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RE: Thoughts on "Impossible" Beauty Standards and Their Origin

in #feminism • 8 years ago

Do you truly believe that society has nothing to do with it, though?

My point? Just this: Neither "society" nor the "patriarchy" hold people in general, or women in particular, to unrealistic or impossible beauty standards. Evolution does so.

I think it's a combination of both...

And yet these same feminists irrationally insist that the "average" heterosexual woman's desire to be wanted by the opposite sex, and to compulsively appeal to its sexual preferences (that is, to male society's "beauty standards"), is NOT a genetic predisposition but is instead a product of cultural conditioning and male dominance--of the "patriarchy" or "rape culture".

Also, just an observation. It kinda seems like you're blaming societal pressures on feminists, instead of evolution, based on how much you use the term "traditional feminists" in your own counter-arguments.

8 years ago in #feminism by
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     8 years ago 

    Society has something to do with it, but much less than feminists suggest (meaning that we can't solve the "problem" simply by reforming society). From the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters:

    The same is true with the ideal of female beauty. Two pieces of evidence should suffice to refute the claim that images in the media, and “culture” in general, force girls and women to desire to look like blonde bombshells. First, as we note below, women were dying their hair blonde more than half a millennium, possibly two millennia, ago, when there were no TV, movies, and magazines (although there were portraits, and it is due to these portraits that we know today that women were dying their hair blonde in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Italy). 2 Women’s desire to be blonde preceded the media by centuries, if not millennia. Second, a recent study shows that women in Iran, where they are generally not exposed to the Western media and culture, and thus would not know Jessica Simpson from Roseanne Barr, and where most women wear the traditional Muslim hijab that loosely covers their entire body so as to make it impossible to tell what shape it is, are actually more concerned with their body image and want to lose more weight than their American counterparts in the land of Vogue and the Barbie doll. 3 The Standard Social Science Model, which ascribes the preferences and desires of women entirely to socialization by the media, would have difficulty explaining how Italian women in the fifteenth century and Iranian women today both aspire to and pursue the same ideal image of female beauty as do women in contemporary Western societies.

    To the extent I'm "blaming" anybody, I blame men for conning and shaming women into ceding their sexual power. My frustration with traditional feminists (as opposed to more modern sex positive ones) is that they aid and abet men in this task.

    My whole point is that evolutionary programming NOT a "societal pressure", rather it's a natural, internal urge. So, it would be inappropriate for me to "blame" evolution for "societal pressures". To the extent societal pressures are to blame for anything, it's for conning/shaming women into doing other than what they are biologically programmed to do, creating much societal strife and personal angst.

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