Primates of Park Avenue (17 page)

Beauty isn’t cheap. And mostly, it is women who bear the brunt of its many costs—the not infrequently harrowing requirements of time, energy, and sheer physical fortitude that prompted our grandmothers to observe, “Beauty hurts.” This truism holds across countries and cultures—in China, where the practice of foot binding crippled generations of aristocratic women; in Thailand, where women of the Kayan tribe wear metal necklaces to give the impression of an elongated neck (they are actually pushing their cervical and shoulder bones down); and in the African and Amazonian tribes where plates stretch the lips until, in some cases, they are the size and shape of a CD. Among the tribe of women I studied on the Upper East Side, “beauty” might mean an augmentation that left your breasts rigid and plastic-seeming in appearance and numb to the touch, making literal the idea that women are objects who supply sensation for others, rather than subjects who enjoy feeling it themselves. Or it might mean injections to make your face stiller, “fuller,” tauter, and more strategically plumped (to convey youthfulness and prevent wrinkles), but at a price.

Studies suggest that being unable to move your face empathically as you listen to someone speak reduces feelings of connection. In essence, numbing your face very likely numbs your emotions: Botoxed subjects show less brain scan activity in key emotional regions than do the un-Botoxed. All in the quest for a youthful face for others to gaze upon. And then what? Confronted with a motionless face, one that expresses nothing as we speak to its owner, humans feel confounded, disconnected, and distressed. I certainly did, the day I ran into a friend who stared at me blankly through our five-minute chat on the street, issuing insincere-seeming laughs as I shared a funny anecdote about my kids. Was she angry? Had I offended her last time I’d seen her? I didn’t think so. Then I recalled that, at our last encounter, she had been on the way to her dermatologist.

Other unanticipated aspects of paralyzing your facial muscles are aesthetic. “Why does that cute mom look so strange? What
happened
to her?” my husband asked me on a day he had done playgroup with our younger son. He figured she was getting a divorce or had lost a parent—her face seemed to have aged that dramatically, years within weeks. I knew exactly who he meant. Several of the moms had been talking about it over coffee after “class.” She got Botox too soon, they agreed, and now this beautiful, previously fresh-looking woman in her early thirties, she of the sparkling eyes and easy smile, had the Face, which we initially associated with youth (unlined) but now associated with age and Botox—Sphinx-like and unexpressive. Unhappy. Old.

I often thought of the symmetrical, still-faced women around me, many of whom had had rhinoplasty before their weddings, as pretty, picture-perfect zombies. They looked beautiful, but they seemed to feel nothing, their eyes, Botoxed all around to prevent crow’s-feet, dead in their faces even as they laughed or smiled. Sometimes I imagined them chasing me down the hallways of the school or down Madison Avenue into Sant Ambroeus, their arms outstretched, cornering me in the elevator or on a cozy banquette, where they proceeded to eat my brain. I was partial to acupuncture facials, having developed a huge bruise around my eye from my inaugural Botox experience. In spite of this fact, joining them—zombified, injected, quelled—seemed inevitable. Then came the fillers. I knew women with faces as big as basketballs from the endless tweakings with Restylane and Juvéderm. Their moonpie visages atop their starved bodies seemed perfect for a photo essay in
National Geographic
: “Bizarre Beauty Practices among the Exotic 10021 Tribe of Kroywen.”

Wanting to get a different kind of purchase on women’s willingness to do so much and go so far in pursuit of beauty, I turned to Richard Prum, professor of ornithology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at Yale University. A specialist on the topics of mate choice, sexual selection, and aesthetic evolution among birds, Prum has a keen interest in human evolution as well. He suggested, as we chatted in his office that seemed to have mushroomed massive piles of books and tins of green tea over the years, that beauty insanity holds sway across species. “A lot of the beauty of birds, and humans, is about the issue of
sexual
beauty, all the observable features that make a particular mate attractive and desirable,” he explained. For birds, this could involve not only choosing a guy who looks good, but one who
sounds
good. Brown and white with black wings, appearing to wear a little red beret, male club-winged manakins (
Machaeropterus deliciosus
) of Andean northwestern Ecuador don’t look so different from their other songbird brethren. It’s their sound, and how they make it, that sets them apart.

In his courtship displays, the male club-winged manakin actually plays his wings like a violin. He emits a clicking, buzzing sound more often associated with crickets, who produce music the same way. “It’s a
ridiculous
way for a bird to communicate!” Prum enthused to me, noting, “These guys are capable of just fine vocal communications. So the question becomes why? Why this fiddling?” The answer: to get the girl. Female club-winged manakins
liked
the song. They found it beautiful. It attracted them and they chose males who could play the tune. And this preference had, over the course of generations, pressured and ultimately changed male club-winged manakin behavior. What was more shocking to Prum and his then graduate assistant Kim Bostwick was their discovery that this female preference had a profound impact not only on male behavior (song) but also on male manakin
morphology
(body structure). Every other bird on the planet has an ulna that is hollow. But in the club-winged manakin, the ulna is thickened, twisted, planar—and solid bone. This female preference for “winging” versus singing has had an unexpected effect—and strange consequences. The male’s amped-up ulna makes it easier to make beautiful-to-female-manakins music—but harder to fly. And escape predators. Meaning . . . male manakins are dying for beauty. “It’s an aesthetic trait that evolved in spite of dragging down the male’s reproductive fitness,” Prum marveled.

The view in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology has long been that “beauty” is about utility and fitness. Beauty, Prum summarized neatly as we chatted, “is presumed to be bristling with information. It supposedly communicates, I’m healthy! You want
me
!” This is a functional take on beauty, beauty as a barometer of health, faces and bodies as a shorthand of sorts, the outward manifestation of “healthy” genes. In this model, straight teeth and symmetrical features “mean” that a potential mate doesn’t have parasites, or heart disease. But, based in part on the fact of the irrational, exuberant, and decadent male manakin’s song, a song that gets him the girl but little else, Prum doesn’t buy the popular belief that beauty is just information—he believes it is more likely “stuff happening”—stuff that helps individual birds attract others. Evolving a beak that can crack a nut is pretty straightforward. “But seducing a mind,” Prum observed with wonder, opening his eyes wide, “is an infinity problem.” Natural selection alone, he says, cannot account for aesthetic preferences like the one for the crazy violin solo of the manakin, a song that may get him a mate, sex, and offspring but also imperils him in basic ways, so that he may get none of those things. In the world of the manakin, as well as the rarefied world of the female primates I studied, Prum suggested, beauty is often decadent, irrational, and out of bounds. It can be exuberant and stunning, ruinous and potentially deadly. It is often a system unto itself, untethered from practicality and function, a world apart.

Rebecca lived in a massive triplex in a “great building” on Sutton Place. This location aligned her with a slightly older, more genteel, lower Upper East Side, before it had stretched itself out, Manifest Destiny–like, to reach all the way to the low Nineties. It was said that Rebecca’s husband had first bought the apartment from Rebecca’s parents, and then decided to buy the entire building. He wasn’t a developer; he was a hedge fund guy and presumably, buying a building—the one he lived in—was something to do. The elevator opened directly into Rebecca’s home. There I handed my coat to a staff member, taking in the unreal views of the river—I had never seen it from this height or distance, right across the street, at the penthouse level, a perspective that gave it and the rest of the neighborhood the aspect of a diorama or stage set. Another elevator then swept me up to the third floor of the apartment, the very top floor of the building and, apparently, Rebecca’s private aerie. There were light-colored flowers everywhere, and beige furniture, and a beautiful long beige marble table facing tall windows. Staff members dressed in beige offered clear drinks (vodka, tequila, and white wine) and simple, light canapés. There was a Hockney—it looked like a portrait of Rebecca—and a massive Cecily Brown and a Tauba Auerbach. I had heard talk of couples with “art budgets” of up to $200 million, and it wasn’t hard to imagine as I took in what hung on Rebecca’s walls. To the side was an off white Eames table piled with hostess gifts in bags from Tiffany and Ladurée and Diptyque. My hostess gift—cookies I had baked with my son—had been eagerly and gratefully accepted by the hostess’s adorable twin sons at the door. There was something else on the table, too, I noticed—a jumble of what looked like gems. Drawing closer, I saw that the women had all brought little bags and dropped them here—tiny Hermès Kelly bags in jewel tones (one looked to be bright red crocodile) and quilted, graffitied and lacquered Chanel bags and diminutive Dior bags with Ds and heart-shaped medallions hanging from them. I placed my own bag—a relatively humble black clutch with a red rose—with the others. And took a deep breath. This was definitely not a bunch of moms ordering pizza and hanging out.

Rebecca, looking radiant, floated over and steered me toward the middle of the room, introducing me to the women I didn’t know. Many were the wives of billionaires who owned TV networks and Fortune 500 companies and ran real estate empires and hedge funds. Some were moms from the school, and some were not. There was a former fashion editor who was now a fashion plate and full-time mother of three, with another on the way. There was a former news anchor who had recently quit her job to spend more time with her three kids. She was pregnant with twins. There were, inevitably, a couple of stunningly beautiful and extremely smart “art consultants,” a niche profession that expanded and contracted with the fortunes of the One Percent. No one was fat. No one was ugly. No one was poor. Everyone was drinking. And everyone seemed comfortable and friendly in a way they didn’t at school or on the street or at events. The usual wariness was gone. It dawned on me that the women were
relaxed.
I relaxed a bit, too, as I noticed that the Queen of Queen Bees was not in attendance and my uniform was in sync with what the others were wearing, on the money, so to speak, albeit steeply discounted.

The talk went beyond the usual chat about kids and vacations. There was talk about politics and of a friend, not there that evening because she and her husband had recently separated, and of another friend of many of the women in the group who was on her umpteenth round of IVF, supposedly in the hopes that another baby would keep her traveling husband interested and closer to home. Something tugged at me when there was very quiet talk, and lowered eyes, and obvious sadness and compassion about this woman’s previous miscarriages, and another friend’s devastating amnio results. I was ashamed by the realization that I had assumed, stupidly, that the lives of the women around me were charmed in every way. They weren’t. And then the talk shifted again and it was, as always, of what everyone was wearing.

The magnificent, extravagant setting and impeccably dressed and made-up group couldn’t be further from the Efe and Aka people of the Western Congo Basin, or the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert. These hunter-gatherers are radical egalitarians, meaning they live in groups without hierarchy or socioeconomic stratification, as humans did for nearly all of our evolutionary prehistory. Among these tribes, no one owns anything and no one’s status is any higher or lower than anyone else’s. The notion of property is unknown. This state of affairs is reinforced by several mechanisms. One is object demands. It is common for one woman to walk up to another and demand her beads, for example, or for a child to approach an unrelated adult and demand a portion of his or her food, or for one man to demand and receive another’s spear tips for hunting. Saying no is unheard of. These gift demands reinforce the notion that nobody owns anything. Self-effacement and downplaying one’s own achievements and those of others is another way to ensure no sense of hierarchy develops. “We’re not sure who killed the duiker we found under the acacia tree,” someone announces after a successful hunt, knowing full well who did. “Maybe it was someone from another group. We will get it,
all
of us, and we will distribute it to
everyone
.” The man supplying coveted meat cannot take or receive credit. Everyone and no one killed the duiker, and so everyone is and remains equal.