Hello Handsome
Henry James Pallett in RUSSH September 2009
Handsome? Hand some? Such an odd word. It got me thinking - why are men handsome and women beautiful?
Handsome is attributed to someone marked with a sense of skillfulness, and has a pleasing and unusually impressive or dignified appearance. There's something about proportions that allows for a graceful, maybe more utilitarian, way of bringing themselves into action. Beauty, on the other hand, is more about aesthetic pleasure. Beautiful applies to whatever/whomever excites the keenest of pleasure to the senses and stirs emotion through the senses. Handsome is an active attribute, beauty is passive. Handsome becomes so when that person is in motion, beauty is something that can exist in suspended animation.
This got me thinking about fashion editorials. More often than not, women are posed to evoke beauty. The emotions or characters that they are asked to portray are often best expressed with very little movement. Editorials with men are generally more successful when they are dynamic - the characters and emotions are active, expressed best through movement and change.
Not that this is a bad thing - it simply fits with our (or at least my) ideas where beauty is to women as handsome is to men.
All this from a photo of a guy with a rifle.
