[lbo-talk] Queen for a Day: My Gay Makeover

Luke Benjamin Weiger lweiger at umich.edu
Wed Jul 16 11:20:34 PDT 2003


On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Miles Jackson wrote:


> 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



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