> Either I'm not making my point very clearly or people are (unconsciously?)
> propping up a straw man to knock down. I'm not arguing that "looking
> nice" is a social invention that only exists in class based societies.
> I'm just mentioning that modern beauty standards are not simply
> innocent or natural or inevitable:
Miles: where are the societies that prize/prized assymetry, waiste/hip ratios (for women) in excess of .7, baldness etc.? If you're going to argue in favor of a social learning theory of all of our beauty standards, you really can't dodge this question. (Speaking of social learning: apparently, it doesn't take infants very long to "learn" our beauty standards: they respond more positively to beautiful faces long before they can flip through the pages of _Vogue_.)
-- Luke