Consider the case of Grace McDaniels, whose mother was trampled by a mule in the third month of pregnancy. Two bits is all you need. One quarter of a dollar. Just step behind the curtain if you dare. Behold, "The Mule Faced Woman."

One hundred years ago, people stood in line to see pinheads, three-legged men, bearded women, human skeletons and midget fat ladies. They paid good money to see Julia Pastrana, "The Ugliest Woman in the World." They went to the carnival and to the Museum of Oddities to marvel at the existence of severely deformed human beings. No matter how poor or unfortunate, it became graphically clear to these people that life could be much worse. Without entering upon the morality of the act, we can say that to stare at a freak was a completely different kind of act from anything reproduced in our media today.

One hundred years ago, the public gawked at freaks. But they did not did buy a copy of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar to look at images of Kate Moss or Heidi Klum in the fall collections. There were no fashion models. Men did not buy Playboy or the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated to ogle the "babes." Today's society is pickled in a radically different sort of spectacle. Beautiful women stare out at us from almost every surface of our media. If the freak made one feel a sort of illegal gratitude, the model fosters in us a self-fulfilling inferiority. The word "model" suggests someone we should aspire to emulate, or in the case of the male, desire to possess. Either way, it is an impossible goal. Even the Elle McPhersons of the world are not the superwomen they have been portrayed to be. The sideshow display may have been exploitation, but postmodern illusions conjure up a more potent spiritual poison.

Flickering Female Images

To do justice to the history of this subject is impossible in a short article, but a quick sketch might help. How did we move from one extreme to the other? The Gibson Girl was a rather chaste illustrated representation of the competent and beautiful turn-of-the-twentieth-century woman. She was a new kind of figure for her time. Pin-up illustration starts with her. The scantily clad covers of pulp magazines, the Vargas Girl, and Playboy Illustrations all originate in this image. The Gibson Girl gave way to John Held's flapper cartoon in the early 1920s. The bobbed-haired image of the flapper revealed the influence of the two-dimensional figure upon its human consumer. She was much more than a pictorial representation of a fashion trend. She became a living reality for many Jazz Age women, suggesting the possibility of the amoral existence of speakeasies and a looser sexuality than seen previously in American society. Meanwhile, developments in camera shutter speeds and print technology created a more dynamic photographic presentation in burgeoning fashion magazines. But none of these developments could hold a candle to the influence of that dream factory of the twentieth century: the motion picture.

In 1909 Mary Pickford appeared in her first silent film and soon became the first major Hollywood icon. The movie star, particularly the female of the species, has been repeatedly projected as a purely visual image. Beginning with the movies, then advertising, then the fashion demimonde, then television, then the rock video and then into far too many other media to list, this overly sensualized presentation is at the root of our postmodern emphasis on visuality. But that is not the whole story. There were deeper philosophical changes that came as a result of a scientific approach that reduced reality to what was measurable -- in short, to that which was visible. And it is this emphasis on visuality that is now a part of the mental software of most twenty-first-century people in the West, no matter what they say they actually believe.

The hippies tried to rebel against these ascendant superficial standards of beauty. They failed. Their images were co-opted by the industry of visual spectacle. Later the feminists tried. They, too, were eaten by the media and regurgitated as Madonna. The punks failed, as well, since their visual rebellion only produced more style, more chic, more cool. "Cool" itself now describes the vanguard of visual living. Naomi Wolf challenged "the beauty myth." But the problem is, beauty is not a myth. Without beauty there is no true human life. But what is beauty? This is a question that will not disappear. And how shall we live so that the visual components of our lives do not overwhelm the essence of what makes us human?

Two-Dimensional Beauty

Today we're surrounded by strange images that are imitations of sensual perfection. The female image has been the primary battleground, although since the 1980s men have been increasingly projected as visual candy upon our mental screens. As a man, I never thought about my "abs and pecs" prior to seeing Brad Pitt take off his shirt in Thelma and Louise. The fixation on pumping iron amongst so many of my male brethren has little to do with health. If these visual comparisons are only recently reaching so many male minds, how much worse must it be for the female psyche in our age. I cannot go to any newsstand in America without being completely bombarded by superficial images of female beauty. And it is getting harder to tell the images apart. The fashion magazine looks like the men's magazine looks like the music magazine looks like the sports magazine. Why do I keep seeing pictures of Britney Spears?

It would all be completely laughable if it didn't have an actual effect. The younger kids are surrounded by these two-dimensional presentations of sex and surface gloss. They feel it. They know something's wrong, but they can't bust through the illusion. There is a frightening sullenness among young men as they hunt down that perfect female image. They toss aside real girls in their quest to find "the hottest babe." Relationships become fragmentary, multiple, disposable. The older generations seem just as lost. How much income is tossed away on schemes to make a 45-year-old woman feel guilty for not looking like a 20-year-old? By the time we arrive at tummy tucks, silicone and surgically implanted washboard stomachs, we've stepped towards that world of the freakish we sought to leave behind.

The trip to the sideshow may have been clouded in disrepute. But standing before a human being cloaked in deformity is an experience much more consistent with the mystery of what it means to be human than our endless comparisons to the imagery of the twenty-first century.