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

[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).