Quote from: rmaddy on July 05, 2017, 12:13:37 PM
I disagree. I think we are seeing changes in society as a result in changes to socialization. What you're looking at is an incomplete transformation. True, young women are being told that they can do whatever they want now, but not until they've fully mastered being a princess under the near constant references to their beauty, which start even before they are born. Dismantle that, and you'll have a blended society.
In your view women still have no agency to choose for themselves and if we tear down "female beauty" everyone will think the same?
People do have the freedom to choose here, though, isn't that good enough...? Nobody can escape how their parents socialize them in whatever capacity, but when we are old enough, we all can.
Quite honestly I think if you try to meddle with the idea of women being beautiful you're going to come up against a lot of women who
want to be beautiful no matter how much you tell them it doesn't matter. And who is anyone to tell individual people what they should and shouldn't find interesting? By all means show kids of both genders all the possibilities they could achieve in a lifetime through a range of interests. But I'm not up for telling people whether they should or shouldn't pursue beauty. Just about everyone thinks about wanting to be beautiful at some point or other, it's human. "Dismantling" the idea doesn't sound like a good path to me as it will lead to banning of imagery of women of a certain weight, or look, etc. (already proposed in London on the buses thanks to the mayor) and it sounds far more totalitarian to me to begin telling people what is "realistic" and "unrealistic" an expectation of them, and to begin actively tearing down or to start shaming people for liking certain beauty standards over others. I would much rather we didn't go down the road of policing ideas about beauty and instead just taught children to think for themselves.
Even then, I do think women on the whole have a tendency - across all cultures, and including the female-minded but still male-bodied - to think about (and to
want to think about) being beautiful more than men do. You can see it all over these boards and it makes people happy to
feel beautiful... you don't see people here saying they specifically desire to be beautiful because society demands it, or because men want it... but because
they want it. Is this some social construct they are obeying like robots, or more likely part and parcel of the enjoyment of human sensuality?
I honestly don't know a single adult woman who is pursuing unrealistic beauty standards or trying to be a "princess" - not saying that doesn't happen at all but I certainly don't see it "all around" me.
My younger sister is a mother of two; wants to be a make-up artist and enjoys making herself up... she had the exact same upbringing as I did - gender neutral, with academic parents who encouraged her to read over watching TV. She was socialized at a young age largely by me, the older sibling, to climb trees, fight, make bows and arrows and raise hell. But once grown up, what happened? She and I couldn't be more different, and she does what she does now because she enjoys it. That's who she is, what she likes and chooses to be like. If someone came along and told her she's doing it because society or upbringing, she would laugh.
What if... there is a biological component to the desire to be beautiful? Men will often try to compete with each other to become successful in a particular field because that tends to make them more desirable as mates. While women don't have to make themselves up to remain desirable as mates, making themselves up undoubtedly appears to make them even more desirable as mates. If this behavior and response is biological in origin - no amount of social engineering is going to get rid of it.
