Less Than Skin Deep

One of my distant cousins was Miss America. There she was! More than Barbie did, she introduced me to an iconic beauty to which I could never aspire. Just think how many little girls have compromised their dreams or grown up wishing they looked good in bathing suits and could sing like divas and save the whole world while tap-dancing.

In our postmodern age, the competition for young girls is even stiffer. So stiff, in fact, that these icons of beauty are not even real. They’re virtual. That is to say, they’re figments of the imagination: somebody’s ideal of a female that is a composite of fantasies, usually men’s fantasies about the ideal woman or girl in this century.

Take Kaya, for example. The creation of artist Alceu Baptistao, she looks like a cross between Avril Lavigne and Audrey Hepburn. Her freckles are precious. Still, although there’s something about her hazel eyes that could intrigue a person looking to get lost in somebody’s orbs, they just don’t ring true. They say that eyes are the window to the soul. Eyes are thus probably the hardest virtual mountain for virtual artists to climb, since virtual creatures don’t have souls—not yet. Maybe that’s the appeal: a blank slate of a female whose eyes don’t betray any human interaction.

In addition to being a little glassy, Kaya’s eyes are designed to be a little far apart, a flaw that makes her seem more human. If you look at other virtual girls, you’ll see similar flaws. Cool, huh? The flaws that mortal women are socialized to try to compensate for are the stuff of virtual dreams. It seems a little ironic, doesn’t it, that artificial perfection consists of selected copies of real flaws added to otherwise perfect templates?

I’m wondering if Kaya will enter the Miss Digital World Contest. This new contest, which will involve an international voting public instead of a row of judges, has been created by Franz Cerami to attract “the most beautiful and intriguing virtual models made using the most advanced 3D graphics tools.” The idea is to celebrate today’s standard, the Platonic ideal of womanhood embodied in a cyborgian image that pushes all the right buttons.

And I’m not just talking about sex, though the creation of virtual women, and girls, has brought a whole new controversial dimension to the realm of pornography, which is why Cerami—just like the Miss America officials—prohibits entrants from ever having appeared in compromising positions. Virtual girls are a boon for the porn industry, and that breaks my heart, even though I do know the difference between reality and fantasy and value free speech. Outside porn, there are a few opportunities in advertising and video games. Even Hollywood calls.

Fantasy rules, and fantasy is tempting. When I look at virtual young women, I actually begin to wonder what the daughter I never had would look like if I fiddled with three-dimensional software. Would she look like a little Felicia with a few features of my cousin the beauty queen thrown in for good measure? Or would I make her face violate every social norm of beauty to protect her from virtual predators? Would I give her my husband’s beard? Probably not. I’d probably just close my eyes and cut and paste and open my eyes to see what the software fates had given me.

I know she would be beautiful, whatever she looked like, as beautiful as all daughters everywhere, and just as obstinate as her mom. I can imagine this virtual daughter asking me for permission to leave the comfort of our home computer to morph into a violent video game or some shady movie on the World Wide Web. “I’m not real, Mom,” I can hear her saying. “What’s the big deal?” Let’s face it. If she were real, I would convince her to do something with her brains.

First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 19 November 2003, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2005.