I’m really not sure what you’re saying here? What’s all this about rendering and baby fat and buying people? It’s a little disturbing tbh.
Yeah in all seriousness, I wonder if these companies could be sold on robots, who sort of look like women? Uncanny valley should not be a problem for them.
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Hmmm, semantic issues again, no doubt my fault. When I say “treat them equally” I don’t think that means equally dividing your attention between them, or somehow overriding your natural level of interest. I mean treating people fairly - is that better? If it’s not OK to cheat a beautiful person at cards, it’s not OK to cheat an ugly person at cards. If it’s not OK to starve a model, it’s not OK to starve a hobo. Unless and until one of these persons takes some action that redefines their status, they should be treated with equal politeness and dignity. Appearances are not generally a good basis for granting respect - but actions are.
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Seriously, shouldn’t that show have been shot with a professional stunt coordinator looking out for safety problems? Does this TV show get an exemption?
Why do you find it disturbing that I would talk about human bodies in terms of value judgements, based on raw physicality, when you are advocating doing exactly that?
If my comments have disturbed you, perhaps that is good. Your comments have disturbed me as well - the particular argument you’re using to defend the fashion industry kind of skeeves me.
Edit: I don’t mean to be insulting - I appreciate your willingness to discuss our differing attitudes. But I’m afraid I have to go now. Good night everyone!
Buying babies to render their fat? I’m still not seeing the connection with, you know, preferring one person over another.
That’s “dapper”? That’s normal from my perspective. But I’m not beautiful enough to factor into your world.
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I think that’s the root of our disagreement: You seem to be talking about standards in general (which are very beneficial in many contexts), not as much the ones discussed in this article. I’m objecting specifically to the way the current fashion industry overwhelmingly portrays a single image of glamour and beauty as most desirable. It’s not abstract, like turning to gods or allegorical poetry for inspiration. That one standard and influence bleeds into nearly all other areas, especially where media are involved and especially for women. It sets up very real, very specific expectations and pressures.
I’m pretty sure people who hate themselves and lie awake at night because they’re not world-class acrobats, or Nobel-prize winning scientists, or famous abstract painters are fairly rare, at least outside of these specialties. Yet countless women of all walks of life truly feel like they must ALSO aspire to that one beauty standard the fashion industry is pitching otherwise they’re undesirable failures, regardless of other achievements or abilities. Many carry the weight of shame and disappointment because they can’t live up to that little checklist. Is that inspiring? Is that a positive drive in one’s life?
Of course the body matters; that’s exactly why it deserves appreciation beyond petty dissections of its ornamental value. That’s why I’m sick of seeing so many bodies deformed, starved and just plain dismissed as ‘flawed’ while being completely wholesome, healthy and beautiful by any rational standards.
Again, I am an artist. I’ve studied aesthetics in and out. I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t truly believe that ‘beauty’ matters. But the specific standards and definitions of ‘beauty’ that are ubiquitous right now have spun out of control. Inspiration is lovely and good until it inspires a great number of healthy people to loathe, starve and mutilate themselves, which is exactly what is happening here.
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To my way of thinking, you are misreading the nature of this kind of value. As far as individuals go, of course we all value people differently according to personal subjective standards that can encompass many different forms and motivations. We love our children, we like our friends, we vote for Democrats, we have a gentlemanly preference for blondes, we are attracted to a wicked sense of humor, we gush over kittens, etc., etc.
But the nature of the value that we “cultural leftists” seek is profoundly different. It’s based simply on unknowable potential. We know the reasons why we love our kids or prefer blondes. But as for the unwashed multitudes, what have they ever done for us, other than breathe our air, pollute our environment, and consume our resources? Shouldn’t we simply resent them all, with our… how did you put it? Oh yes: ressentiment.
But no. We place value on the downtrodden, the halt and infirm, the aged, the poverty-stricken, the young, the voiceless, and even those like me: the fashion-unconscious, the unsophisticated, and the conventionally unattractive. Even the downright repulsive.
This value is based on potential, and the fact that at any given moment, a person’s potential is essentially unknowable. Self-improvement is by no means ruled out; that would be stupid. But there’s no way to know if an ugly duckling will grow into a swan, if a gorgeous young Mickey Rourke will age into the battered wreck of a face he bears today. No one can tell who will grow into the next Marie Curie, Steve Jobs, Mozart, or Meryl Streep. And it doesn’t matter anyway. The world at large wants these grand successes, and those with elite potential will, if given the opportunity, rise to the occasion and perhaps reach the point where they no longer need anyone’s help. But all of us are, at our core, lowly and frail and mortal lifeforms, and at any given moment all we have in common is hope for our future potential. Up-and-coming young athletes can suffer career-ending injuries any day. Celebrated supermodels? Well, it’s only a matter of time. They can find themselves bumped out of the top slots by younger beauties, by the ravages of childbirth, by a heavy-handed plastic surgeon, or simply by waking up too many mornings. Even Sophia Loren is mortal, though she’s still prettier than anyone you can name. And out of the millions of infants born today, none can say which will “amount to anything” in the eyes of popular consensus. And there’s the rub: we see ourselves in others. We see a crippled unfortunate and think, “there but for the grace of purest luck go I.” And we see someone who is dazzlingly beautiful and glamorous and we think, “Man, that could have been me, under slightly different circumstances.” It’s called empathy, is it not, this ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others?
There is a self-satisfaction and arrogance all too common in the realm of high fashion (as well as in many other realms) that seems to forget this pretty basic fact. Fashionistas love to congratulate themselves on how the aspirational quality of their work uplifts the human spirit rather than degrades it. And yet:
The other is a tendency to erase valuing of the body and claim that a person "is" their mind, that their mind is the only thing that counts. But actually, a whole person is a body and a mind, or a body that has a mind, and to interpret and value a person is to interpret and value any of that.
Fashion utterly erases the other side of the same equation: the valuing of the mind. Fashion has no interest in intellect or sensitivity or compassion. Fashion is a self-fulfilling edict: “This is how one is supposed to look. One’s feet must be wedged into these ergonomically catastrophic shoes, and one’s hemline must hang at precisely this distance relative to one’s knees, and by God those thighs better show sunlight between them when one walks, else one is not, repeat, not fit to be seen.”
And ideals such as those… should anyone in their right mind actually consider those “ideals” at all, let alone ones worth striving to attain? Is that actually something you would consider encouragement toward improvement?
“Upwards,” you say? Trying to look fashionable is something you consider movement upwards, rather than a colossal waste of time, money, and effort? Christ on a bike, I’m not gonna tell someone to stop trying to make themselves look more attractive according to their standards, if that’s the hobby they want to pursue. I play drums and fix cars. If some other guy wants to hit the gym, manscape, read GQ, and shop at sartorial establishments outside of which I wouldn’t be permitted to loiter in a limo driver’s cap, then I’m not gonna try to deny him his dubious pleasure. It might get him laid. It might improve his career. It is not about to make him a better person in any way that matters to anyone with more than an inch or two of depth.
And who was ever “uplifted” out of misery, poverty, heartbreak, or anything other than privileged ennui by leafing through a fashion magazine, seeing something they absolutely adore and must have, and then leaping up out of the gutter (or just off the sofa), plucking the odd hairs, whitening the teeth, tightening the abs, firming the gluteals, fixing the hair, getting a fatter cashflow, and then hitting the boutiques?
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That’s another thing that drives me to drink: They can photoshop whole limbs off and rearrange major muscle groups, yet they can’t shoop some snow and penguins in. Nope. Just gotta have the lady actually freeze her buns off because ‘it’s a tough job’ and whatnot…
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Corey, I feel like this will get lost in the comments, but an update with a link to the Model Alliance, the go-to non-profit in the US for these issues, would be good for this article. This article itself is a hyperbolic, self-serving account from a narrow perspective aimed at selling a book, so at least do the girls some justice by directing some attention to accurate information and money towards their interests, rather than a former vogue editor.
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That’s superficially true, but that’s OK, because fashion is just one of many things, one part of many values. It is not, by and large, an overall outlook or value system. You can dress well and read books, both. Even then, the deeper point of fashion is not to blindly copy current outfits but to express yourself within one’s cultural sartorial idiom. Fashion is really a language, not a list of approved looks.
Trying to look better is movement upwards. It’s better self-expression. It brings pleasure and interest to those around you. If you want to spend your life looking like you don’t care about your appearance, that’s up to you.
Please go watch Paris is Burning if you believe looking fabulous cannot lift even the very unprivileged out of some portion of their misery.
First of: How freaky is the fashion industry? I fully support anyones free choice (even if it comes from a psychological dark place, because let’s face it, almost no one can claim the center in the “normal” wen-diagram), but it still makes me sad.
However, the weird thing is that there’s an easy & supposedly longevity-inducing way for these people to obtain that skeleton-look they admire: CR. Calorie Reduction can be a healthy way to live, it does take some work to insure you get the nutrients you require, but there must be a fair amount of downtime in the model-biz.
Problem solved…?
What a beautiful post (the whole thing, not just the ending paragraph).
Eating disorders run in my family, so I’ve seen first hand, over decades, how societal standards of “beauty” intertwine with the twisted thinking of control-my-body-to-fit-an-impossible-standard…a supposedly self-imposed impossible standard, but of course it isn’t…eating disorders run rampant only in those cultures that impose an irresponsible and virtually unattainable standard against half of the population at the societal level.
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Fuck yeah.
I don’t disagree with you that the obsession with thinness is unhealthy and damaging, but I think you’re wrong about the cause. I think the fashion industry is reflecting this particular ideal, not causing it. The cause is a fetishistic reaction to increasing obesity: as the population becomes fatter, people of a healthy weight become rarer and their relative thinness becomes fetishised, especially as they tend to be of higher social status. Thinness itself becomes appealing purely for its own sake, even past the point of unhealthiness.
If we lived in a society where people mostly got too few calories rather than too many, only fat models would be appealing enough to sell clothes and magazines, precisely because they’d appear hyper-fed, hyper-healthy.
But even this wouldn’t prevent people loathing, starving and mutilating themselves, since anorexia can be found in societies where thinness is not the ideal (if Wikipedia is to be believed). It’s worth bearing in mind that eating disorders have many causes and are not as culture-bound as was once thought.
[quote=“Medievalist, post:39, topic:6800”]
Human fat is valuable, especially baby fat.
[/quote] In particular it is especially valuable to babies.
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In this world gone mad, people are judged by their skills and character! The horror. The horror.
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I suppose in principle I would, but I honestly find it very difficult to imagine the values and priorities of someone so profoundly broken as to spend $40,000 on an item of clothing.
