#beauty culture

[being-kindrad]

Andrea Dworkin's classic Beauty Hurts diagram from Woman Hating (1974), updated for modern procedures, fifty years later.

A first step in the process of liberation (women from their oppression, men from the unfreedom of their fetishism) is the radical redefining of the relationship between women and their bodies. The body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhaps the notion of beauty which will then organically emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a respect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable, variety. —Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (1974)

#feminism #radical feminism #anti beauty culture #anti beauty industry #anti beauty standards #anti makeup #andrea dworkin #dworkin #beauty culture #women #woman hating #woman

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Often when people talk about appearance of characters in media, especially that of women, some use an argument along the lines of "Why would I want to look at someone ugly in the games I play/shows I watch/etc.?"

From what I saw, and if I'm not wrong, you prefer to not engage with that kind of argument, but if you absolutely had to, what answer would you give that could have a chance to make those people see and maybe agree with your point?

I mean, the reason why I wouldn't engage with that argument is that it is always, universally, without exception, an argument made in bad faith, by people who are lying when they utter it. And it takes only the briefest examination of reality to determine this.

The argument they pretend to make is that "there is no reason to desire things that are not pleasurable in entertainment," in response to which I present The Concept Of Horror Media, or the success of Jackass, or South Park, or literally any subversive prank show, or sports as a concept, or the genre of tragedy, or the phenomenon of people rubbernecking. I present true crime podcasts and biographies of John Wayne Gacy and Mortal Kombat fatalities, I present unflinchingly earnest documentaries about war and disease, I present cringe comedy, I present the entire online media genre of pimple popper videos.

Human beings desire so much more than beauty, so much more than aesthetic pleasure (and indeed we can take aesthetic pleasure in so much more than beauty). We find entertainment in disgust, horror, fear, revulsion, sorrow, embarrassment, pain and, yes, "ugliness" all the time, and we have done for as long as we have had sentient minds to entertain.

So this argument "why would I want to look at someone ugly in a video game" is simply a lie. It is an argument made in bad faith by people whom I will guarantee you against a bet of real money constantly look at things which are "ugly" for entertainment.

It is a lie, it is a stupid lie, and while I'm sure that many or most of the people who peddle that lie don't realize they are lying when they do it, it remains a lie which isn't worth dignifying with a response.

And anyway, 99% of the time they don't mean "ugly" they mean "woman who I don't find fuckable" or they mean "fat" or they mean "trans" or they mean "queer" or "non-white," they mean someone or some thing which falls into a category which they feel entitled to hate, and they are trying to enforce the normality of that hate.

You cannot logic someone out of a position they didn't logic themselves in to, and there is very rarely anything you can say to these people to make them reconsider. They are reacting emotionally, they are reacting on the impulse towards disgust and hatred, and they will rationalize a lie to excuse it.

#beauty culture

[vgpussy]

#my posts #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #make up #beauty culture

[edonee]

Women's rejection of the natural aging process/their body changing as they grow up is actually maddening. You don't need to do 17 steps of "skincare" every day. SkinCARE is preventing cancer by applying sunscreen, skinCARE is not applying make-up with tons of potentially harmful ingredients in it. The point of skincare should be to protect your health, not to prevent wrinkles.

Same thing goes for "healthy diets" (aka trying to survive on quinoa seeds and one lettuce leaf a-day like a fucking hamster). News flash: your body needs actual nutrients in order to be healthy.

#radblr #radical feminism #radical feminists do interact #radical feminist community #radical feminists do touch #terfsafe #.txt #diet culture #beauty culture #rambles

[woman-for-women]

If it looks degrading when men do it, it’s degrading when women do it too. You’re just used to women being degraded.

Would the Time Person of the year wear sequined spaghetti strap tops or sheer black bodysuits, put on red lipstick, or pose with half their crotch out or arms up behind their head if they were male? If it looks degrading when a man does it, it’s degrading when a woman does it too. You’re just used to women being degraded.

While not every woman is posed like Taylor Swift is in these covers, do you ever see rich and powerful men dressed like this? If wearing revealing clothing, shaving, or wearing makeup is empowering, why don’t the most powerful men in the world do it? Why do the most rich and famous women in the world have to degrade themselves, even when they’re being celebrated?

#sexism #Misogyny #Beauty culture #beauty and misogyny #taylor swift #w4w speaks #femininity

[scrapnick]

“Do men really like this?”

“Do women really enjoy that??”

Doesn’t matter. Someone thinks you’re ugly as sin and someone saw you once and still thinks about you.

Deal with that as you will.

#scraps.txt #beauty #beauty culture #lots of discussion on this on twitter and its all just so dumb

[iceyrukia]

Well said. X

#radfems please interact #radfems do touch #radfem safe #beauty standards #hyper sexualization #beauty culture #also some of the replies give me brain rot like ' so u think wumen are too sTupid to make their own choices !!!' no u missed the point

[femmesandhoney]

i love more women appreciating grey hair because i've always found it so beautiful and seeing older women around me talk about it with fear and anxiety, discussing how they'd dye it, seeing media where the second a woman gets a grey hair they'd shamefully pluck it or dye it away, like it was something literally immutably horrifying happening to their bodies. really made me sad as a child to see, but i love seeing more and more women embrace it and hate having to hide natural changes to their bodies, especially when it's something so lovely.

#radical feminism #radical feminist #beauty standards #beauty culture #radfem

[spiderfreedom]

my suffering is profound and legitimate, yours is frivolous nonsense

Just reading a blogger I like but I had to laugh because she was talking about how beauty practices are bad for women's mental health, and she left a note saying "unlike gender affirming care! gender affirming care improves people's mental health and it's nothing at all like cosmetic practices."

TIL, when an older woman gets botox to remove her wrinkles and avoid facing the inevitability of decline and death, her problem is spiritual/structural and she needs to Do The Work to deprogram her ageism, unlike people with dysphoria, who of course have legitimate claims to cosmetic alteration.

And it is cosmetic - no part of the body that is altered by HRT or SRS or any of the feminization/masculinization surgeries is failing to function or functioning poorly. The problem is with the brain, which perceives the body parts as foreign or undesirable. We may sympathize with someone struggling with such a condition, but that does not change that the body parts being altered were already healthy and the alterations are cosmetic, and the relief being brought about is mental.

But plenty of trans people openly admit that separating body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria is a losing game. Contrapoints's video on "Beauty" (transcript) has the observation that she feels least dysphoric when she is meeting feminine beauty norms:

But I also think that trans people often talk like gender dysphoria is this intrinsic, personal experience that's always 100% valid and never has anything at all to do with the external pressure of beauty standards. But in fact, gender dysphoria is not sealed away in a vacuum away from the influence of societal ideals and norms.  [...] When I try to psychoanalyze myself, I find that my desires to look female, to look feminine, and to look beautiful are not exactly the same, but they're woven together so tightly that it's kind of difficult to untangle them. And the opposite is also true, that for me feeling mannish or dysphoric usually goes along with feeling ugly. I don't have a lot of days where I walk out the house thinking "well, I'm giving femme queen realness, but apart from that I look like absolute shit". 

Max Robinson's book "Detransition," from an FTM perspective, points out how the prospective trans man views his suffering as unique from and distinct from women's, even as the surgeries they seek are not especially different:

The stereotypical cosmetic surgery patient is seeking to become closer to being perfectly feminine - she wants to be beautiful. Transitional cosmetic surgery, on the other hand, is widely understood to mark the patient as ex-female and therefore unfemale; this is part of the meaning FTMs seek to create through surgery. FTM desire for cosmetic surgery is positioned as something totally different than the stereotype of a woman who 'merely' seeks beauty at her frivolous leisure. FTMs are deemed to have a rare affliction that needs urgent, life-saving treatment. Conversely, there is nothing more common than for a woman to become obsessed with her socially-deemed 'unsatisfactory' looks and desperately seek to change them, believing that such a change is the only thing that can restore her quality of life. This comparison will feel like an insult to the FTM. It will feel that way because we believe other women's suffering doesn't matter, and recognize how much ours does. Women's suffering is ordinary but ours is extraordinary. For us to matter, we must be differentiated from the silly little woman who wants to be pretty so badly she'll pay thousands of dollars (now billable to credit cards and loan programs designed to pay for elective surgeries!) to risk her life and health. These women don't need to be fixed; we do. FTMs know that we don't deserve a woman's fate but have not yet realized that no woman does.

I have more to write on the topic of the relationship between gender identity and beauty culture, but I'll end this one here. It makes sense that somebody who is identified with the opposite sex would also be affected by the standards of beauty expected of that sex. (Non-binary identification is more complicated and requires separate treatment.)

#mypost #beauty culture #gender identity ideology #radical feminism #100 notes tag

[gynoids-over-androids]

"I think my daughter deserves bullying for how she naturally looks and should go through a painful process to appease her bullies"

Girlmom and confidence tags are so sad.

#Beauty culture #Radfem #radical feminist #Radblr #Feminism

[itellmyselfsecrets]

razor ads "that's right, we're not like those stuffy old squares who try to control your body. we're not afraid to say it: i'm a woman, and i love shaving my armpits! yeah, we went there - we said the word: armpits. *airhorn noise* *record scratch* uh, yeah, women have hair! wild notion, right, grandpa? we'll get used to it! except don't get too used to it, because it's gonna get shaved. for feminism

#womanhood #feminism #marketing propaganda #shaving #gender roles #this is why we need feminism #capitalism #beauty culture #not mine

[fem-lit]

If women suddenly stopped feeling ugly, the fastest-growing medical specialty would be the fastest dying. In many states of the United States, where cosmetic surgeons (as opposed to plastic surgeons, who specialize in burns, trauma, and birth defects) can be any nonspecialist M.D., it would be back to mumps and hemorrhoids for the doctors, conditions that advertising cannot exacerbate. They depend for their considerable livelihood on selling women a feeling of terminal ugliness. If you tell someone she has cancer, you cannot create in her the disease and its agony. But tell a woman persuasively enough that she is ugly, you do create the “disease,” and its agony is real. If you wrap up your advertisement, alongside an article promoting surgery, in a context that makes women feel ugly, and leads us to believe that other women are competing in this way, then you have paid for promoting a disease that you alone can cure.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#anti cosmetic surgery #beauty culture #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe #beauty capitalism

[womenaremypriority]

My take is that radfems should shift the conversation from “women wear makeup for men, so we should stop wearing it.” This reminds women of how men victim blame them for assault and harassment. It’s also not true on an individual level- most women don’t want male attention at all. It’s for multiple reasons- out of habit, for other women, to look impressionable, etc. If you want to get across to a specific women, and she says something like “I wear it for myself!” Or “I always wear it” or “I feel unfinished without it” ask “why?” Why can’t you stop? And shift the conversation from them to the fact wearing it is pushed us on from childhood, how men don’t wear it despite the fact they also have facial flaws, how it takes up time that adds up, etc.

#radical feminism #radblr #feminist #feminism #radical feminists do interact #radical feminist safe #anti beauty culture #beauty culture #anti beauty industry #Anti makeup #ditch makeup

[edonee]

"my eyeliner is sharp enough to kill a man"

they are shaking I'm sure

#radblr #radical feminism #radical feminists do interact #radical feminist safe #libfem #anti makeup #anti beauty industry #beauty culture #beauty industry #terfsafe #terfblr #radical feminists do touch #personal

[woman-for-women]

If eyeliner grants women more power, why does it not grant men more power? Who is granting women power when they wear eyeliner? Why? What kind of power is it?

If eyeliner is worn almost entirely by women and wearing eyeliner "sharp enough to kill a man" is feminist, which specific feminist issue does eyeliner tackle (menstrual health, sexual harassment, medical misogyny, domestic violence shelters)?

How does eyeliner liberate you from the patriarchy (not make you feel good, liberate you ― there's a difference)?

#gender abolition #feminism #feminist #patriarchy #anti makeup #eyeliner #w4w speaks #femininity #beauty culture

[sad-cinnamongirl]

I'm in my teens and I am often told I need Botox or some kind of plastic surgery to get rid of my fine lines. I used to use drugs. I had an eating disorder. I smoke. I experience stress. I don't look old. I look like a teenager with a face completely appropriate considering my situation.

aging is a gift

#plastic surgery #anti beauty industry #anti beauty culture #anti beauty standards #radblr #radical feminism #radical feminists do interact #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do touch #terfblr #rad fem #anti plastic surgery #anti makeup #beauty culture #radical feminist #female socialization #sex based oppression