I laughed just a little bit as I read this.
Then I reached the last line. And suddenly I had tears in my eyes. Who knows why… who knows why.
If everyone is beautiful, what does beauty mean?
That which creates aesthetic pleasure, which is incredibly diverse amongst people.
All I have to say is…up a bit…over to the left…too far…little more…right there! That’s the sore spot. Ahhhhh
I beg to differ. Most men may have silly buttocks. I myself have buttocks that are extremely serious, and should be treated with utmost respect.
I mentioned the “silly buttocks” bit to my posterior but it ignored me and continued doing taxes. What an a-hole.
I wonder if someone had opined that clouds are all beautiful, or mountains, or streams, or songbirds or kittens, or anything besides people, if anyone would have worried what that does to the meaning of beauty.
All people are beautiful, but some people are more beautiful than others.
Beauty does not have to be all-or-nothing, either in location or in degree.
Cue Katishaw: “But I have a left shoulder-blade that is a miracle of loveliness. People come miles to see it. My right elbow has a fascination that few can resist.”
And it isn’t a straight line; I’ve known people whom I would not at all call pretty but who are so full of life and character – so much themselves – that I’d still call them beautiful. Cuing Kat again: “There’s a fascination frantic / in a ruin that’s romantic”.
Finally (for now), even the formal ideal of human beauty is not an absolute. Our standards of human beauty are VERY tied to particular cultures and particular times. Looking back at photos covering the history of stage and film stars makes this obvious; some of the stars considered Helen-of-Troy level in their time now strike me as merely pleasant, and I don’t think I’m the only one who has noticed this.
So my conclusion is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so unless you go dungeon-crawling and kill a Beholder to get a potion of beauty there really isn’t a clear meaning. It’s subjective and relative rather than absolute, it’s massively nonlinear and multivariate, there is no single path and no single destination and no clear dividing line.
We consider most mammals appealing, at least, Why not view humans with the same eye?
I like this. This is good. Thank you for posting.
I know I’m not adding much to the discussion but thought you should know that reading stuff like this normalizes our perceptions of our own bodies for the dumpy of the world.
–A Dumpy Person
Babies also can have cellulite, a lot of it. And on babies it is adorable. But men do have silly buttocks, but their thighs are serious.
Are you Yakuza?
So, heading into the last paragraph, I quickly started suspecting that this was one of those funny articles designed to make people feel good about themselves for a second before the big wham of everybody laughing about how dumb that is. And then I read the comments and turns out, I’m the biggest asshole on the internets tonight. And I’m hardly even snarky. Is it safe to come out? Or you just haven’t called Opposite Day yet? Want to trust, yet wary, so wary . . .
What always bugs me is how much of a shit people give about it. I mean, next to owning a working body and being able to use it to do whatever cool shit you want, how it looks should be a relatively minor concern.
For evolution to make sense, beauty should be pretty strongly correlated with fitness, otherwise everybody’s obsessed with a half-arsed approximation.
That, by the way, is only really relevant if you intend to breed, or at least have sex with the subject of your judgements - unless of course someone’s so rough on the eye beholding’s a chore.
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