Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Racial Prejudice [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

A couple of decades ago, I began noticing that the leading lady in a movie was almost always fairer-skinned than her leading man.

It appears filmmakers and their audiences subconsciously associate lightness of complexion with femininity. Yet, nobody ever seems to talk about it.

Medieval Europeans referred to women as "the fair sex," but in contemporary discourse, skin color is associated only with race, not with sex.

We don't behave like that, however.

Audiences famously want their leading men to look "tall, dark, and handsome" (a phrase first applied to that epitome of male glamour, Cary Grant) when they embrace their leading ladies. But, apparently, "dark" is even more important than "tall."

My impression is that female fans are more insistent than male fans that their favorite actresses be fair. Conversely, male fans don't much like pale actors, as Jude Law's problems shedding the dreaded "pretty boy" tag demonstrate.

When the Internet came along in the 1990s, I discovered that an anthropologist at Université Laval in Quebec named Peter Frost had been researching for years this question of why actresses were so fair, and much else besides.

His findings are quite extraordinary.

He's finally published a lucidly written and wide-ranging book entitled Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice. It proves well worth the wait, shedding light on a broad array of contemporary social issues.

It turns out that this favoritism toward lighter skinned women is not an invention of Hollywood. You'll note that conventional "social constructionist" thinking can't explain this phenomenon. The standard academic's logic would predict that, because whites rule and men rule, therefore the whitest men would be the most popular. But pallid blonde actors of the James Spader ilk typically play evil preppie-yuppie villains, not heroes. Conversely, the movie industry is responding to a fondness for fairer females found in almost all cultures across almost all eras.

In his foreword to Fair Women, Dark Men, U. of Washington sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe, author of one of my favorite books, The Ethnic Phenomenon, summarizes:

"Although virtually all cultures express a marked preference for fair female skin, even those with little or no exposure to European imperialism, and even those whose members are heavily pigmented, many are indifferent to male pigmentation or even prefer men to be darker."

Frost reports that out of 51 different cultures in the anthropology profession's famous Human Relations Area Files, 44 cultures favored lighter complexions on either only women (30) or on both sexes (14). In only 3 cultures was fair skin preferred on men only, and in just 4 cultures was darker skin desired.

Lighter ladies were favored in many countries with little exposure to Western beauty standards, such as medieval Japan, Ethiopia, Aztec Mexico, and Moorish Spain, where the dominant culture was darker skinned than the conquered natives.

Frost discovered that the reason women were called "the fair sex" is because women are indeed fairer on average after puberty. He notes that 50 out of 54 anthropometric studies from around the world have shown that women's untanned skin, such as under the upper arm, reflects more light than men's. Women have more subcutaneous fat, which gives them a lighter look.

The gender difference in color is not large, but before Europeans came into frequent contact with sub-Saharan Africans and others of highly different hues, it was noticeable. Frost writes:

"When one's social horizon takes in a limited range of observable skin tones, small gradations of color take on more importance.... A 'white' person was simply a fair-complexioned individual; a 'black' person, a dark-complexioned one. This old way of seeing things persists today in surnames that once referred to the normal range of skin color in Europe, [in] surnames like White, Brown, and Black among the English..."

Could it all just be social class prejudice? Traditionally, wealthier women who didn't have to work outdoors could avoid tanning more than poor women who had to slop the hogs. That plays a definite role in maintaining the bias, but the cultural fondness for fairer women is even found among hunter-gatherer tribes where all women have to be outdoors every day finding food.

Frost also points out a corollary of this sexual selection for lightness:

"Since higher-ranking men marry the more attractive women, the upper classes tend to lighten in color with each passing generation, as in India."

This seems particularly true in Latin America, where the elites remain quite white-looking despite almost 500 years of intermarriage. The trick is that the most successful short, dark men often wed tall, blonde women and have more European-looking offspring, thus replenishing the caste system.

Frost's short but mind-expanding book shows once again how much more fascinating the study of humanity can be-when freed of the boring old prejudice that biology has nothing to do with human beings.

This is one of the most shockingly bad popular science books that I've ever read. Ever. The only reason I give it one star is because I could not give it ZERO stars. (And let me say that I already agreed with the author's thesis and was looking for a reasoned demonstration thereof.)

One by one:

1. The prose is extremely choppy and disconnected. It makes reading 5 pages like reading 50 because it is so hard to follow where the argument is going.

2. The actual text of the book is only 76 pages (it says 140 pages on the website, but the last 66 pages are taken up with a review of the anthropological literature (with lots of comments that could have been included in the text if properly treated) and footnotes.

3. The book is self published-- and now I see why! If this book was talking about anything even vaguely interesting then he would have been able to find a decent publisher. I've read many books on popular science that were not that great and still were good enough to get a publisher. There are only 3 reviews on this book 5 years after it came out, and NOW I SEE WHY.

4. In the foreword of the book, an endorsement (of sorts) is given by Pierre VandenBerghe of the University of Washington at Seattle. This person is apparently a retired professor of Sociology-- even though the book claimed to be (in some way) about the biological basis of color preferences. It's some perverse combination of anthropology, anecdotal evidence and undeveloped historical context.

5. There is no elucidation of any biology in this book. That would have been a good departure point. Instead, there are some weirdly broken up chapters and no introduction to the book that told what direction the book would take as it progressed.

This book is not worth one single penny. Think of all the other things that you could buy if you had saved that penny! A single sheet of toilet paper. A down payment on a stick of gum. A wish at a wishing well. Any of those things would have been more useful than this book.

for racialists and conservatives who want to prove that black and mixed race black women are less attractive than other women. It's been peddled by so-called scientists from the 18th century to the present. This book ratifies alot of racist/sexist stereotypes of people of color and women I read since high school.

I'm just not feeling this book. Sorry!