I really wish men and women could body swap for a day so we could better empathize with each other. Most men don’t really see that the world tells women “the most important thing you can be is pretty”. Whatever else you might have accomplished in life really pales in comparison to your looks. It’s just the way it is. This holds especially true outside the Bay Area bubble. Many of my wonderful male friends are just astonished at how much time and energy and money that I spend to be beautiful. I don’t think they understand how much society judges me on my looks. How it forces me to constantly compare myself to other women. How awful those moments are when I feel that I don’t have it. How women are acutely aware of and expected to “fix” our physical “shortcomings”: the hair on our face and legs and armpits and bikini lines and backs, our even-slightly-blemished skin (how dare we have pores), our thick ankles, our fleshy arms and stomach, our facial features (everything from thin lips to nose shape can be “fixed”), our hair color and texture, cuticles and unpainted nails on both hands and feet, callused feet, moles, under eye darkness and bags and wrinkles, thigh cellulite, breast shape, flabby arms, creased forehead and cheeks, short or saggy neck, unlifted lashes, low cheekbones, eyebrow shape, jaw and neck definition, etc etc. and especially, any signs of aging. We don’t ever become “silver foxes” or look “distinguished”- aging is the enemy.
In today’s world, the scrutiny of men’s appearance will never even come close to the microscope that women live under. Truly. An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman.
And worse, women are brought up to really care what others think of them, and to make everyone else comfortable at their own expense. So you can’t just “stop caring what people say”. That would really screw you over in this world.
I imagine that beauty is for women what money is for men. It’s our currency and often what makes us valuable to the group of the shallow “others” in this society.
I used to think like you, until my brother committed suicide from loneliness and rejection. I look at his suicide note every so often,and worry about my boys. Most men absolutely care what people think, and want to make other people comfortable. My brother, my father, your wonderful friends, probably do too.
Women and men have very different burdens, and its extremely clear the grass is not greener on the other side. Most people are not the high performing ruthless psychopathic type A personality common in Silicon Valley, New York, Miami, etc.
I'm a Korean woman that grew up in a white Surburbia, the meanest people to me were brown haired "average" white girls. They insulted my hair, my eyes, my nose, and my lack of nasal bridge, literally everything you can think of.
I believe the primate social hierarchy at play, and at our core many of us are trying to "win" that hierarchy. At the same time, I think certain types of people gravitate to cities and certain lifestyles.
> We don’t ever become “silver foxes” or look “distinguished”
While perhaps a little more crude, doesn't "MILF" convey the same intent with respect to women? All of the above speak to an attractiveness found in those who are considered older. There are plenty of women in their later stages of life who are still considered very attractive.
> aging is the enemy.
I posit that becoming "boring" is the ultimate enemy. Indeed, becoming boring is correlated with age. People tend to settle down as they become older, and that is what is considered least attractive. The movers and shakers don't want to associate with someone who thinks watching TV on a Saturday night is a good time.
> An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman.
It does appear to be true, statistically, that it takes men longer to mature. In fact, stereotypically, there is an idea that men will never grow up. The longer you keep at doing "stupid kid things" the greater the chances that you will eventually strike gold.
> The longer you keep at doing "stupid kid things" the greater the chances that you will eventually strike gold.
This is somewhat the key to success as a man, and what they're evolved to do.
Men don't get to live a life staying safe in the cave. Men are the species' tool for throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That's why the bell curve for male success/failure is much flatter than it is for women. More extreme successes and more extreme failures. Men are the element of the human tribe that take on huge risks to discover new and valuable things. When it works, the success can be massive and disproportionate. When it fails, it fails hard, often in death. And usually, there's no (or little) safety net for men. There's a reason why 75% of the homeless are men.
This does seem like a necessary outcome of the harsh reality of supply and demand of sexual reproduction, that eggs and wombs are scarce and valuable while sperm is abundant and cheap.
Angela Merkel pretty solidly disproves this. Granted there aren't a lot of women like her, but even a single counterexample is sufficient to disprove broad assertions.
Women communicate in a variety of ways. One of the prime ways they communicate, even with other women, is through looks. So enhancing looks is the first step of communication. And so there is also competition. I have noticed in a large group of women, if there is someone who comes to work highly focused in looks, the other women begin to do the same. And in similar style too.
Men don’t really study that much into looks. They are less sharp about it. But ugly men get less attention too. If they don’t dress well, they get less noticed. In such cases, the surviving men who don’t look great have something else that sets them apart: high level of intellect.
What sets women apart, if not looks, is discipline and reliability.
> The essential object of competition is "ability to attract and influence men"
I completely disagree. communication via appearance starts from an early age. Young girls (less than 7 yrs old) try to look pretty. There is communication too between girls via appearance. boys don’t enter the picture until much later.
Remember the red and blue journalists attending China’s presidential address. The red coat journalist got the mic and spoke of unrelenting support. The blue coat journalist was so taken aback by this weird support she began to eye the person from top to bottom. Both were women. And were native Chinese working for American media companies. They communicate with looks.
>I completely disagree. communication via appearance starts from an early age. Young girls (less than 7 yrs old) try to look pretty.
This is because the behavior is ingrained in biology. But make no mistake behavior ingrained in biology is from selection pressure and that selection pressure is sexual selection. Men select the women who are more interested in making themselves look pretty.
>There is communication too between girls via appearance. boys don’t enter the picture until much later.
The communication is this: If a girl looks prettier she is saying, "I'm better at attracting and manipulating men than you." That's the only thing communicated.
>They communicate with looks.
You're thinking too much. Do men communicate by getting rough and rowdy? Do men communicate by playing sports? Maybe? But the extent of the communication is minimal and it's the same thing with women and looks. There's hidden communication network that men don't know about, that's much to imaginative. Additionally, if such a network existed, some woman would eventually spill the beans.
The rest of your hypothesis rests on an idea that women evolved (into a species?) with reinforced traits focusing on appearance. Disagree here Because Men and women didn’t evolve into different “species” And neither do we find similarities between them in this regard.
Selection pressure is an idea that tries to explain the trends in evolution. It is just an idea. It would be careless to trace everything in current state of behaviors to evolutionary changes.
You would be better off leaving evolution out of the picture.
(Edit: I’m deeply disturbed by your view. The people who advocate for child-love use similar reasoning.)
Agreed. This issue you're talking about is the forefront of the political climate in the US today.
Do we speak the truth? Or do we speak in terms of empathy so as to not diminish constructive conversation?
It hurts my feelings when someone says 99% of all rape cases are from men. I may get angry when someone says that and that is, like you said, not leading to "constructive conversation."
But the issue here is that the 99% statistic is also the truth. So that's the big question with social justice and liberal politics today. How much do we bend reality for the sake of feelings or "constructive" discussion? When does reality get so bent that "constructive discussion" is no longer "constructive"? Let's not talk about rape and let's not talk about how males are the majority instigators because it hurts my feelings and is not constructive.
Additionally there's very selective application of "constructive discussion". For example you see a lot of rightly placed discussion about the male/female pay gap but no discussion on the fact that males make up 70% of homeless people. The 20% pay gap is by far the bigger issue here. Why?
I wrote a lot here because I care about the subject. For my money, I would argue that your one liner comment against the massive content I'm putting up here is the one that is "dismissive".
Odd how dismissive you are of someone noting an imbalance of privilege between genders....
Do you recall the underlying cause for it being ignored when/where it affected women negatively?
That's right, the privileged group was/is in denial as they did not want to lose the privilege, as equality feels like oppression to the privileged.
Now, apply the same century of arguments that have been well hashed out back onto the privilege women have. And don't deny that there are privileges in being a woman, fundamental to the misogynistic norms were explicit privileges well documented alongside the similarly well documented oppression.
I look a little white, I look a little Middle Eastern. When I was young, I absolutely hated how I looked. I was bullied. Taunted. Tormented. I wanted a nose job. I wanted different hair. I wanted a different build. But as I got into my late 20s, I started to get a lot more attention, and I realized that a lot of people found me attractive. For reference, I look a lot more like Yehuda Amar (an Israeli chef) than Michael Aloni (Akiva on Schtisel).
It's true that being conventionally attractive made my life 1000x easier - it's almost like the trees lowered their branches to make the fruit easier to pick. I'm pretty sure it made it easier to get a mortgage and a job and definitely a partner. But I still think about what my life would be like if I had a different nose, different hair, different build.
Even in my late 40s, I still get a lot of attention from much younger women. A few weeks ago, a woman, maybe 25, openly flirted with me while she made my cappuccino. This has happened many times before, but I never make a move.
All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw me naked. Or how fast she would disappear if she saw my crooked upper teeth. Or all my gray chest hair. Or my hairy back. Even if I played ball and gave her my number, even if she thinks I'm handsome, older-and-wiser, I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her.
Maybe it won't come as consolation but a lot of very beautiful people suffer from the same. Like how people who are already skinny can very well be hit by anorexia.
Used to being beautiful all their lives, one day there's a chink in the armor: a wrinkle, a white hair, a stretchmark, that same feeling you have starts to sink in. The emotional impact might be worse than for people who had a lifetime to be at peace with how they look like.
This seems to be the author of the article [0]. Your first reaction is probably that the real picture doesn't match at all the picture you built in your mind while reading the article. I hope that helps you realize you are not alone in feeling that everyone else must be thinking of you what you think of yourself. They're probably not.
Definitely recommend any “nude” cultural stuff you may find. It empowers you with self acceptance and body(ies) awareness.
Germans calls it FKK [0] and it’s a think our civilization would highly benefit to incorporate. Also if anyone visit Belgium/ Netherlands, highly recommend an afternoon in a nude sauna garden. (For those wondering, no sex involved neither allowed). Naturist beaches in other places are great too but a bit harder to get when you’re a “beginner” : they tends to be public space that are also frequented by clothed-people and you may find yourself weird to undress among them, the first times at least.
We have a similar path from how we were growing up vs getting better as we got older. One benefit I saw from being an overweight, out of shape, nerdy kid growing up is that I learned not to worry about what other people think or say.
"Let it pass like water off a duck's back." became a little bit of a mantra until I truly wasn't worried about it, even as I age.
Accepting that, if people wanted to be with me they would. If they didn't, I didn't want to waste my time with them. Trying to get somebody who didn't like me to like me, ceased being anything I was concerned about. Prior to hitting this point, I'd had multi-year crushes in high school on a couple of girls who were nice and friendly but just weren't interested in me.
After having this realization, it made it a lot easier to date because you can ask people out without fear of rejection. If somebody said no, great! That saved a lot of time. Don't take it personally.
The other thing that young men definitely have to learn is the gossip pipeline. Don't participate in it, but realize it is out there. Word got around in college that I "wasn't looking for a serious relationship" and it made it a lot easier for me to date. Turned out that a lot of young women worry about overly clingy men if they go out one time and then decide not to pursue it further. There's a lot of pressure on women there. People even tried to set me up on blind dates.
Eventually, I met my wife of 20 years so far.
The act of simply going on a lot of first dates is fairly validating in and of itself. Learning all of this stuff added to my own confidence too. But the absolute first step is simply self acceptance. Control what you can control, don't worry about what you can't.
And to be clear, control what you can control means that you can control improving yourself (diet, exercise, grooming, mindset, humility, faith, education, courtesy, reliability, family relationships, etc). A lot of self acceptance advice suggests that you shouldn't be trying to get better. I'm not suggesting that at all. We can all improve and we can all be better for the people we care about. That's a big piece of showing we care.
From my experience I found most ‘perfect’ looking people when getting to know them better a bit boring, bland. Perhaps it’s this lack of struggle or soul searching that made then slow down their growth in other dimensions. Many of these folks suffer most when getting older and their looks fade.
I prefer the company of "ordinary" people. I have always avoided beautiful women, even if they fancied me; I wouldn't want to become jealous. Also, I've found some (not all) of the beautiful women I've known to be be rather shallow, as if "beauty is enough".
To be clear, the women I've loved weren't really ordinary; they were intelligent, eloquent, kind, and beautiful in their own way.
Being good looking takes a lot of work and time. Time that cannot be spent doing other things.
Grooming, keeping up on trends, working out, shopping, etc. It's takes hours weekly at a minimum.
So it's easy to let it take over your personality if it becomes a defining characteristic. Especially for women because often that is the societal expectation. If you're pretty that's enough.
Are you sure you're saying GP should "work on that" out of a genuine desire for them to improve, rather than a way to puritanically assert a perceived lack of virtue that you think they should mediate?
Because if not, maybe there's something /you/ "really really should work on."
"All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw [real me] ... I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her"
That's not healthy, it's almost uncertainly untrue (we all have bodies!), and it's something therapy could help with.
We all struggle more or less with imaginary problems which talked about could go away. I see this a lot on HN and it’s what makes this space more human.
Did you read the article? This is an HN discussion of feminine standards of beauty. The whole discussion is going to run straight into the rocks of people's personal situations and I have no idea how one could expect otherwise.
One of my former coworkers is objectively very, very handsome. He looks like a blond 6’4” model. On top of that he’s young, very smart and a genuinely nice guy too.
Whenever we went for lunch together, it was like I entered another world and it was fascinating to me. Girls would walk up to him and say “hi”, stand around and make awkward conversation and then leave. This happened ALL THE TIME. I can say that this has never happened to me not even once in my life. I’m the type of guy where a girl will ask me where I work, and I’ve been working with her for a year. It doesn’t bother me one bit but I’m also in my 50s.
I’m not particularly handsome so sitting with him felt like I was gaining a secret pass to the lifestyles of the beautiful. When we were in line, I would look around and see girls just staring at him without him noticing.
The complete contrast between his life and mine in terms of how women treat him was really fascinating to me, especially since he’s a good guy and a rising star because he’s smart and hard working.
Rumi talks a lot about the pain of unattainable beauty, in both men (as desire) and women (as envy or desire to be desired). That brand of Sufism really breaks down, both philosophically and psychologically, the "meaning" of painful beauty. For Rumi, the beauty that drives people insane is an infinitesimal ray of God's beatific manifestation. Witnessing unattainable beauty is supposed be painful, and the pain is there for a reason, to draw one to what is Higher, and eventually drawing one to the Source of beauty to find that within oneself.
> Since tresses and cheeks show a sign of that drop, kings keep licking the ground.
> Delicate earth has received a drop of Beauty, so you kiss it night and day with a hundred hearts.
> Though mixed with earth, a single drop can drive you mad—what then will that wine do to you when pure?
(Rumi M V 372-375)
Note "earth" here is a reference to human beings, as Muslims believe humans were created from earthly clay.
This reminds me of a very cynical old quip about the difference between patriarchy and feminism:
Patriarchy is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for men"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is possible in patriarchy, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from above.
Feminism is a brutal social hierarchy that occasionally talks about being "for women"...but is really for the 1% at the top. And especially for the .01% at the very top. Revolution is impossible in feminism, because the brutal hierarchy is imposed from below.
Very true.
It seems men just don't care as much about social norms, which I just chalked up to autism when I was younger. Now I realize after getting married to a wonderful husband, and having kids, that's it's a survival mechanism. They don't get nearly as much societal help as women, and so social norms are far less relevant to them.
Women care a great deal about social norms/"brutal" hierarchy, but we can also get a lot more from it. So it tends to be enabled at every rung of the hierarchy.
When I was a young girl, the worse bullying came from "average" looking girls rather then the very beautiful ones.
Can you explain the second half of that quote any further? It's not obvious to me how feminism fits that description in the way that patriarchy does. The intended irony of the statement is clear, but I fail to recognize how the second half of the statement bears any resemblance to feminism in theory or practice.
The hierarchy of physical looks seems inexorably tied to the human social order. It seems that there is a separate world that opens up when you meet a certain threshold of physical attractiveness.
I get the impression that complaining about ones physical appearance is more accepted in women than men. I can imagine a man writing the OP piece would be labeled a few topical terms for his entitlement and toxic envy.
It's become impossible for me to ignore how often social hierarchies order themselves to a significant degree on the basis of physical appearance. I would implore anyone to consider physical fitness, fashion, skin, hair care and even cosmetic surgery if they inexplicably fail in social or romantic endeavors while bearing no other obvious faults. It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance.
>It is rarely spoken how much our sense of self and what we allow ourselves to achieve is a reflection of everyone's biases towards our appearance.
When stuff like this comes up I always have to think of two people, Machiavelli and our last chancellor, Angela Merkel. She was by no means attractive, a woman, an East-German physicist and yet managed to become arguably our most significant post-war leader and governed over 16 years.
Machiavelli tells us why. In social hierarchies it's not looks, wealth or even intellect that matter, it's Virtù, that is martial spirit, or ambition. All other traits are just up to luck. People who accept the notion that their role in hierarchies comes down to how they look or how others perceive them have already given in to passivity. People who climb hierarchies literally do ignore why they're not supposed to be there.
Separate world: definitely. I remember a random real estate agent inviting my friend to a party and saying "bring your good looking friends" while giving me the stink eye from a distance. I have an older neighbor who is tall and handsome, and his wife was saying how, when they were younger, women would walk past him then turn around and make some excuse to talk to him.
I can't believe how much I deluded myself when I was younger about the nature of social hierarchies. There was some research (can't find it now) about childhood aggression showing how, if a kid is better looking, then aggression actually improves their social standing, while if the kid was not good looking, the opposite happens.
Forgive your younger self, we all had our own coping strategies.
My coping mechanism was that, if I only I lived in South Korea I'd fit in and be popular and happy. I learned as adult the social hierarchy is just as cruel there as it is in America.
Whatever you do, just make sure you don't allow your kids to repeat the same mistakes.
As I have grown older(early 40s), I too have observed this effect. Not that it is absolute, but there is certainly a correlation between looks/attractiveness and whatever they want, money, attention, partners and so on.
The most depressing part was when I in my early 20s realized there are people in this world and seeming quite many of them who have it 'easy'. They live their life's without struggling with the small stuff, everything just comes. The big stuff takes time of course. Not that they don't have their own subjective experience of struggle, its just on another level both personal and materialistic.
As you say physical fitness it maybe the only thing one can do in order improve ones standing unless one has some innate talent which can be exploited.
One thing is dating. The other is that people treat others differently depending on their attractiveness in any other aspect of life. Not only how kids relate to each other in school but even how parents (often subconsciously) favor the more attractive kids.
My reading of Neapolitan quartet is completely different. It is not Lila’s external looks that make her irresistible, but it’s her spirit - a force of nature that she has. I think the Lenu considers herself better looking than Lila, so it was not so much about a beautiful face and body. Remember it’s “My Brilliant Friend” not “My Beautiful Friend”.
Would highly recommend the books to anyone who is still wondering - the torrent of raw humanness coming out from those books is, for a better word, brilliant.
The elegance of this authors words makes me fathom how she could possible feel so inadequate. The entry certainly explains it, so I make no attempt to reduce or abstract. But as another commenter has mentioned, there is beauty found in more than just appearances.
I'm afraid I didn't find the writing "elegant"; I found it overly flowery. But then she let on that she's a poet. I don't enjoy poetry much, but some people do, so I decided to let it pass. Until I saw your comment...
What an unfortunate article. Not because the content reveals anything wrong or abnormal about the writer; rather because it is so commonplace and so very normal.
But embedded inside of its message is a deep, I think, and fundamental misunderstanding of beauty, as immutable, objective, so easy, obvious and self-evident to rank into an unambiguous ordering of things. But this kind of lowest common denominator simplification makes it possible for a society to create rules and structure, so it becomes a cultural default.
But I think that aesthetic beauty is multi-dimensional and temporal. A fine wine or a brandy; a sublime cheese and not a fresh glass of milk. There is a very specific kind of electric, youthful beauty which is ephemeral and fleeting. But there are other kinds of beauty which can be subdued and hard to miss, which can appreciate over time. I don't even mean that in a subjective "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but rather, that beauty objectively can come in more than one form.
Is a bombastic Wagner opera more or less beautiful than a simple, haunting, short song by The Cranberries? The question doesn't even make sense, they're apples and oranges. But if you ask me, I prefer the song by The Cranberries and for the kind of beauty it holds deep inside of itself, the Wagnerian opera would never come close.
I wish society would accept and circulate this truth rather than the other simpler, convenient, and yet so very wrong lie reflected by this article. I may not be a woman, but I've felt so many similar kinds of body dysmorphia of this sort living in NYC surrounded by conventionally attractive male models for so long until I stopped trying to be a conventional kind of attractive that would never sit right on my skin and instead embraced the one that felt like home to me.
I sometimes regret that I didn't realize this sooner. But on the other hand, I'm glad that the experience taught me a lesson and imbued me with a confidence that now cannot be taken away from me by anyone or anything.
> Is a bombastic Wagner opera more or less beautiful than a simple, haunting, short song by The Cranberries?
It's amusing that you try to make this point by comparing extremely talented musicans. For every cranberries there are millions of rightfully forgotten medicore bands just as for every beauty there are many, many more medicore or unattractive people.
But that is my point. They are both extremely talented but they are different directions of beauty and different directions of talented. If you limited your ideal of what was beautiful to being a Wagnerian opera, you'd miss out everything else, including other extremely talented musicians who are talented in a different way.
I don't make the point that there are /not/ millions of rightfully forgotten mediocre bands any more than I make the point that ugliness does not exist; ugliness certainly does exist and it certainly is common.
>But I think that aesthetic beauty is multi-dimensional and temporal. A fine wine or a brandy; a sublime cheese and not a fresh glass of milk. There is a very specific kind of electric, youthful beauty which is ephemeral and fleeting. But there are other kinds of beauty which can be subdued and hard to miss, which can appreciate over time. I don't even mean that in a subjective "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but rather, that beauty objectively can come in more than one form.
I think the opposite. I think the higher level ideal is the illusion. What our base instincts tell us is beauty is the actuality and it's embedded in our biology.
For much of humanity woman have always been valued for their youthful beauty. Pregnancy is costly health-wise and men value youth and beauty because natural beauty conveys better physical genes and youthfulness conveys higher success to conceive a child.
Women are objectified for their beauty by men beauty for real biological reasons. And as a result women who obsess over their own physical beauty also end up being more successful in the mating game. Most of this behavior is the result of evolutionary psychology. This definition of beauty is cold, but it is reality and it is delusional to call it a "misunderstanding" of beauty.
The author writes this article and is drawing upon millions of years of evolutionary instinct and behavior.
>I wish society would accept and circulate this truth rather than the other simpler, convenient, and yet so very wrong lie reflected by this article.
Society doesn't need to circulate anything. Any person with a brain recognizes physical beauty and they know the meaning of the quote "Don't judge a book by it's cover". What's going on is just people are continuously lying to themselves when convenient.
You're saying it here as if someone let's me know of the "truth" and suddenly my instinctual definition of beauty will completely do a 180 and change? No. Unfortunately the cold hard truth is this: You have minimal choice in what you find beautiful. Culture and biological instincts shape your preferences far more than individual choice and you have little control over it.
It's like choosing to find the female form beautiful or the male form beautiful. If I had that choice I can be gay at will. It's convenient to define beauty on your terms when you encounter a woman lamenting the fact she's not beautiful, but your definition of beauty completely flips when talking about sending homosexual people to training camps to train them to be straight... yeah as if they or anyone has a choice. Like I said, your definition is a lie we tell ourselves unconsciously when the situation is convenient.
Sorry to be a downer. But hacker news is a level up above other sites. I think we can handle the truth. In fact I think we prefer it. I prefer to talk about the actual science behind why she feels the way she does and how evolution and biology has shaped this behavior.
Keep in mind it's not one sided. Women objectify men as objects of success and this no doubt shapes mens behavior as much as mens preferences shape women. I have more interest in the interplay of behaviors between men and women then I do idealistic re-definitions of beauty.
Beauty IS in the eye of the beholder, but that eye is built by DNA by which ALL humans share 99.9%.
I appreciate your simplistic argument and find it almost noble in its naiveté. Somewhat ironically, I don't think you take your biological essentialism far enough.
Why do feminine beauty ideals contrast across not just cultures but socioeconomic class? Thinking just about feminine beauty, can you create a uniform rule about why certain strata and societies have historically prefer a more androgynous look and others prefer the more "bombshell" look? Why does what vary over time and wax and wane as certain looks go in and out of fashion?
Could you create such a rule which is consistent over time? Do you think those rules would have been consistent by era, or would they have varied in times of famine versus times of surplus, and could you create anything consistent across civilization? How about by geographic areas which shaped the city states which served as centers of power in those civilizations, IE how feminine beauty may exist on the steppe vs on the coast, or in the mountains?
Why don't we take it one step further and ask about such a rule in primate sociology that varies in, say, one great ape spicies versus another? How about archaic hominid differentiation between H. Neanderthalensis vs H. Florensiensis vs H. Naledi vs H. Sapiens?
> Unfortunately the cold hard truth is
Speaking about cold hard truth is challenging when working from a basis of archaeogenetic ignorance. You risk overestimating how universal your priors are.
In 10 years' time we'll be laughing at today's trend of Kardashian-style duck lips, Brazilian butts and fake eyelashes, but the funniest will be the plain people who desperately tried to become attractive through aping the style, not the objectively beautiful people like Kim herself who could actually pull it off.
Nefertiti is one example of beauty that was shaped by evolutionary pressures for a very specific region and civilization. Consider Börte and other steppe women for contrasting examples. You are oversimplifying a vast swath of human history to make a point that does not stand up.
Beauty isn't only shaped by evolution. It is shaped by culture as well. Evolution has given leeway to the human interpretation of attraction through imprinting. This leaves a lot of variety among cultures on "what is beautiful". As stated before, outside of this variety, there are several characteristics and attributes of beauty that are universal and do not vary drastically across cultures. It is a combination of these two things that defines what is beautiful for a person.
One thing that you're wrong about is that it's a choice or a truth. A human cannot reinterpret or redefine what he or she thinks to be beautiful. Much of this definition is created by genetics and cultural imprinting.
>Why do feminine beauty ideals contrast across not just cultures but socioeconomic class? Thinking just about feminine beauty, can you create a uniform rule about why certain strata and societies have historically prefer a more androgynous look and others prefer the more "bombshell" look? Why does what vary over time and wax and wane as certain looks go in and out of fashion?
Socioeconomic class is basically another culture in terms of influence. These two terms can be used interchangeably as they both have the same effect on the perception of beauty. Your question is something I can answer. It differs across cultures because the minds interpretation of beauty involves external experiences. That is why.
As for your comment about universal rules. Well that's also easy. Universal rules involve symmetry and youth. Possibly more, but those are some of the biggest rules of beauty extend past "culture" so we know it's part of biology.
>Could you create such a rule which is consistent over time?
The answer is no. None of these rules are created by anyone or anything.
>Do you think those rules would have been consistent by era, or would they have varied in times of famine versus times of surplus, and could you create anything consistent across civilization? How about by geographic areas which shaped the city states which served as centers of power in those civilizations, IE how feminine beauty may exist on the steppe vs on the coast, or in the mountains?
These rules vary by culture, culture varies by environmental circumstance and genetics. You're getting into a redundancy here. I think you misinterpreted my post. I DID not say that culture does not influence beauty. Quite the opposite. I said Culture DOES influence someones perception of beauty. Read my post, it is there. However and this is a big "However" you do not have a choice in the matter. You do not choose your culture and you do not choose the ideals that are imprinted onto your brain by that culture. Once imprinted on your brain you cannot change it. If the culture values skinny bombshell models then that ideal will be seared into your brain. There are variations and anomalies but overall it is generally consistent.
It's the same way that a baby bird imprints on the first thing it sees as it's mother. It does not have a choice. Your brain is evolved to assimilate itself into it's environment and culture without conscious choice from you.
That being said outside of this as I previously mentioned there are beauty standards that are universal that are not created by culture, two examples already mentioned are symmetry and youth (for women). We know this because surveys show that these ideals do not shift when observing different cultures. Additionally, quite obviously: men are generally attracted to women and women are generally attracted to men, there is some genetic influence making this opposite sex attraction preference generally consistent across all cultures.
Do not discount these universal rules. They are powerful biological instincts and overall... When in conflict they usually override cultural imprints of beauty.
>Speaking about cold hard truth is challenging when working from a basis of archaeogenetic ignorance. You risk overestimating how universal your priors are.
Except this statement doesn't make sense. If everything I say is logically correct and everything you say has issues with correctness, then who's the ignorant one?
Skinny and bombshell are different. Even a bombshell model that is skinny is curvy and not the kind of neotenous androgynous ideal I referred to. You missed the point and clearly don't understand the significance of the difference.
> If everything I say is logically correct and everything you say has issues with correctness, then who's the ignorant one?
It doesn't matter if what you say appears to be logically correct to you because it's overfitted to a small subset of history that makes sense to you and actually falls apart under a larger evolutionary timeline. Thank you for proving my point.
You don't actually grapple with divergent local evolutionary pressures creating different, competing and often conflicting ideals of feminine beauty each of which make sense for a given evolutionary context, because it's easier to be intellectually lazy than to actually build a model that accounts for that evidence.
Who's the ignorant one? The one who continues to ignore full evolutionary context, so still you.
>Skinny and bombshell are different. Even a bombshell model that is skinny is curvy and not the kind of neotenous androgynous ideal I referred to. You missed the point and clearly don't understand the significance of the difference.
Doesn't even matter, that's not the point. There are cultures in Africa that value obesity as beauty and those definitions are valid. https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937... You think I'm fixated on a western style definition of beauty. I am not fixated on it. I am simply saying that the western definition of beauty is a VALID definition. It is not a "misunderstanding", your initial post claimed it is a "misunderstanding."
You're emphasizing too much on specific examples with your preconceived notions.
>You don't actually grapple with divergent local evolutionary pressures creating different, competing and often conflicting ideals of feminine beauty each of which make sense for a given evolutionary context, because it's easier to be intellectually lazy than to actually build a model that accounts for that evidence.
Except I never said anything on the contrary. When did I say that there aren't competing ideals of beauty? I'm glad there's a word for intellectual laziness because I clearly don't fit it.
Is there a word for making stuff up? Imagining that someone meant something when that person never said anything to that effect? What's the word for that? Delusional? No you are not delusional, but you need to understand that I never said anything to contradict your statement here.
>Who's the ignorant one? The one who continues to ignore full evolutionary context, so still you.
Except you haven't given any arguments to contradict my stance. Your arguments here are in full agreement with my point. I really don't understand what you're getting at here.
There is a larger gap in more gender-equal societies. Perhaps it is because absent socioeconomic survival (which the West has largely solved), mate competition is solely in how gender-conformant one is. The more feminine woman, the most masculine man, etc. A refinement of the normal competition but now with survival necessities removed.
Anyway, I am somewhat hopeful that I can do something for any future daughter of mine, but it does strike me as pointless in some way. Immersed in this society she cannot be otherwise. Still, it's obviously worth a shot at identifying some method of innoculation.
That was beautiful. Thank you for posting that link. I will synthesize all of it into something cohesive as I sleep, but all I know is it was powerful.
Tangential but the first popup was with left close button (macos style) and the second popup was with right close button (windows style). I haven't seen this kind of inconsistency before.
In today’s world, the scrutiny of men’s appearance will never even come close to the microscope that women live under. Truly. An ugly man can make it way further in life than an ugly woman.
And worse, women are brought up to really care what others think of them, and to make everyone else comfortable at their own expense. So you can’t just “stop caring what people say”. That would really screw you over in this world.
I imagine that beauty is for women what money is for men. It’s our currency and often what makes us valuable to the group of the shallow “others” in this society.