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"Beauty" has always been entirely socially constructed. There is no such thing as beauty, even when Beyonce "creates it". It is an invention of men as part of t

"Beauty" has always been entirely socially constructed. There is no such thing as beauty, even when Beyonce "creates it". It is an invention of men as part of the larger social construcion of gender -- hence "what beauty is for black women" rather than black people in generally -- that is monetized more by make-up and fashion companies than by Hollywood. It's a myth. The recent liberal development of the sentiments "everybody is beautiful", "everybody defines their own beauty" and the like is a naive attempt to mitigate a demonstrably deadly social poison by advocating that we spread it thin enough that it just becomes water. The actual solution is to identify that it is poison and abolish it.

gwern 11y ago
> "Beauty" has always been entirely socially constructed. There is no such thing as beauty, even when Beyonce "creates it". I think you might benefit from reading "Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review" http://www.jonathanstray.com/papers/Langlois.pdf http://www.jonathanstray.com/papers/Langlois.pdf , Langlois et al 2000.
- detcader 11y ago
  The abstract seems to deliberately construct a misrepresentation and uses it as motivation for the paper: "Common maxims about beauty suggest that attractiveness is not important in life." The authors go on to imply that those maxims are meant to assert that something "is the case" when they are obviously asserting a "should be the case". Kind of silly, no? Unless there really are maxims that assert "looks are not important in life at the current moment in time, you will never be judged by your attractiveness today" -- but I've never heard any of these. The three maxims that the paper names are all either of the "should" form or not at all related to "importance" -- the first claims relativity from person to person, not importance, the second asserts a "should", and the third is totally unrelated to actual social conditions (the "life" in "attractiveness is not important in life"). So the paper seems to exist for its own strawman, but I'll have to read the whole thing...

gwern 11y ago

> "Beauty" has always been entirely socially constructed. There is no such thing as beauty, even when Beyonce "creates it". I think you might benefit from reading "Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review" http://www.jonathanstray.com/papers/Langlois.pdf http://www.jonathanstray.com/papers/Langlois.pdf , Langlois et al 2000.

detcader 11y ago
The abstract seems to deliberately construct a misrepresentation and uses it as motivation for the paper: "Common maxims about beauty suggest that attractiveness is not important in life." The authors go on to imply that those maxims are meant to assert that something "is the case" when they are obviously asserting a "should be the case". Kind of silly, no? Unless there really are maxims that assert "looks are not important in life at the current moment in time, you will never be judged by your attractiveness today" -- but I've never heard any of these. The three maxims that the paper names are all either of the "should" form or not at all related to "importance" -- the first claims relativity from person to person, not importance, the second asserts a "should", and the third is totally unrelated to actual social conditions (the "life" in "attractiveness is not important in life"). So the paper seems to exist for its own strawman, but I'll have to read the whole thing...