Tag: beauty standards

Goddamn Watashi ga Motete Dousunda is too real about the difference between how dudes treat you when you meet standards of conventional beauty vs. when you don’t… which is like hilariously relatable but also depressing

Alright dudes (I’m not calling everyone dudes, this is specifically addressed at dudes), say you have a male friend who’s really into black metal, and he wears corpse paint most of the time, and one day he shows up without any on. Do you feel compelled to tell him he’s “still pretty without makeup”?

No? Then why the fuck do you feel the need to say that shit to women?

IDK I Feel Like The Way Women Are Often Socialized To Deal With Bodies and Beauty and Shit

Really fucks you up, and fucks up your relationships with other women a lot of the time.

Like sex work has really changed a lot of my perspectives on shit because we live in a society where women are told that their primary value is their sexual desirability and nothing else they do matters if they’re not hot, and like how you know if you’re hot or not is how many men want you, and like we’re told men are these constantly horny lust machines with essentially identical parameters for what’s desirable and so anytime there’s a guy who doesn’t want you, you must be defective somehow.

And like hotness in this worldview is objective and sort of a zero-sum game and like it leads to a really shitty competitive thing between women and like IDK maybe I’m really gay or really primarily gay or something or it’s partially just being a sex worker, and really having the whole “yeah, I know I’m desirable” thing because work really covers that need for me, but like I don’t have that feeling towards other women and like I’m not saying “Oh I’m so good for not being like that, look at how good I am” or anything cause like it’s just an acculturated thing and like I don’t know how to deal with it, but like it’s come up in like my sexual relationships with other women where like they’d literally tell me that whatever about my body or appearance made them insecure somehow or like that attention I got from men made them feel hurt, and I’m also not saying “Oh, I’m secure in my position as hottest, I win” because like there are definitely like circles in which I’m not the babeliest babe or whatever because I don’t appeal to that demographic and my girlfriends would sometimes get more attention than me in those and like I didn’t care because like “the hot girl chose me, so…” so I didn’t mind them getting attention and like my girlfriends have all been really gorgeous in my opinion, and I don’t think hotness is an objective quality or a zero-sum game at all, but like it’s just really depressing that that’s a thing and that like “But I’m with you” isn’t enough to turn the culture of competition into something else.

And like I see young women jockeying for position of “resident hottie” in various spaces (usually male dominated spaces) because society has told them that’s what they have to be to be valid, and like if you want to do stuff in a male dominated space you have to be the hottest girl or there’s sort of no point and it’s just… like depressing and fucked up and like IDK when I was younger, and not doing sex work, I did often hang out in places with lots of boys because they were all like… fairly nice to me because I was decorative and like I liked some of the same stuff they liked so it felt good to be there, and like I probably would have felt pretty upset if another girl had come along and I’d sort of ended up in the cold because I wasn’t the pretty one anymore, and so like it’s a social dynamic that’s really perpetuated by men only being friendly or kind to women if they perceive them as sexually interesting and like how there’s only room for like a sort of “token girl” in a lot of heavily male interest circles, and so yeah I’m also definitely not saying that “look at these silly girls, hating other girls because they want to feel like the prettiest” because like it happens for a fucking reason, but it still sucks,

Seriously Though

The fact that women are told to feel “proud” of their bodies is actually creepy (just like telling them to feel ashamed of their bodies is creepy) because it goes back to that whole “beauty = goodness” thing and like making women morally responsible for their appearances innate or otherwise.

Your looks just sort of are, they’re not something to be ashamed of or proud of, you can like them, you can be pleased with them, but pride implies responsibility and implying women are responsible for how they happen to look is gross.

Maybe my attitude of neutrality towards my unmade up/unplastic surgeried face is weird

But like I’m not ashamed of it, I don’t hate it.  From what I understand I got pretty lucky as faces go, but like also I’m not proud of it because I didn’t do it.  Like regardless of how nice my unmodified face is, I still didn’t do it.  Like if I’d inherited a Da Vinci painting or whatever I wouldn’t be proud of that painting cause it’s not a painting I did.  Like I mean I’d feel pretty damn lucky to have inherited a treasure like that, but there wouldn’t be pride involved.

My face is something that happened without my involvement and the way women are made to feel responsible for their appearances is weird and fucked up.

You know it really undermines your critiques of women getting plastic surgery

When you follow up “it’s so sad women are mutilating themselves because of beauty standards” with “and she looked so much prettier before”

What you want her to get more surgery so she can meet your beauty standards again?

I have issues with the rest of your argument too (though yes it does suck how we have these beauty standards constantly shoved down our throat) but like, making it clear you want her to get more surgery to “undo” what she had done because of your beauty standards is especially hypocritical

If We Handled Favorite Colors The Way We Handle Beauty Standards

The most popular favorite color in the world is blue, and so society would tell us that liking any color other than blue was some kind of creepy fetish.  Media would depict all other colors as hideous, ranked on how similar they were to blue, green’s okay, purple’s okay, turquoise is pretty good, orange?  Oh my god what’s wrong with you? You’re obviously some kind of sex pervert.

Obviously they’d say liking blue relates to like deep evolutionary psychology, liking clean water, and the sky and that sort of thing, but liking red?  Obviously there’s something wrong with your DNA, red is the color of blood, what kind of fucked up pervert likes the color of blood.

And then there’b be color positivity campaigns that are like “It’s just as good to like turquoise as it is to like blue.”  or like “Primary blue is an unrealistic standard to hold up to natural life, sky blue is much more realistic" and then there’d be people going “we should redefine blue as green because more things are green so it wouldn’t make as many non blue things feel bad about themselves” and “they photoshop the sky bluer than it is, they’re giving us unreasonable expectations of blueness”

You Know I Don’t Like Discourse Like “The media distorts our image of beauty” or “gives us impossible standards”

thepeacockangel:

because it implies that women are supposed to be beautiful regardless and that it is reasonable to demand that all women conform to a standard of attractiveness so long as that standard is deemed “reasonable”

Like what’s important is that women are considered worthless when they don’t live up to certain standards of physical attractiveness, not how “reasonable” or “attainable” those standards are.  Having the standards at all is the problem

I don’t care how “average” you make your non-Barbie, there are little girls who are going to be really tall, really short, really fat, really skinny, with rare skin conditions, built like Barbie, built like Lamily, built like whatever, and it’s not fair to make the beauty standard “statistically average” any more than it is to have it be some tiny outlier group. all standards of beauty are impossible to live up to for someone so fuck beauty. Stop valuing beauty as a single ideal rather than a subjective quality