Aesthetic Beauty is entirely subjective, and no person has the power to determine what is universally beautiful.

“Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that,” Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist, shouted  his opinion about model Yumi Nu over the twittersphere in May 2022. I’m sorry, Dr. Peterson, her objective beauty is not for you to decide. Just because you do not find her beautiful does not mean that she is not beautiful to anyone. Truth in a math equation is objective but a person’s beauty is not math. 

Peterson’s views are several months old, yet their incendiary remarks still remain relevant as ever. 

First, ground rules must be established. Is there a standard of beauty at some level? Yes. In the macro, there is a way we can judge between what is beautiful and what is not. The universe has a beauty that we can see, but people are more complicated than that. If you want to discuss beauty in “the All,” read Plato’s “Timaeus.” If you want to talk about the beauty of a person, read on.  The entire scope of the argument has to do with Aesthetic Beauty.

Peterson is a clinical psychologist who has risen to fame for his advice on self-actualizing and his conservative bent. What right does Peterson have to determine one’s beauty? Just because Yumi Nu does not fit into his standard of beauty does not mean she is not beautiful.

The standard of beauty that Peterson claims to preserve the free world from “authoritarian tolerance” has not been the standard for beauty. 30,000 years ago, the standard of fertility was a woman with features very similar to Yumi Nu. Would Peterson walk up to this tribe and tell them, “Sorry, not beautiful.”? What right would he have to tell them what is beautiful? The Taureg women in Saharan Africa are fed more to encourage them to become fat, and therefore more desirable for marriage. To them, women with more weight are more beautiful. Who are we to tell them that they have the wrong conception of beauty? Let’s look at the western tradition. Peter Paul Rubens painted women very differently from Edgar Degas yet they both were painting their own view of beauty.. 

The standard of beauty has changed throughout time, and it is objectively false to act as if the celebration of Yumi’s body is a departure from God’s standard of beauty.

The common expression is that we are innately bound to an objective standard of beauty that is directly linked to health, and for this reason, those who are “overweight” will never meet that objective standard of beauty. This line of argument does not hold up for many reasons. For one, the same people who might argue that Yumi is objectively “not beautiful” have probably had no issue with many of the malnourished models who have graced the covers of magazines in years past. The ballet world is another example of a community in which “objective beauty” and health are often at odds with each other. In talking with my sister, who has been in the ballet world for 20 years, it is clear to me that this idea of objective beauty can often lead to the pursuit of dangerous practices, all in an attempt to achieve that standard:

“At 12 or 13, I was given the ‘weight talk’.  At 14, I had a teacher directly instruct the class to try throwing up as a ‘stress relief method,’” my sister explained.

“When I first saw Peterson’s tweet, I was angry, disheartened, and some small part of me wondered if he was right. I have appreciated Peterson’s perspectives on some things, and I love and respect many people who follow his work. I have also felt, until recently, that there was a standard of beauty that I, unfortunately, would never be able to meet. It gets extra complicated as a Christian, when you tie beauty to truth and truth to morality, because then, to hate oneself for not looking a certain way becomes almost holy,” my sister said. 

I say all this to caution against grandstanding about an issue you don’t fully understand. Holding onto our current standard of beauty ostracizes thousands of people whose body type does fit into the strict grade that American society has demanded. If we loosen that standard, fewer people will look in the mirror and hate themselves. Instead of seeing themselves as people whose weight determines they are unworthy of love, they can start to see themselves as beautiful. Beautiful, not because they cause a reaction in a person’s brain called attraction, but beautiful because they’re made in God’s image.