I didn’t feel good about that other thread. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but I think that we still live in a profoundly misogynistic and objectifying society, in a way that usually harms women and trans people (but also can harm cis men), and thus if we want to discuss things like sexual attraction with groups of relative strangers (which I don’t have a fundamental problem with), we should be incredibly careful not to contribute to and exacerbate this broader misogyny and objectification in society.
That other thread didn’t really strike me as terribly careful. Not a huge deal, but enough to make me not feel great about it. I’m not exactly sure how such a thread could be more careful, but I think mentioning these societal characteristics, and how negative they are, might be a first step. Further, perhaps it could bring in a discussion about how much our own perceptions and attractions are affected by bigotries and other negative characteristics of broader society and culture.
I don’t think we live in a misogynistic society at all. I think that the USA, along with other modern western countries like Canada and western Europe, are the least misogynistic there has ever been. If anyone can name a place where women have more rights, I’d like to hear it.
There are other places on earth, generally non-western, where women are legally banned from showing body parts like the chin or elbow in public, and where little or no photography dealing with women’s bodies can be published. Those are the profoundly misogynistic societies.
Over here in our modern western societies, women can wear what they want, and magazines can endlessly obsess over women’s bodies and fashions and makeup. And they do. Elle and Glamour and all that crap is mostly produced by women for women. Some women (and some men) may dislike such stuff on the grounds that it’s objectifying, and also dislike TV shows and movies and websites online message board polls focused on women’s bodies and fashion and makeup. I say it’s not the most uplifting stuff in the world but dealing with it is the price of living in a free country.
So, I pretty much said what I had to say in the other thread. But what they hey, I’ll say it again here. The premise seemed to be “only 4% of women think they are beautiful. That’s not enough, I bet more are really beautiful and that will make women feel better about themselves”. Or something like that.
But “only 4% of women think they are beautiful” isn’t a problem that needs to be solved. The problem that needs to be solved is that women feel they need to be beautiful to be valued. Saying, “hey, it’s not 4% it’s really 15%” does absolutely nothing to help that. Odds are, you aren’t in the 15% after all. And you may know perfectly well that you aren’t physically beautiful.
So the whole thread seemed broken from the start. And then a bunch of guys coming in and really objectifying women (which the OP didn’t do, but a lot of the responses did) just made it worse.
I agree with you whole heartedly.
Once I know a woman, to some extent, I find it impossible, to separate her physical beauty from her inner ( if you will) beauty.
A plain woman can become infinitely more attractive, and also the opposite.
However you can’t see that across a room looking at some unknown women.
I don’t think it’s relevant to my point that there may be other societies better or worse on women’s rights and misogyny in the culture. Maybe ours is the best in human history – if so, it’s still shitty in terms of how women are treated, and still riddled with misogyny and objectification.
Are we going to rehash what evolution really is, all over again? Buddy, there is no top, no mountain. So think of some other way to justify whatever you feel like doing.
I didn’t participate in the other thread, because “what percent of women are beautiful” as addressed to men seems to be a really non-responsive … uh … response, to the question of “what percentage of women think that they themselves are beautiful.”
Obviously, if you want to figure out if women are judging themselves extra harshly, the correct poll to take is “Women - what percentage of **other women **do you think are beautiful?”. It still wouldn’t mean anything, since dopers are a different demographic to “women in the street polled by Dove”, but it would really put the original poll into a different light if we find out that women in general reserve the word “beautiful” to a single-digit percentage of people.
Even better if you put up a gallery of random pictures, including the correct proportions of 40-year-olds and 70-year-olds and ask everyone “how many women in this gallery are beautiful?” I rather suspect everyone’s beauty-percentages would go way down with that experimental design
Hmm, the original poll was about thoughts, not reality - if women have some sort of memory bias that makes them think that a lot more people are beautiful than actually are then that bias would have impacted the original “Am I beautiful” poll, and I’m not sure we should try to eliminate such biases from the matching “How common are beautiful women anyway?” poll.
It would be interesting to design a proper experiment to measure womens’ self-evaluations over their other-evaluations (something the Dove poll clearly wasn’t particularly trying - they were interested in a marketing hook). Probably the best one would be to take photos of all the people who answer your survey, and then get the survey-answerers to pick what proportion of those photos they considered “beautiful”. But even that would be subject to bias (ie, who’s willing to get photographed and have strangers rate their looks)
Actually to some degree you can. Body language speaks loudly. How people hold themselves and move and look at people informs about how comfortable they are with themselves and with their bodies. Among other things.
Body positivity is not delusional thinking; it is part of finding those for whom you are that exceptional person who possesses that exceptional trait of beauty … in their eyes at least. Easier to happen when it is true in their own eyes to begin with.
It is not thinking that they could be Victoria Secret models. It is rejecting that standard as the standard of beauty or even as something that represents any sort of healthy reality.
Fat women (and there’s no need for quotation marks, it’s an actual word with a clear meaning) are objectively considered unattractive currently in western societies. Ignoring that by talking about the beholder and his eye is being in denial, which is never very constructive. And if what is considered attractive changes widely from one culture to another, or with time, I’m unaware of any culture that doesn’t have arbitrary standards of beauty. If fat women were to be again considered attractive, it would in all likelihood just shift the lines, and then you’d have a “thin shaming” problem instead of a “fat shaming” problem, and nothing would have changed.
If your hope is that someday nobody will care about physical appearance, then I suspect it’s not ever going to happen. And anyway, as I wrote before, I don’t see that as desirable. Regardless of what your criteria are to determine attractiveness, there will still be people not meeting them and considered undesirable and unattractive. Feeling shitty because you aren’t smart enough to be desirable isn’t going to be any more pleasant than feeling shitty because you aren’t beautiful enough to be desirable. Probably less so, in fact. At least with beauty you can do something about it, and time will be a great equalizer. No such luck with smarts.
The problem people have with fatness is that it is something that can be changed, contrarily to most other standards of attractiveness. If people don’t find you attractive because you’re fat, you could lose weight and your problem would be solved. So complaining about it looks to most people like complaining about having difficulties finding a mate because you’re lazy and can’t keep a job. If you’re unhappy, stop being lazy, lose weight and find a job instead of saying that your unhappiness is all society’s fault and trying to make others value you despite being overweight and/or lazy, so that you won’t have to make any effort yourself. That said, I’m not convinced that people can actually reliably lose weight, but then again I’m not convinced that people can stop being lazy, either, and nobody feels bad for lazy people.
I don’t think you understand what the word “objectively” means.
And personally I am not so sure there is a clear meaning what “fat” means.
Venus Williams has been labeled “fat”. Is her body shape part of that clear meaning? In point of fact many celebrity women are or have been labeled as fat who I personally (and many others as well) think of as very attractive. Elizabeth Hurley once famously stated “I’d kill myself if I was as fat as Marilyn Monroe.”
One very interesting aside is that the '90s in particular saw the rise of media standards of waif thin as “beauty” - think Kate Moss - and simultaneously an increase in both obesity, (including morbid obesity) and in serious eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa.
I tend to think of gender analysis as what I do, to the point of being ponderously exhausting to people, and so in one sense of the word that’s the context in which I say things, the ongoing context in which I’ve already pontificated about patriarchal polarized roles and how behaviors are interpreted differently based on the gender of the person doing the behaving and, in particular, the specifics of what is eroticized as masculine and feminine, of sex in a patriarchal society as something that women are and men consume (etc etc, yadda yadda…)
It may be unfair for me to think that anything I say should be perceived against the backdrop of that context, though. It’s not the only context. There’s the context of the Straight Dope Message Board, and there’s the larger context of society in general (both of which include, to varying extents, all of those patriarchally polarized patterns that I blather on about). (NOT, incidentally, that it is necessarily true that because I talk about such things a lot I am somehow immune or off the hook for behaving in ways that perpetuate these problems).
I agree that it makes a difference when doing something like discussing the sexual attractiveness of women in general as to whether that discussion is taking place alongside of a discussion of sexual objectification and the male appetite as consumer and the historical fact of patriarchy and how patriarchy has most centrally sought to control women’s sexuality and reproduction (and by controlling women, to control sexuality and reproduction in general, and for the older to control the younger and manipulate what is erotic to them for the benefit of older patriarchs doing the controlling). I mean, yeah, that makes it a different discussion than an isolated “what percent of women do you think are hot 'n sexy, huh?” sort of discussion.
The Dope in general doesn’t have as much discussion as I would like of feminism and patriarchy and how it works and what sexual fairness would actually consist of and so on, but it is an educated and intellectual community and more of that is part of our shared headspace than the surrounding culture at large, or so I think at any rate.
All of this is a messy and roundabout way of saying that it’s not necessarily obvious when there has been an attached discussion of these social-analytical points, these matters of women’s ongoing sexual objectification and how we all (male and female) experience that social dynamic and what’s wrong with it and how it oughta be instead, etc.
I thought he was saying that it is unreasonable for a “fat” woman to consider herself a good candidate to be a Victoria’s Secret model. But I probably got it mixed-up somehow.