a little bit.

Interestingly, some conservatives (women) are defending Obama while others are suggesting he “crossed the line” (woman) and needs “gender-sensitivity training” (man).

“She’s brilliant and she’s dedicated, she’s tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” Obama said at a Democratic National Committee event in California Thursday, adding “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general.”

Obama had the chattering class buzzing not long after he made the remarks, with some arguing he “crossed the line” and needed “gender-sensitivity training.”

And he found defenders in an unlikely place: Fox News. On Friday’s Fox & Friends Gretchen Carlson said “She’s pretty! So what?” Later conservative radio host Monica Crowley defended the president as well. “What he said was sincere, it was honest, it was very sweet,” she said.

I can see why some people might be bothered by this comment, although I have no sense that Obama is sexist in any way. He praised her skills as a lawyer and public servant first and foremost, and then offered, as an aside, the comment on her attractiveness.

It seems clear that is was the wrong place and time to make such a comment, but it does not appear particularly harmful or in any way belittling of her skills and talents. It feels like political correctness to demand he attend gender-sensitivity training.

Writing at The Atlantic, Garance Franke-Ruta offers a different perspective - the gaffe in this comment is in mixing the worlds of power and the worlds of beauty, which tend to be mutually exclusive.

Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe

The system of beauty, the system of power, and Kamala Harris

GARANCE FRANKE-RUTA

APR 5 2013,

Eric Risberg/AP Images

President Obama's biggest gaffe yesterday when speaking of California Attorney General Kamala Harris was not in flirtatiously complimenting her as "the best-looking attorney general," but in introducing an observation from the system of beauty into a forum that was about the system of power.

What's that, you say? Irin Carmon does a great job in Salon in laying out the bounds of propriety for when it's appropriate to talk about a woman's looks as a general matter. But I've long felt we lack a solid theoretical underpinning for easily discussing these issues, and why precisely it is that admiring and complimenting women for the beauty they work so hard to maintain--and let's be clear, nobody looks like Harris at her age (48) without effort and without herself valuing beauty and fitness, which are achievements as much or more than naturally occurring properties--can sometimes be inappropriate.

It seems to me--and I touched on this a bit a 2009 Slate piece--that a simple distinction between the two worlds in which women today operate can help us think about this: They are the system of beauty, and the system of power.

The system of beauty is what preceded women's entry into the paid workforce in a bid to achieve economic equality and professional fulfillment. It operates everywhere in the world, according to regionally variable standards, but goes a little something like this: Women are a natural resource, a form of wealth that men can acquire. Beauty and, to a lesser extent, fertility, are the coinage in this system of value. In contemporary America, women can choose the extent to which they wish to engage with this system of power, but there's no question that it remains extant, and that in many ways the most economically successful women are those who use it best to their advantage--actresses, models, musicians, and the like. Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded. We pay homage to it, still, and young women as they face the world can make a choice to live a life--even a career--within it, just as they can choose to go to law or medical school or contend in any other way for standing and earning capacity in the world.

That is, they can enter the system of power. Power as the acquisition of status, capital, position, knowledge, property. And for a reason other than the exploitation of the resource of the physical self. The fight of feminism was the fight of women for entry into the system of power from the system of beauty. The fight in the workplace for women very often is to create a space for themselves within the system of power while continuing to operate within the system of beauty in their private lives. And the struggle of feminism has often been to acknowledge that the system of beauty is irrevocable and cannot be expunged by protest or discourse or time. To be an educated professional woman in contemporary America is to know that you operate--and often, must operate--within both systems. It's why beautiful and extremely capable women are often valued above their less glamorous or less fit peers--they are triumphs in two systems of value, double-threats.

Harris, like Michelle Obama, is a triumph in the system of beauty as well as the system of power. But President Obama's remark mistook the setting. Just as it's perfectly appropriate to tell a colleague she looks gorgeous when she's dressed to the nines for some black tie work event, it would be inappropriate to refer to her as "gorgeous over there" during a work meeting. Doing so takes her out of the system of power and puts her into the system of beauty in a setting in which power is the value that's brought her to the table. And that, dear readers, is a gaffe.

Men Must Be Beautiful, but Not Too Beautiful

Discovery News ran this story the other day on the need/desire in young men to look good, but not so good that they might be considered gay or effeminate. That is a tough double bind - one of many that young men must deal with.

Big Think ran a little preview on this story that looked at it in terms of how men are in a double-bind about appearance.

Men Must Be Beautiful, but Not Too Beautiful

Big Think Editors on October 1, 2011

What's the Latest Development?

Society's expectations of beauty do not affect women alone. Recent research indicates that men, too, perceive their body in light of what the media, their male peers and opposite sex deem masculine. "After conducting interviews, observations and focus groups, Concordia University researchers concluded that boys possess a 'double-bind masculinity,' in which they care about their appearance, but not in ways that make them look vain or uncool." Researchers believe this outlook takes root in males during adolescence or even in childhood. 

What's the Big Idea?

Men have a difficult role to fill: Society expects them to meet normative standards of beauty but also to be practical enough to overcome those expectations. "Unlike girls and women, boys and men are pulled in two separate directions: being healthy, attractive and masculine, and the need to transcend their bodies for a more rational, functional outlook in life." While women are seldom judged for caring about their looks, it is a common reaction against men who appear vain. Men must possess beauty and social skills to fulfill their masculine role. 

Here is the original article from Discovery News.

BOYS WANT TO LOOK, BUT NOT TOO GOOD

Analysis by Marianne English Fri Sep 30, 2011

Images of tone, skinny bodies and ideal beauty stare us down everywhere -- from web sites to TV shows, in magazines and advertisements. The concerns about these pressures usually focus on how girls and women react to them.

But some qualitative research tackles the same problem in boys and men, with interesting results.

Moss Norman of Concordia University in Canada looked at how teen boys perceived their bodies in light of what media outlets, their male peers and the opposite sex deemed masculine. After conducting interviews, observations and focus groups, Norman concludes that boys possess a "double-bind masculinity," in which they care about their appearance, but not in ways that make them look vain or uncool. The idea isn't new, but researchers are curious to see when this outlook takes root in males. So far, it could begin in early adolescence or even during childhood.

Essentially, double-bind thinking is common in boys between the ages of 13 and 15. Participants, from two white and black communities in Canada, note that it would "be nice" to have a muscular body similar to what's deemed desirable through media, but it's not a big deal if they don't have it.

Unlike girls and women, boys and men are pulled in two separate directions: being healthy, attractive and masculine, and the need to transcend their bodies for a more rational, functional outlook in life. True, women can feel tugged by conflicting responsibilities and body image issues, too, but they aren't generally looked down upon for caring about their appearance -- something that seems to be the case among boys and men. In some instances, participants describe such "vanity" as limited to the realm of "girls" and "gay men," the author writes.

Instead, a sense of what they perceived as "normal" drove the teens' concepts of masculinity. Staying in shape was a personal responsibility, not necessarily an effort to look better. Boys not concerned with their appearance said they don't need to look good, but rather need to have "game," or the smooth skills, to draw interest from girls. Surprisingly, most boys didn't apply the same flexibility to girls their same age. An unattractive girl couldn't get attention from boys with social skills alone. In other words, her appearance had to back it up, which wasn't true for boys, in their opinion.

Perhaps boys' need to separate themselves from girls -- as less vain, more self-driven and rational -- underlies some of the sexist thinking in youth today, the paper suggests.

"They [boys] are simultaneously compelled to both achieve culturally privileged male bodies at the same time they are interpellated to maintain a function, aloof and distanced relationship with their bodies," Norman writes in summary. Ultimately, media messages appear to shape boys sense of what's normal, but pursuing them directly is looked down on and may challenge their sexuality in the eyes of their peers.

Other research touches on how putting forth uniform images of masculinity (men being strong and dominant) may promote aggression, as men perform the vast majority of violence in movies and TV.

Michael Shelton - Male Beauty: Variety and Homogenization in the Future

Hmmm . . . male beauty. It's bad enough we have done this to women for so long, now we want to do it to ourselves as well? People are more than appearance, though I know we are "programmed" to judge by exteriors. Too bad.

Male Beauty: Variety and Homogenization in the Future

Some final predictions about males, race, and sexual attractiveness

By Michael Shelton
Published on November 20, 2010

Throughout 2010 I have been blogging about the impact of increasing cultural diversity in the United States on our ideals of male beauty, and now, as this series comes to close, I believe several predictions are possible.

Positive Predictions
• White men will continue to cede their priority position in the rank of "classic" American masculine beauty.
• Dating and marrying those from different cultures, ethnicities, and races will become increasingly common.
• Engaging in sexual activity with a person from a different race or culture will no longer be taboo or imply a rebel status.
• Finally, and of great importance, we will increasingly find ourselves attracted to and sexually aroused by individuals from different ethnicities and races.

Less Sanguine Predictions
The future sounds like a better place, doesn't it? But before we pop the cork on the champagne, we must confront an unavoidable truth: A hierarchy of attractiveness will yet remain. Studies find that women across the globe have a general consensus regarding the physical characteristics of a sexy male: He is tall (usually six feet or taller), muscular (but not too developed), and has symmetrical features. Throw in clear skin and lustrous hair, and we have an attractive male. Regardless of their ethnicity and skin color, men who have these qualities are described as good looking and sexually arousing, even to those of different cultures, and there is no evidence that these criteria for male beauty will markedly change in the future.

Without doubt, many men will still be left out of the beauty race due to their body composition, too much or too little muscularity, height, and assorted physical anomalies. Men will still be expected to work just as hard to achieve an ideal of beauty (and secretly fret over their inability to achieve this ideal) even when skin color and ethnicity no longer play predominant discriminating factors. Regardless of skin color, some men, either through genetics, effort, and/or available finances to correct "deficits", will be pinnacles of beauty and the aspirations for others, while the majority will maintain a secondary status.

In an even more extreme position, some believe that standards for male beauty will become more exacting. While skin color will no longer be a determining factor, other demands will usurp its place. For example, Susie Orbach, author of bestselling Fat is a Feminist Issue and co-originator of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, writes that, "[W]e are almost doing away with body variety..." Comparable to the finding that myriad languages around the world are going extinct, so too are regional standards for physical beauty; Orbach and many others believe that a homogenization of beauty is occurring for both males and females. In their vision of the future, we will be even less forgiving of those who lack perfection and tyrannical about the characteristics of the desirable male.

One step forward, and two steps back...

Tags: Michael Shelton, Male Beauty, Variety and Homogenization in the Future, psychology today, men, masculinity, beauty, culture, perfection, desire

Pre-Adolescent Male Beauty Pageants Enter the U.K.

I do not know what to say about this. I really DON'T like the pageant thing for little girls - it's gotten more than a little insane and generally reflects the desires of the mother, not the child. Some of these "pageant moms" spend tens of thousands of dollars on this crap. And the little girls (I mean, really young) end up looking and acting like sexualized adults - that can't be healthy for them.

So now we do this to boys, too?

The whole pageant subculture is just too weird to be healthy - for girls or boys. As best as I can tell, this is a symptom of our cultural obsession with fame and attention.

Pre-Adolescent Male Beauty Pageants Enter the U.K.

by Kilian Melloy
Friday Jul 9, 2010

’Toddlers and Tiaras?’ Even very young children
compete in pageants--boys as well as girls (Source:TLC)

When a little girl is paraded in pageants, there’s often a tut of disapproval from the wings. Some onlookers fret that little girls are being prematurely sexualized, and fear that notions of feminine beauty that emphasize unrealistic physical qualities are being reinforced. Others worry that pre-adolescent girls who compete in pageants could be targeted for sexual abuse and violence by pedophiles.

But now a controversy in Britain has emerged over similar pageants for pre-adolescent boys, and reports say that the British are holding Americans to blame for the new trend.

Some worry that it will now be boys who are made the target of pedophiles, given that young children are dressed up provocatively and coached to strut. Others, having bought into the idea that such pageants are fine for girls, say that boys should not cross gender lines in this way. Others reason that if lessons emphasizing superficial beauty are bad for girls, they can’t be any better for boys.

In a June 25 article, U.K.newspaper The Daily Mail calls the new fad "disturbing," and adds, "Depressingly... such pageants are now attracting contestants in their droves, with parents desperate for their children to get stage experience in preparation to become the future stars of shows such as Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor," which are the U.K. equivalent to popular reality programs in the U.S. that showcase the talents of aspiring professional performers.

Blog The Frisky reported on the Daily Mail’s article in a June 25th posting, noting that, "Boys in beauty pageants do all the creepy, you’re-too-young-do-being-doing-this things that girls do. They gel their hair. They bronze. They ’gyrate on stage in a crude and alarming approximation of male sexuality,’ " the posting added, quoting from the Daily Mail piece.

"If more boys compete in beauty pageants, that won’t be a sign of ’equality,’ the blog posting went on. "It will only be a sign that the sexualization of young girls and the regimentation of beauty standards in pageants has desensitized us so much it is spreading to the boys."

At another blog, Bukisa, a June 10 article notes that, "On one side of the coin, there’s the argument that boys should be in beauty pageants. Why shouldn’t they have the opportunity that their female counterparts have to charm audiences and win large sums of cash?" Boys, the article posits, don’t tend to make a career out of pageants, "aging out" of the spectacles while still fairly young. Moreover, if a boy finds such competition fun, why not allow it? "If a boy child truly wants to be in pageants, it seems less sinister than forcing a sports loving, pageant hating boy to go onstage and smile at the judges," the posting says.

Some claim that beauty pageants are harmful to children, but others rebut this claim. "While the adverse psychological effects of child beauty pageants have been discussed for many years--and have been ignored by stage moms and dads for roughly the same period of time--there is no reason to assume that boys are unsuited for the catwalk," says a June 25 Associated Content article by Sylvia Cochran that discusses the British outrage at the imported phenomenon of boys competing in pageants. "Kaplan & Sadock’s Concise Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry points out that it is not as unusual as a parent may believe for a boy to decline participation in traditionally male activities."

Adds the article, "Thus, our British friends might be caught up in their own gender stereotyping. In the alternative, they may simply find something fundamentally distasteful about a little boy prancing on stage with highlights in his hair and a hip bump that would do a rapper from the ’hood proud, which we in the U.S. may have simply grown accustomed to."

Tags: boys, culture, beauty, Pre-Adolescent, Male, Beauty Pageants, U.K., obsession, fame, attention, sexualized