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By that logic, attractive women who go out in public wearing skimpy outfits are committing theft - but I would not want to make dressing sexily and then going o
by axguscbklp 5y ago
By that logic, attractive women who go out in public wearing skimpy outfits are committing theft - but I would not want to make dressing sexily and then going out in public illegal. I think there is something about the airplane banner at the beach and the slick hyper-calculated megacorp advertisement that pops up on the website you visit that is annoying for reasons other than theft - it is not so much the grabbing of one's attention that is annoying, but rather what grabs it and what the intentions behind it are and what context it happens in. Part of what makes many ads suck, I imagine, is that people deliberately design them to be unpleasant - which is why so many of them are garish. They stand out in part because they actually are meant to be annoying. In which case it is not so much the grabbing of attention that is the problem as what grabs it and what the intention is - in the case of the deliberately garish ad, your attention is grabbed in a deliberately unpleasant manner by a team of total strangers who work for YetAnotherSlickModernCorporation, want only profit, and are probably not offering you anything that you want.
- jjulius 5y agoWhy limit that to "attractive women"? What about attractive men? "Unattractive" individuals who wear something skimpy causing you to look regardless? Individuals you deem so unattractive or attractive that you can't look away no matter the attire?
- axguscbklp 5y agoI am not limiting it to attractive women, that is just the example I used. I think that extrapolating the idea to attractive men, to unattractive people in skimpy outfits, and so on makes sense.
- jjulius 5y agoBut it's still a really terrible comparison. Advertising is designed to attract your attention and convince you to do something. Individuals, by and large (and, obviously with exceptions - working out, dieting, cosmetic work, etc.) cannot control what they look like. Even with those exceptions, they have absolutely zero control over what other people may find attractive or unattractive about their bodies. What is simply a comfy outfit that one individual chose to wear might be deemed "skimpy" or sexy by you but not by others. They're wildly different things, and the assumption that just because some skin is showing means that someone's trying to get you to look at them is also incorrect.
- axguscbklp 5y agoWell yes, that assumption is incorrect, but I am not making that assumption. When I said skimpy outfits I had in mind skimpy outfits worn in the context of the wearer wanting to attract attention. Maybe I should have been more precise, but I assumed that my audience would understand what I meant without me having to spell it out. Also, when I wrote my original post I had two different things in mind - intentional grabbing of attention, which is what the person I was replying to had in mind, but that post also made me think of unintentional grabbing of attention: for example, would that person be annoyed by just some random airplane passing by the beach even if it does not carry an ad? How much does intention matter? Etc.