Culture

Sexy Beasts assumes we’re shallower than we are

Shows like Sexy Beasts are hilarious, but they’re also driven by a weird moral logic

Sexy Beasts, the new series on Netflix that transforms contestants into monsters in the hope of improving their dating prospects, appears on the surface to raise only the kind of questions that an imaginative child might put to David Attenborough. (Like, can a dolphin love a baboon?) But the show – which, full disclosure, is hilarious – also propagates some common myths about modern superficiality.

The premise is as follows: across a series of decadent dates, three suitors must compete for the heart of one lucky contestant. The catch is that, like a fairy tale, everyone must undergo a gruesome transformation, rendered beastly in grand prosthetic masks. Though the show is not new – it was first aired in 2014, on BBC Three – the Netflix cash injection has funded new, incredible transformations: all the costumes, from blue-skinned aliens to pink-eared mice, are astonishing feats of make up. (These masks are sturdy, too, standing up to a nose-clashing pulling session between a horny devil and boob-obsessed baboon.)

Imagine, then, The Island of Dr Moreau, but the island is Britain: rainy Hertfordshire, in fact. Dates include a grey trip to Thorpe Park, and drinks at Knebworth’s Lytton Arms pub, where an American beaver downs “a pint of British beer” and then looks thoroughly disgusted.

The idea here is that, reduced to monsters, these daters will have to get to know each other’s personalities. Yet there are several problems with this premise, even if we keep criticism focused strictly on the game’s rules. The first is obvious: height and body shape aren’t concealed. One contestant – a beaver who never says “daaaaamn”, and who explains that he invests the highest importance in asses – is a bulging trapezoid of a man. He wastes no time in bringing this to every date’s attention, twerking his pecs under his shirt, offering up his biceps for squeezes, and even, during a clay pigeon shoot, asking the instructor whether he’d “seen guns like these before”. (The instructor, an older gentleman with a giant shotgun, looks at the beaver like he’s having a fox-hunting flashback).

There’s a problem here, explains Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who studies love and relationships. With just the face covered, contestants still receive a huge dose of primal courtship signals: body shape, (for which the beaver later praises the blue pixie) but also things like whether the person leans forward to listen to you, whether their arms and legs are crossed, or, most important for first impressions, their teeth, grammar and self-confidence. “When you actually fall in love, a tiny little factory near the very base of the brain, called the ventral tegmental area, or the VTA, begins to produce more dopamine, and sends that dopamine to many brain regions, giving you the elation, the giddiness, the euphoria, the sleeplessness, the loss of appetite, and the focus on one particular person,” explains Fisher.

Covering someone’s face doesn’t calm that reaction – we can get it from something as simple as a hilarious or moving email, says Fisher. In fact, a mask could even benefit attraction. “One thing about the head being covered which is actually good, is that it creates novelty,” she says. “Novelty gives you something to talk about right off the bat. And it’s unusual: any kind of novelty drives up the dopamine system in the brain."

Another problem viewers have pointed to is that the show only features contestants who are fantastically hot. They range from sportspeople to models to model sportspeople, and it becomes apparent very quickly that no one will take off their mask and reveal themselves to be less than gorgeous. (Perhaps the shooting instructor could have walked out at the show’s end, revealing himself to the devil as the baboon she pulled under Nemesis Inferno?) Fisher suspects this is as much for the audience’s sake as the contestants. “The brain pumps out some dopamine, and you feel good when you look at pretty people,” she says. “This is why they put pretty people on advertisements. You feel better when you look at them. So my guess is that’s why the producers went for a lot of pretty people.”

At a deeper level, Sexy Beasts, like a lot of dating shows that remove looks from the equation, is driven by a weird moral logic. Namely, that modern daters are image-obsessed, poisoned by the screens that surround them, and that deep personalities lose out to surface-level looks. Only dressing up as pandas can make us less shallow.

As compelling as this sounds, were it to be true you would expect to find hordes of people in relationships with beautiful people they think are jerks. Things aren’t quite this bleak, Fisher explains. She has carried out huge studies, focused on more than 50,000 Americans – 5000 a year for ten years – of all ages, backgrounds, ethnicities and sexualities. She has not found that we’re obsessed with looks. “Every year, I ask, what are you really looking for, and good looks have never been in the top five,” she says. “The first thing that people say they want in a long term relationship is somebody who respects them, somebody who they can trust and confide in, and somebody who makes them laugh,” she says. During the pandemic, she explains, looks grew even less important: people were after more self-transparency, more meaningful conversations, and more self disclosure. (They were also interested in learning if a person was financially stable).

This isn’t to say that looks are unimportant or that modern dating is never toxic, superficial or outright prejudiced. But the idea that looks perennially win out over personality doesn’t hold water (and parallels suspiciously some of the logic behind incel culture). Besides, is sexual attraction necessarily shallow? Or misleading? Personality deep? Or in conflict with beauty? And does the dichotomy of inner and outer beauty even hold up?

Sexy Beasts probably isn’t deep enough to bear these questions. But, watching the show’s first episode, as a British mouse tells an American devil about the joys of “banter”, it seems faintly ludicrous to bet that his looks would have saved him. “The bottom line here is that there are many, many aspects of courtship,” says Fisher. “And anybody who thinks that someone’s going to fall in love with somebody just because they’re good looking, just doesn’t understand this complexity.”

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK