8

Self-Branding Bodies, Self-Marketing Minds

THE BODY IS a practical tool for survival and reproduction, but it is also the packaging and advertising for our genes. Body watchers have understood for centuries that the human form, like that of all animals, is a showcase of fitness indicators. By understanding how we display good genes, good health, and good fertility through our body traits, we can better understand how our self-marketing minds display themselves through our consumer behavior.

Folk wisdom holds that beauty advertises health and fertility. Publilius Syrus, the ancient Roman mime, wrote, “A fair exterior is a silent recommendation.” Oscar Wilde, the gay Irish wit, wrote, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Martha Graham, the angular modernist dancer, observed, “The body never lies.” Peacocks have tails, lions have manes, and humans have luxuriant head hair that will grow long if left uncut, gemlike eyes with big white scleras, expressive faces, sensually everted lips, smooth hairless skin, and gracefully dextrous hands. As Darwin realized, these human traits are all the result of sexual selection—generations of our ancestors favoring reliable cues of youth, health, fitness, and fertility in their sexual partners. Moreover, each human sex has its own luxury fitness indicators. Males have beards, large jaws, large upper-body muscles, and longer, thicker penises than those of other great apes. Females have much-enlarged breasts and buttocks and relatively thinner waists compared with those of other great apes. These sex-specific indicators only mature at puberty, just in time for individuals to advertise their fitness in the mating market.

In the past fifteen years, evolutionary psychologists have confirmed that many of these human body traits do function as fitness indicators. (That might sound obvious, but it’s not always easy to find good empirical support for the allegedly obvious.) There is now strong evidence that these body traits are uniquely amplified in humans, are valued as sexual signals, and are displayed more prominently during sexual courtship. They show large sex differences, and develop under the influence of sex hormones, especially around puberty. Some of these traits (lips, breasts, buttocks, penises) even get engorged with blood during sexual arousal. They are salient and sexy, they are costly and complex, and they are hard-to-fake signals of survival and reproductive ability. They are the focus of visual pornography for males, and narrative pornography for females. As we age, sicken, or starve, our hair dulls, faces droop, lips thin, skin sags, and hands shake. If male, our penises, muscles, and jaws shrink; if female, our breasts and buttocks shrink and sag. If our parents were siblings or cousins, their genetic inbreeding reduces our health, fertility, and attractiveness. If we are badly injured, the damage reduces our symmetry of form and grace of movement. These traits are both physical fitness-indicators, and physical-fitness indicators (the hyphens matter here).

These indicators are most reliable at the medium to low end of fitness. Superattractive movie stars like Anne Hathaway and Will Smith are not necessarily healthier or more fertile than the most attractive 20 percent of your high school class. Yet both groups are very likely healthier and more fertile than the least attractive 20 percent of your high school class. Attraction to physical beauty is the flip side of repulsion to physical ugliness, asymmetry, disease, handicaps, lesions, and injuries. When we buy beauty-enhancing products, we are mostly trying to hide imperfections—the sorts of conditions discussed on Embarassingproblems.co.uk: acne, bad breath, belly-button discharge, cold sores, dandruff, genital infections, head lice, impotence, incontinence, jock itch, penis problems, snoring, tics, varicose veins, and warts.

Indeed, when we think of the phenomenal range of human bodies, it’s very hard to remember what we have in common, for only the fitness indicators are salient. If you compare the actress Elizabeth Hurley with your ugliest female relative, or the soccer star David Beckham with your ugliest male relative, it’s hard to imagine that their kidneys, colons, tongues, eyeballs, and testicles or ovaries are virtually identical in structure, function, and physiology. If you’re one of the 8 million people who saw the “Body Worlds” exhibition of plasti nated human corpses, by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, you may remember that you couldn’t really tell which body had been sexually attractive before the skin flaying, muscle dissection, and organ disassembly. If you were one of the 3,400 people executed by China in 2004, your sex appeal had little influence on the price that your kidneys, corneas, liver, and heart could fetch on the medical black market. Some rich Singapore businessman is probably looking happily now through those condemned corneas, without prejudice.

In the cadaver trade (for medical schools and surgical training seminars), the big companies such as Innovations in Medical Education and Training (IMET) don’t care how cute you were before your corpse entered the “tissue bank” supply chain. They’ll just pay the standard $550 for a head, $815 for a whole leg, $1,500 for a spine, or $375 per breast—plus air freight. When the occasional package bursts open in a FedEx sorting plant, the workers don’t exclaim “Oh, what a fetchingly handsome jawline and noble brow on that disarticulated human head!”; to them, it’s just a repulsive ball of thawing meat, fat, and bone. As Augie Perna, the head of IMET, said in a Harper’s interview, “That torso that you’re living in right now is just flesh and bones. To me, it’s product.” Or, as the Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote nineteen hundred years ago, “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”

I don’t want to rock your existential boat with such morbid thoughts; I just want you to remember that overall, human bodies are really pretty similar, and that we make an enormous fuss over what are essentially minor differences. To a short, malnourished, rickets-warped, lice-infested medieval peasant, we would all look as gorgeous as angels. To a horny chimpanzee, we would all look like anemic, short-armed, sunken-faced chemotherapy patients. To a saber-toothed cat, we would all look mighty tasty. Members of the International Biometric Industry Association have to work quite hard to find reliable automated ways to distinguish people. Typically, this requires measuring precise, complex, semirandom surface patterns from the skin (fingerprints, hand scans, spectral reflectance profiles), face, iris, or voice. To other species and biometric machines, human differences are subtle indeed.

But the evolutionary consequences of those differences become huge when they are averaged across whole populations and compiled across thousands of generations. Tiny differences in DNA sequences lead to subtle differences in proteins, cells, tissues, organs, and bodies, which lead in turn to different average levels of reproductive success. We evolved to notice these apparently trivial differences because in the evolutionary long run, they matter enormously.

Obviously, many goods and services are marketed to improve physical appearance. The most popular and dramatic examples—clothing, cosmetic surgery, the fitness industry—have been analyzed by thousands of researchers. Only the more extreme oddities still surprise, and remind us how much narcissism lurks beneath consumerism. One such example is Bust-Up chewing gum, marketed to Japanese schoolgirls by B2Up, a Tokyo-based company. It contains phytoestro gens claimed to increase breast size, shape, and firmness (see Bustgum .com). Another example is Extreme Makeover, a reality TV show in which volunteers are filmed undergoing liposuction, breast implants, nose jobs, tummy tucks, exercise regimens, and wardrobe upgrades.

The Rise of the Triathlon

When the jogging craze swept the developed world in the 1970s, runners started to compete in marathons. While the Boston marathon had been run since 1897, big new annual marathons began sprouting up everywhere: New York (1970), Berlin (1974), Chicago (1977), London (1981). The New York marathon, the world’s largest, now has to limit the runners to thirty-seven thousand per year.

However, from a fitness signaling viewpoint, marathon-running developed a problem: it proved too easy. It soon became apparent that almost anybody between fifteen and fifty-five could finish a marathon, if he or she trained conscientiously for about six months. Completing a 26.2-mile marathon was no longer an achievement special enough to provoke much respect, and winning a marathon became impossible for the nonprofessional runner. Even worse, marathon training did not give people very impressive bodies. Long-distance runners become skinny and stringy: men lose their upper-body muscles, while women lose their breasts, buttocks, and fertility. Both sexes develop lower sex-hormone levels and libidos. Finally, marathon-running was too inexpensive to serve as a good wealth indicator: all you needed to compete was a pair of $80 running shoes.

Some other form of amateur athletic competition was needed—one that would favor stronger, fatter, sexier, more fertile bodies, and that required much costlier equipment. Voilà—the Hawaiian Iron-man Triathlon was invented in 1977. It required a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike ride, and ended with a 26.2-mile marathon. This contest favored amateur athletes with more upper-body strength (for swimming), lower-body strength (for cycling), and fat reserves (to avoid freezing in the water, and to provide long-term energy). Today, serious triathlon competitors also need to spend at least $5,000 on equipment—for example, $550 for a Blue Seventy Helix Full triathlon wetsuit, $3,800 for a Scott CR1 Plasma Pro triathlon bike, plus special energy bars and electrolyte drinks (a triathlon, unlike a marathon, requires refueling en route). So, triathlons quickly became more reputation enhancing than marathons: longer, harder, and more competitive, requiring more muscle, more training, and more money. Insofar as ancestral human life also required a balance between the aerobic capacity for long-distance walking and running, and the strength to carry hunted meat, gathered plant-foods, and heavy babies, the triath lete’s body also better fits our evolved sexual preferences for the way that a healthy, fertile human should look.

The triathlon is a classic example of runaway trait display. It not only required a higher level of physical fitness, but also higher levels of wealth, training effort, and conscientiousness. Compared with the marathon, it also resulted in a body better suited to human sexual preferences for general health, strength, and fertility. The triathlon’s displacement of the marathon exemplifies a key signaling principle: strong signals drive out the weak.

Facial Fertility Indicators and Cosmetics

One of my central claims is that we buy many products in a semiconscious attempt to increase the social and sexual attractiveness of certain personal traits. There is little mystery about some of the physical traits (breasts, buttocks, hair) that function as fitness indicators, and that women display to appear sexually attractive. However, many other physical traits function as more-subtle fitness indicators in each sex, and are more often displayed in public, and augmented by purchased products. Women’s cosmetics, for example, teach us a lot about the nature of beauty: how certain female facial traits function as indicators of fitness, youth, and fertility.

The evolutionary background of cosmetics is that in most primate species, sexual selection focuses very heavily on facial appearance. This is because most primates are highly social (they care where others are looking and what their facial expressions are conveying), and highly visual (they care what others’ eyes and faces look like). Typically, this leads female primates to select male primate faces that have some absurdly exaggerated sexually attractive features. The whole face itself may evolve to be more visually salient, as in the strong light-and-dark contrasts that frame the faces of black and white colobus monkeys, white-faced sakis, and De Brazza’s monkeys. The eyes may evolve to be more salient, with similarly stark contrasts framing the eyes, as in the white-nosed monkey, red-capped mangabey, and spectacled lan gur. The facial skin or fur may evolve highly saturated colors, as in the uakari’s bright red face and the mustached monkey’s bright blue face. These colors may evolve to be slightly more subtle, as in the pastel blue of the golden snub-nosed monkey, or the pastel pink of the Yun- nan snub-nosed monkey—or the colors may evolve to be even more garish, as in the mandrill’s bright red and blue nose. Other primates evolve striking hairstyles, such as the emperor tamarin’s mustache, and the cotton-top tamarin’s mohawk. Facial features may be exaggerated to form oversize noses (the proboscis monkey), cheek flaps (the orangutan), or pointy crania (the gorilla).

In each case, male primates have the more distinctive and extreme appearance, reflecting an evolutionary history of stronger female choice on their facial fitness indicators. In humans, by contrast, sexual selection has affected each sex’s facial features about equally, resulting in distinctively male “testosteronized” features (more prominent brows, jaws, chins, and noses; deeper-set, smaller eyes; beards) that are strikingly different from female “estrogenized” features (larger, more prominent eyes; fuller lips; lighter, smoother skin).

Many cues of female facial attractiveness function not just as general fitness indicators that reliably reveal a woman’s stable genetic quality, but as fertility indicators that reveal whether a woman is at the peak of fertility in her life course and in her ovulatory cycle. Female humans are unusual in that they become sexually active in their mid-teens, several years before they are physiologically fertile (which, given low-fat ancestral diets, was usually the late-teen years); and they remain sexually active long after they have stopped being physiologically fertile (after menopause). They are also unusual in remaining sexually active throughout their menstrual cycles, rather than mating just when they are at peak fertility, before ovulation. By having sex when they are not really fertile, female humans can solicit more consistent help, care, and investment from males for themselves and their children. This, however, creates a problem for males: If they have limited resources to invest in themselves and in different possible girlfriends and alleged offspring, how do they choose the investment opportunities with the highest likelihood of promoting their reproductive success? That is, how do they discriminate the truly fertile women who could get pregnant from the juvenile, postmenopausal, menstruating, or already-pregnant women?

In assessing women’s ages, men apparently evolved to pay close attention to facial and bodily cues of being in the young-adult phase of peak fertility. Women’s fertility increases rapidly in the late teenage years, peaks in the mid-twenties, and declines smoothly throughout the thirties, reaching negligible levels in most women by the early forties. Thus, prehistoric men who felt sexually attracted to pre-fertile girls or post-fertile women might have had wonderful, loving relationships, but they left few descendants to inherit their maladaptive preferences. Prehistoric men who felt most sexually attracted to peak-fertility women in their late teens through mid-thirties left more descendants to inherit their preferences for cues of youthful but sexually mature fertility.

As an evolutionary counterstrategy, women evolved to develop their fertility cues at younger ages in their juvenile life stages, and to retain their fertility cues into older postmenopausal ages, in order to extract more attention and investment from male mates. In prehistory, there were no birth certificates, driver’s licenses, or birthday parties to yield objective indexes of a woman’s chronological age. Males had no way to assess actual age or fertility; they had only visual and behavioral cues of sexual maturity, youthfulness, and fertility. So, women could evolve to fake their fertility all the way from around age twelve to around age sixty—not just physically but behaviorally. As a counter-counterstrategy, men in turn evolved more perceptive ways to distinguish genuine peak fertility from pseudofertility—and to react with sexual impulsiveness to the genuine-fertility cues. For instance, when Bill Clinton allegedly had an affair with Monica Lewinsky in 1995, Monica (born 1973) was twenty-two, near peak fertility, whereas Bill’s wife, Hillary Clinton (born 1947), was forty-eight, with negligible fertility.

One way of faking fertility across a broader age range is to apply cosmetics that amplify facial fertility cues that peak in young adulthood, such as plump lips, large eyes, prominent cheekbones, smooth and radiant complexion, thick and glossy head hair, and minimal facial hair. (Each of these traits distinguishes not only peak-fertility females from younger or older females, but also human females from other anthropoid apes.) In almost all cultures, women use cosmetics to make their facial traits look more similar to those of a mid-twenties peak-fertility woman.

For example, eye size, whiteness, and contrast tend to decline after the mid-twenties fertility peak, so women use eyeliner, eye color, mascara, brow pencils, and Visine to make their eyes look larger and clearer, and to increase the light/dark contrast between pupil, iris, sclera, lashes, skin, and brows. (Virtually all magazine covers, ads, and porn pictorials also use Photoshop image manipulation to whiten the scleras of female models.) The thickness, redness, and eversion of lips tends to peak in the mid-twenties as a fertility indicator, so women use lip liner, lip color, lip gloss, and lip plumper to make their lips look larger and brighter. The prominence and roundness of “cheekbones,” which are really the pads of estrogenized fat above the zygomatic bones, tend to shrink with age, and the overlying skin loses its vasodilated red blush, so women use blush and shading to highlight cheekbones. (Many models and actresses also get small silicone pads implanted in their upper cheeks, and fat extracted from their lower cheeks, to make their cheekbones more prominent.) The translucence, radiance, evenness, and smoothness of women’s facial skin declines after the mid-twenties, so women use foundation and powder to make the skin complexion appear more uniform in pigment and texture, and to hide wrinkles. The thickness, length, color saturation, and glossiness of head hair peaks in the mid-twenties, so older women use volu mizing shampoos, shine-enhancing conditioners, hair dyes, highlights, hair extensions, and wigs to emulate peak-fertility hair. Conversely, they use depilators to minimize facial hair, which tends to grow as estrogen drops and androgens increase after menopause.

Top makeup artists, such as Pat McGrath of CoverGirl, have the skills to achieve these youth- and fertility-enhancing effects with such subtlety that casual observers cannot tell any cosmetics have been used. The result is that when Molly Sims or Queen Latifah appear in CoverGirl ads, they look so youthful, radiant, and fertile in such unde tectably natural-looking ways that most female readers feel instantly outclassed, and desperate to achieve the same hyper-fertile look. (The beauty-fertility connection is not usually conscious, in the minds of either women seeking to be more beautiful or men seeking women who are more beautiful. We have just evolved to act as if we understand the connection.)

Cosmetic choices are much less culturally arbitrary than they appear at first glance. Ancient Egyptians may have used kohl rather than liquid eyeliner to increase apparent eye size, red ochre rather than blush to increase cheek redness, and mesdemet (ground copper and lead ore) rather than foundation to make their complexions look more uniform. Yet in each case, they sought to increase rather than decrease the facial cues of estrogenization, youthful sexual maturity and fertility. Across cultures, people have used different cosmetic ingredients, pigments, colors, and bases, and different cosmetic application methods, styles, and patterns. Yet I cannot find any cases in which cosmetics have been widely used by women in a culture to give an impression of small, jaundiced eyes, pale thin lips, or wrinkled, pockmarked skin.

The fact that all cosmetics aim for the same youth- and fertility-enhancing effects makes it very difficult to be a cosmetics marketer or product developer, because it is so hard to capitalize on genuine functional innovation in the cosmetics themselves. Pharmaceuticals that genuinely “cure diseases” can be profitably patented after FDA approval, but cosmetics that merely “enhance appearance” are not subject to the same evidentiary standards or legal protections. Instead, cosmetics brands must differentiate themselves mainly through packaging and pricing, to appeal to women who differ along the dimensions of age, wealth, and apparent sexual availability (if not actual promiscuity). For example, the Wet’n’Wild brand appeals to low-status, self-sexualizing teens, whereas the Shiseido brand appeals to high-status young professional women seeking a chaste image that deters sexual harassment at work. Recently, cosmetics have also begun brand differentiating according to more subtle lifestyle dimensions: conventional romanticism (Chanel, L’Oréal, Lancôme) versus clinical chastity (Clinique, Olay, Neutrogena, Prescriptives), versus eco-friendly naturalism (the Body Shop, Aveda, Ecco Bella), versus metrosexual urbanism (DuWop, NYX, Smashbox, Urban Decay). Women will pay a high price premium to acquire the brand that they feel best expresses their personality—although the chemical differences between the products are negligible, and although most potential male mates have no idea that the squat, squarish, black, recyclable tubes of Ecco Bella lipstick are supposed to connote environmental awareness, whereas the cylindrical, brassy tubes of Urban Decay lipstick are supposed to connote cutting-edge, post-goth glamour.

From Signals of Bodily Fitness to Signals of Mental Fitness

The cosmetics analysis above could be misread as suggesting that women display more fake physical fitness cues than men do. In fact, a similar analysis could be done of male fashion models, Chippendale’s dancers, athletes, bodybuilders, soldiers, policemen, ruggedly hirsute field anthropologists, and users of anabolic steroids, Viagra, and Rogaine. Vanity about physical appearance is an equal-opportunity vice; the males just target different physical traits for amplification and display, using different products. For instance, men try to build muscle mass by buying ultrapremium sustained-release protein powders such as Syntha-6, advertised with close-ups of muscular male torsos that are hotter than most of those found in gay porn. Both sexes draw on the costly signaling principles of conspicuous waste (enlarged cheekbones, hair volume, breasts, and buttocks in women; increased height, muscle volume, and sexual performance in men) and conspicuous precision (facial and bodily symmetry, regularity, and smoothness; minimal wrinkles, lumps, and lesions on the skin; fine grooming and clothing).

And yet many consumers wind up disappointed with products that promise to enhance their physical appearance. They realize that youth, health, fertility, and fitness are actually very hard to fake, because people have evolved for thousands of years to be very discerning. Our perceptual systems evolved the greatest sensitivity and accuracy in the tasks that were most important to our social and reproductive success, and assessing others’ physical qualities were among the most critical of them. We may not be able to see at a glance which cantaloupe in the produce section is ripe (hence more nutritious and carrying fewer phy totoxins), but we can see which potential mate in the nightclub is “fit” (hence more fertile and carrying fewer genetic mutations).

Intelligent adults eventually realize all this, at some level. They stop fooling themselves that body-display products actually increase physical attractiveness, and learn instead that maintaining one’s physical appearance is an effective way of broadcasting one’s personality traits. The consistent, skillful use of cosmetics, razors, hair products, and fashion advertises one’s intelligence, mental health, conscientiousness, and self-esteem. The fortysomething trophy wives of sixtysomething movie producers know that they cannot really look better on a purely visual, sexual level than the twentysomething aspiring actresses. But they do know subconsciously that, by maintaining a svelte figure, subtly made-up face, and strong fashion sense, they can remind a husband that they still have sufficient savvy and self-respect to make a useful ally in parenting and networking, or a formidable opponent in divorce court. Likewise, the ex-college-quarterback who maintains his form and energy after twenty years of marriage is displaying not so much his physicality as his moral self-restraint against the temptations of sloth and gluttony. Thus, even the apparently superficial use of appearance-enhancing products can, among mature consumers, signal a wide array of mental and moral traits, rather than just bodily traits of health, fertility, or fitness.

Looking Tough in World of Warcraft

Consumer narcissism can be seen most clearly in the virtual worlds of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), which are great natural experiments for investigating human behavior. For example, about 9 million people globally play a MMOG called World of Warcraft (WoW), marketed by Blizzard Entertainment. In WoW, players create a virtual character who is one of ten races (such as human, dwarf, gnome, orc, or blood elf), and one of nine classes (such as warrior, shaman, rogue, or hunter). The characters run around in a three-dimensional virtual world forming teams, fighting monsters, trading items, and accumulating character levels (which range from 1 to 70) depending on amount of game experience. Online players can see one another’s characters rendered in very high detail and vivid color, so the visual appearance of one’s character and the items it owns (especially its weapons and armor) are a major source of pride and social status within the gaming community.

My colleague Zack Mendenhall analyzed conspicuous consumption in WoW by looking at the auction-market prices of different weapons. Each weapon has a set of game-relevant attributes determined by the game designers, such as the “damage per second” it typically inflicts, its “durability” (the time until it breaks), and its “critical strike bonus” (its chance of inflicting an extra-damaging attack). While these quantitative attributes wholly determine each weapon’s actual utility in the game, some weapons look a lot cooler than others, and are more impressive to other players. These appearance-based features of the weapons are indexed by their “rarity” color level, which can be white (common), green (uncommon), blue (rare), or purple (“epic,” or very rare). For example, purple swords look larger, more exotic, and more distinctive than green swords. They are also objectively better weapons (with greater damage per second, durability, and other useful qualities), but we wondered whether weapon rarity in itself might be a source of social status for players, and whether they might pay a price premium for rare weapons.

In online chat associated with the game, players often discuss by name the rare, high-status weapons that they own, want, or have observed. For example, in online WoW dialect, they might say:

“Whodi, 411 flash. u c that l70 pally in SM with Cataclysm’s Edge?”

“NFW. IIRC, it does 138 dps? WEG. Better than my vendor trash”

“=:-D. OMG, sick wep, sick tank! If he got torqued, I would shit a cold purple Twinkie. *g* L8R”

 

Standard-English translation:

“Friend, consider this interesting news. Did you see that level- 70 paladin running around the Scarlet Monastery with that famous purple-level sword, Cataclysm’s Edge?”

“No feasible way. If I remember correctly, that sword does 138 points of damage per second? (Wicked evil grin expression.) Better than my cheap, common weaponry.”

“(Scared grin expression.) Oh my God, what a cool weapon, and a cool, physically intimidating warrior! If he got angry at me, I would react with extreme distress. (Giggles.) Talk to you later.”

Mendenhall and I focused on the simplest “melee” weapons (swords, axes, and daggers) that cause damage at short range, and on the green, blue, and purple rarity levels that are favored by almost all players. We analyzed just those weapons that could be auctioned to other players through the WoW online market for an auction price determined by supply and demand, and that could also be sold back to a nonplayer character in the game for a vendor price determined by the game designers. This yielded a sample of 309 specific weapon models, each of which is owned by thousands of different players around the world. (We excluded two superweapons with special hard-to-quantify powers and astronomical auction prices—the Night Blade dagger and the Blinkstrike sword.) We expected that conspicuous consumption effects would lead to weapon rarity’s having a much bigger effect on a weapon’s auction price (which reflects the premium players will pay for cool-looking weapons) than on its vendor price (which reflects a weapon’s objective attributes).

This is exactly what we found: rarity has a far larger effect on a WoW weapon’s auction price than any of its game-relevant attributes, explaining 33 percent of price variation. Median auction prices were 157 silver pieces for green weapons, 2,923 for blue, and 11,099 for purple. By contrast, a weapon’s vendor price is 95 percent explained by damage per second, and not at all by rarity (median vendor prices were 90 for green, 120 for blue, and 467 for purple—differences that became insignificant when controlling for damage per second). Thus, WoW players are willing to pay a premium of about ten thousand silver pieces for purple-rarity weapons that look big, cool, and exotic, even controlling for the better quantitative attributes of those weapons. Such coolness displays work because most rare weapons are acquired not through auction, but through being a high-status expert player who has spent hundreds of hours going on successful quests with large, competent guilds of friends.

The advantage of analyzing conspicuous consumption in such virtual worlds is that there is no wiggle room for arguing that the luxury good has some hidden quality or performance benefit that justifies its price premium. BMW may claim that its luxury-car premium reflects hard-to-quantify aspects of handling and drivability. No such claims can explain the purple-weapon premium in World of Warcraft, because the quantitative weapon attributes that are made publicly available by Blizzard Entertainment wholly explain the weapon’s objective utility in the game. In this online game, we have caught people red-handed paying huge costs just to impress one another. My argument is that such effects are ubiquitous in the real world, too, and that the alleged hidden quality and performance benefits of luxury goods are typically illusory—just vague ways for consumers to rationalize their consumer narcissism.

The Body Goes Mental

Most animals have very little behavioral control over their physical appearance. They can groom themselves to keep feathers or fur clean, but they cannot select a different species, sex, age, shape, color, or body texture. Ever since humans invented body ornamentation at least a hundred thousand years ago, however, we have been able to transform our bodies in ever more dramatic ways. Tribal peoples wear animal masks; British civil servants cross-dress; children play dress-up; the Florida elderly don toddler-bright colors. As people do more of their socializing through virtual-reality worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, their visual appearance is becoming less constrained by their true physical characteristics, and more constrained by their psychological traits, such as aesthetic preferences and idealized self-images. Virtual-reality users will soon be able to create avatars that resemble a mini-Mao, a Botox syringe, a mantis-legged cantaloupe, a pearl necklace, Nigella Lawson, or the evil Archimandrite Luseferous from the Iain M. Banks novel The Algebraist. Such customized avatars will reveal nothing about the physical appearance of the users, but a lot about their psychology. They will demonstrate more forcefully than ever before that consumerism is not about owning material objects, but about displaying the sort of personal qualities analyzed in the next chapter.