Delicious LiveJournal Links for 6-22-2010

[andrewducker]

• Playing The Ugly Card
  (tags: feminism women)
• Gay Walmart Employee Forced To Wear Identifying Clothes
  Huzzah for Utah!
  (tags: gay usa EpicFail)
• The Toshiba AC100 Android laptop. If they can iron out the niggles then I want one...
  (tags: android laptop technology)

Comments

[nameandnature]

There may be no objective (in the sense of would convince a ghost of perfect emptiness) beauty. Nevertheless there are facts about what sort of thing most people within a culture like, plus maybe some things that most humans like. Similarly, there are facts about what people don't like (and in fact, I'd say there are more likely to be cross-cultural facts about that).

These facts do serve the same sort of role as an objective standard in a lot of the cases of interest. I don't see why everyone is getting so excited about that fact.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Because the fact that these subjective factors serve as an objective standard - for whatever reason that is - is one that makes an awful lot of people desperately unhappy. Deeply, suicidally unhappy in some cases. It means that an awful lot of people don't get what they want in life. They don't get the jobs they deserve. They don't get the friends they could have in school. They don't get the lovers they might have, had they had confidence in their own appearance, their own beauty. Society tells them they're ugly, and they believe it.

Can you tell me what purpose that serves?

[nameandnature]

I didn't say it served a purpose, I said there were such facts about our preferences.

In some cases, they are probably facts because they do serve some sort of purpose (maybe an evolutionary one, for example), but not necessarily a moral purpose.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't seek to change these facts (after all, I agree are contingent) or to put them in a proper context (that is, to say that someone's worth is not defined by their beauty) where they cause harm to people, but neither do I see the value in denying that they currently exist.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Who's denying that they exist?

[nameandnature]

I don't think people on this thread have overtly denied it, I think there's a tacit denial implicit in the claim that everyone likes something different: of course they do, but our likes and dislikes cluster around some common standards. I think those standards are what momentsmusicaux is talking about.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

And I'm saying that those standards are not objective, and calling into question what purpose there could possibly be in framing them as being so.

We could absolutely decide to have a semantic argument about whether beauty is (a) in the eye of the beholder or (b) the number of dots above the line you draw in an arbitrary place on the chart of 'common standards', but I don't think that serves much of a purpose either.

Let me rephrase my previous question: What harm does it do to tell people that they should love their faces and bodies and find beauty in them? What harm can it possibly do to tell people that they are beautiful?

[nameandnature]

I agree that those standards aren't objective (but that's not news: I'm not convinced there are objective standards in many fields), although they're pretty pervasive. In common with morality, I think it makes sense for momentsmusicaux to use ordinary language about those standards.

I don't think it does any harm to tell people that they should love their own faces and bodies.

If people were kept in blissful isolation before releasing them into the cruel world, I think it might do some harm to give them unrealistic expectations about how other the world would rate them aesthetically. But in fact that hardly ever happens: most people are only too aware of where they stand: it cannot do them harm to tell them they are beautiful by the standards of their society, but it probably doesn't do much good either.

OTOH there's telling someone they're beautiful as an expression of your personal preference or affection for them, which I think does do them some good (assuming they care about what you think).

[andrewducker]

The whole point is that cultural judgements of beauty are affected by the common cultural notions. If we tell people enough times that being "Ginger" makes you ugly, and nobody want you, then it becomes true, despite the French (for instance) thinking that redheads are gorgeous.

Telling people they _are_ ugly, rather than that _less people fancy your type on average_ gives them something much harder to deal with (as well as being untrue).