Not everyone is beautiful

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

I need to gather my thoughts on this, but in the meantime I want to leave this Katie Makkai performance called "Pretty" here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I need to gather my thoughts on this, but in the meantime I want to leave this Katie Makkai performance called "Pretty" here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

That was AWESOME, and it ties into what I was trying to say very well, I think.

A person's value is not, or should not be, defined by her breedability. Not everyone is beautiful.

And that is OK.

[Epimetheus]

I had to read the OP multiple times, spaced apart, to figure out whether I agreed and was fussing over details/misunderstanding the point, or disagreed. I think it's the former. Strongly agree with the point about attaching human value to looks. It's roughly analogous to considering a book to be great because its cover art is purty.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I had to read the OP multiple times, spaced apart, to figure out whether I agreed and was fussing over details/misunderstanding the point, or disagreed. I think it's the former. Strongly agree with the point about attaching human value to looks. It's roughly analogous to considering a book to be great because its cover art is purty.

Thanks Epi.

To take it a step further, the part of me that recoils at "you're beautiful on the inside" is the same part of me that recoils at "you can still get married". It places all the value on the wrong part of the person. "You're still worth something because you're not totally worthless as a sex object or broodmare".

[Epimetheus]

Yeah, the speaker discredits his/her own set of values by saying it.

Like if hairy feet were cultural treasures
And a man with hairless feet was very smart
"Well, he has hairy feet in his brain."

[Able Kane]

I'm talking about the current Western standard of physical beauty.

Unfortunately that implies there's but a single standard.

author=Man Green]A person's value is not, or should not be, defined by her breedability.

This is true. However there are different sorts of value like there are of beauty, and one sort of value is breeding value, which is most certainly (and redundantly) defined by their breedability (which again is subjective depending on both what makes a given partner genetically ideal for the individual, and what makes a given partner aesthetically ideal).

I agree with your overall point and I think that most people would. It's no secret that one of the thousands upon thousands of symptoms of the disease known as "civilization" is that beauty, like every other thing people value has become mass-produced and mass-consumed.

That said there is merit to valuing beauty on an individual scale. It's really not so much that people consciously base their opinion of a person's overall regard solely on how good-lookin' they are, but it's of course simple animal instinct to pay more attention to the sexy ones.

[Epimetheus]

That said there is merit to valuing beauty on an individual scale. It's really not so much that people consciously base their opinion of a person's overall regard solely on how good-lookin' they are, but it's of course simple animal instinct to pay more attention to the sexy ones.

There's merit to it because it's simple animal instinct?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm talking about the current Western standard of physical beauty.

Unfortunately that implies there's but a single standard.

author=Man Green]A person's value is not, or should not be, defined by her breedability.

This is true. However there are different sorts of value like there are of beauty, and one sort of value is breeding value, which is most certainly (and redundantly) defined by their breedability (which again is subjective depending on both what makes a given partner genetically ideal for the individual, and what makes a given partner aesthetically ideal).

I agree with your overall point and I think that most people would. It's no secret that one of the thousands upon thousands of symptoms of the disease known as "civilization" is that beauty, like every other thing people value has become mass-produced and mass-consumed.

That said there is merit to valuing beauty on an individual scale. It's really not so much that people consciously base their opinion of a person's overall regard solely on how good-lookin' they are, but it's of course simple animal instinct to pay more attention to the sexy ones.

You get extra bonus points for being a complete useless wanker. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Let me try to simplify this for you: this is not about standards of physical beauty. This is not a debate about the Western standard of beauty or whether there's more than one. This is not about whether we have a biological drive to be sexually attracted to pretty people.

This is about the practice of using the concept of "beauty" as the ultimate value judgement. Rather than saying "it's OK to not be beautiful", we try to insist instead that people, women particularly, still have value because they have "beauty on the inside", or are "beautiful at any size", instead of validating the many other potential value sources they possess.

This merely reinforces the culturally ingrained ideal of beauty and reproductive viability as the source of a woman's value.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

What I don't get is the rash of "scientific" guys saying that what we consider attractive is tied to good genes, reproductive ability, etc. I mean, yeah, a healthy person is a lot more attractive than a diseased one, but there's guys calibrating fractions of centimeters and assigning more points to one celeb than another. Isn't it a matter of personal taste?

A lot of people tend to have types, and one person's type isn't the next persons. FFS. Why is this being presented as science?

There are generalities for which that is true; we are most likely to find healthy, reasonably (but not overly) symmetrical people at peak reproductive potential the most sexually attractive, both relatively and generally speaking. What actually gets billed by a given society at a given stage of time as "beauty", however, varies widely. (There are also some complex factors like relatedness that come into play, but those can be considered extraneous details for the purpose of this conversation.)

There are also other factors that may override that tendency in individuals, like our own age and sexual orientation.

As for "what's up with those guys", I don't know. Who are they? Can you cite a study? Are you talking "pop" science, or real scientists?

Pop science, it was a fad for awhile. I remember a whole pack of them blitzing the talk show circuit five or six years ago, don't recall names but google got me these:

http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Measuring-Facial-Perfection-The-Golden-Ratio

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/04/britains-most-beautiful-face-reveals-beauty-secrets/

This one is saner and allows for personality, effects of advertising, etc.
http://www.jyi.org/volumes/volume6/issue6/features/feng.html

I agree, health, youth, etc. are considered more attractive generally - but this? 

FIT OR FUGLY APP

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Let me try to simplify this for you: this is not about standards of physical beauty. This is not a debate about the Western standard of beauty or whether there's more than one. This is not about whether we have a biological drive to be sexually attracted to pretty people.

This is about the practice of using the concept of "beauty" as the ultimate value judgement. Rather than saying "it's OK to not be beautiful", we try to insist instead that people, women particularly, still have value because they have "beauty on the inside", or are "beautiful at any size", instead of validating the many other potential value sources they possess.

This merely reinforces the culturally ingrained ideal of beauty and reproductive viability as the source of a woman's value.

THIS.

[Juana]

to the OP. I've been thinking about this a lot since I read it and it lines up pretty well with some of my own thoughts of late.

Real body positivity ought to hang on people being comfortable in their own skin, not "everyone is beautiful", yes? Because, yeah, as the OP points out, "everyone is beautiful" reduces a person to their fuckability (and, oddly, this is linked sometimes to a person's ability to be loved, which makes me a little uncomfortable).
"Everyone is beautiful" is a nice sound bite (and just a sound bite), but I'm thinking it ought to be replaced with something that doesn't value beauty so much, nor does it reduce a person to whether or not they are fuckable.

I need to gather my thoughts on this, but in the meantime I want to leave this Katie Makkai performance called "Pretty" here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

I want to hug this woman.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This is about the practice of using the concept of "beauty" as the ultimate value judgement.

Oh, okay. 

I have no argument with that being wrong.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

It also cuts the other way, too. If a woman has virtues unrelated to her looks, but also has looks, she is often reduced to being a pretty face and her other qualities are demoted to second-class attributes or even ignored. For many women it's almost a requirement to be borderline ugly before they can be taken seriously -- of course, lacking beauty they have a lot more trouble being heard in the first place. This is a great disservice not only to women but to society in general, because it encourages beautiful women to aspire only to beauty, and stacks the deck against ugly women, both of which serve to reinforce the bullshit notion that pretty girls are weak and/or dumb, and strong/intelligent women are undesirable. This is obviously overgeneralizing it but the tendency is there, I think.

But I don't think it's so easy to divorce sex drive from value judgments based on beauty, especially considering how sex-obsessed (and repressed) our culture is.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It also cuts the other way, too. If a woman has virtues unrelated to her looks, but also has looks, she is often reduced to being a pretty face and her other qualities are demoted to second-class attributes or even ignored. For many women it's almost a requirement to be borderline ugly before they can be taken seriously -- of course, lacking beauty they have a lot more trouble being heard in the first place. This is a great disservice not only to women but to society in general, because it encourages beautiful women to aspire only to beauty, and stacks the deck against ugly women, both of which serve to reinforce the bullshit notion that pretty girls are weak and/or dumb, and strong/intelligent women are undesirable. This is obviously overgeneralizing it but the tendency is there, I think.

But I don't think it's so easy to divorce sex drive from value judgments based on beauty, especially considering how sex-obsessed (and repressed) our culture is.

HAR!  And when they want to show a woman scientist in a movie or a commercial, she always looks like a supermodel in a lab coat.

Contrast that with the female genius in The Andromeda Strain from way the hell back in the 70s.  She's 40-50-ish and kinda dumpy from spending all her time in the lab, and a permanent slump in her shoulders from leaning over stuff.  She's out of shape and epileptic.  She hemmed and hawed a lot, and had to explain herself several times to laymen in the movie.  She's just some scientist that understands viral epidemics.

Nowdays, she'd be shown as a early 30s half-Asian girl with a flat tummy, a tiny nose, CC tits, and perfect hair & makeup.  She'd open her mouth and speak like a tenured professor.