Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[bjlong]

Ok, this is why I dislike these point-by-point rebuttals. They provide no overall argument other than "No, you're wrong." (This seems to be a major viewpoint that I have a particular hatred for--someone knows what they're against, but doesn't know what they're for. And really, the second is far more important.) However, here's what I gathered of your claims:

1) Companies should be only allowed to do what a sane human would do in public.
2) Companies create a context for society that should be carefully controlled.
3) Women should be taught about beauty in a way that affirms them, rather than pressures them, by some non-personal entity.

My main objection to these is a question: How? Should we involve panels of legal judges every time someone wants to publish a book? Should we create yet another useless class in public school detailing how to view beauty? Your arguments are cleverly vague--we need to agree on these non-specific points, then hope that someone comes up with a practical way of implementing them. I understand that this is a very internet response, but if you're being intelligent, take it all the way.

While these are generally accepted truths, I'd like to challenge the first two. Firstly, why should we restrict a company to only socially acceptable actions, when individuals who break social norms are generally held up as "living life to the fullest"? If we accept only ethical restrictions, then how do we define the ethics? Even if we are somehow able to set up some sort of standard, why are we forcing them, by law, to do things that we would only encourage other groups of people to do? This is even granting that you've taken apart the "companies can't be treated as just groups of people" argument, which I'd like to see a coherent rebuttal to.

Secondly, I'd argue that companies are lagging indicators of societal trends, if only by a small amount. If there was a feedback loop playing in our heads of society vs. corporate products, then a lot of the fads of yesteryear should be around and even more extreme today. Instead, where are the jingles? Where are drug-like colors splashed across the screens of TVs? Where are the gritty, leather-wearing bikers with absurd hair? These all fell out of favor in their time, and though the stereotypical model hasn't, this would more likely be explained as a longer-lasting societal trend than corporate enforcement of a mindset. Every major fad has come from the people and spread to the corporate products, rather than the other way around. This is probably due to good artists getting their influences from real life first, then from other art.

[Jude]

I think the key thing here is that Jude is denying that people are actually affected by the forces around them,

I sure wish I knew where you got this particular bit of nonsense

You didn't even read the rest of that part of my post, did you? If you did, and understood it, you'd know that a lot of my point relied on the fact that they weren't "pictures of extremely hot other women"; they were falsified. Photoshopped, airbrushed, whatever you want to call it, they weren't even entirely photographs of real people anymore.

I did read the rest of it. And I entirely fail to see the relevance of whether they're photoshopped or not. Especially since if they ARE clearly photoshopped, intelligent people should take them with a grain of salt.

Hell, I don't have a real sexy physique. When I see dudes that do (and AREN'T photoshopped) sure I feel a little twinge of inferiority. But I encounter that all the time, in all forms of media, just as often as women encounter pictures of supermodels. What do you suppose the difference might be between me and a woman who gets upset about not being super thin? More relevant, what might the difference be between two women, both exposed to the same media messages and of about equal attractiveness, but one becomes obsessed with obtaining a perfect body type while one remains satisfied with her looks? So if these same media messages have differential effects on women, I have a real hard time apportioning responsibility to them for women who end up anorexic, or just unhappy about their looks.

I have a pretty strong suspicion, also, that women being unhappy with their looks is a consequence of the existence of women who are better looking. Just as my being unhappy with my height or muscle definition or athletic prowess or scientific accomplishments or whatever is a consequence of there being people who are superior in those fields. I don't care if you live in the Amazon rainforest and only have words for the numbers one and two and the colors white and black, there are going to be people sexier than others, and the less sexy ones are going to be mad about it. This problem won't go away if we stop photoshopping cover girls and centerfolds, or picking good-looking actors to star in movies. Or do anything else except clone everyone so we all look the same.

Artificial beauty is fine. Natural beauty is fine. Expressing either one is fine. Expressing artificial beauty while CALLING it natural beauty is not fine; it's deceptive.

That was included in my criticism. Why do you get to decide where the line is between artificial and natural?

Is makeup artificial? Clothes? Haircuts and hair arrangement? How about if a woman is more attractive to men by virtue of having had few sexual partners in the past? Is lying about her own past promiscuity "artificial?" Is a man lying about his income and talents artificial?

And yes, there are things like makeup and other aspects of personal care/beauty-adjustment to consider. However, the other things you mention are actually possible for people to do. If a model has her hair colored and makeup on her face, not only is it usually obvious, but that's something that real people can do, in real life. You can put blush or eyeshadow or hair color on in real life, or wear certain styles of clothing. You can't photoshop your waist thinner or your legs longer, and a lot of that photomanipulation crap is done such that most people won't even notice that it's fake.

First of all, are you really arguing that it's somehow morally reprehensible to create a depiction of something aesthetically pleasing which is not a direct reproduction of something that really exists? Because I'm really not sure where you draw the line between, say, painting a picture of a bunch of really good looking people, and using photoshop to make a photograph more attractive. If anything, the photoshop thing is LESS bad by your standards since it is partially real.

And besides which, a simple reductio ad absurdum applied to your argument shows that you are pronouncing basically all art to be morally objectionable in the same way that the cover of "Cosmo" is.

Yes I can, if it's known to be socially harmful and they do it willingly and only to make profit for themselves.

In order for me to know that it's "socially harmful" I'm going to have to see a causal relationship demonstrated between the publication of pictures of attractive women (post-photoshop) and harms of some kind - with all possible confounding factors ruled out. Otherwise you're just constructing ideological castles in the air.

Because it's purely selfish on part of the media. It's designed to sell product. In other words, it's bad because it's designed to use and abuse people for the sake of an industry's profit. Any worldview like this is bad, especially when it's mostly just the haphazard result of free-market economic forces.

Again, before you use phrases like "use and abuse" I'm going to need to see evidence of the harm caused by such publications, free of confounds. No matter how self-evident such a link might seem to you, unless you can assure me that it is fashion magazines and not any of a zillion other social and biological factors that are causing whatever problems you're talking about, you don't have an argument on this point.

For one thing, I mentioned more than once (and am continuing to, since you don't seem to be reading it) that these standards are pushed upon people long before the point in their lives where they can be expected to think clearly and critically about them. If we were born as adults, you'd have more of a point, but as children, middle/high school kids, etc., your faculties for critically thinking about these things aren't exactly up to speed yet, and pressure to fit in/belong/etc. will tend to override it anyway.

I didn't deny that, as it's obviously true. What I'm saying is that as intelligent creatures, we do have the ability to accept some information and reject other information. Otherwise everyone would be nothing more than machines that spouted out the messages ingrained in them by the outside world. And so are we going to insist that children have to be sheltered from every piece of information that we think could potentially harm them? Maybe instead we should take responsibility for ourselves and our families and teach our children discernment and how to take things with a grain of salt.

Also, I'm presenting a skeptic's perspective in asking for actual evidence of the argument, which seems to be taken for granted, that fashion magazines are a direct cause of people being unhappy with themselves. Personally I suspect there is some relationship. but I'm sure not going to go out on a limb and say "fashion magazines make women depressed; therefore the fashion industry is evil."

I also am way more attracted to women in real life than to ones on magazine covers, and I'm not real big on keeping up on current fashion. So I have a hard time swallowing the notion that people helplessly swallow notions that are presented to them without some level of decision that they are going to embrace certain values and aesthetics.

Er, yes it does. Society teaching you which things in particular to find "attractive" does seem to contradict what you said; you seemed to be implying that what we find attractive is ingrained and unlearned.

To a large extent, it is. I'd say that since the variation we DO see is so much less than what's conceivably possible, and that the commonalities are so broad and consistent, we have a good basis for believing a large portion of sexual attraction to be innate. After all, a nativist view predicts we should see a large degree of commonality throughout all human societies, and outer limits on variation - which we do see.

I think I already said this (notice a theme, here?), but: Hypercorrective tendencies. When people are overweight extremely often, to the point where thinness itself gets linked to attractiveness, and being underweight isn't a prominent or often-considered health issue, then underweight women may still wind up being seen as attractive; people may overlook the fact that their weight is unhealthy, because they're focused more on "thin is good".

The research I've seen suggests that men, at any rate, find healthy women attractive (not necessarily consciously). Women's notions of their own attractiveness may be different; since it is their main currency in the rough Darwinian world of reproduction it does make sense for them to be more concerned about it. In any case, I'd posit



agggghghh got to go. eff this thread these posts are getting too long

[Maric]

Shes hot.

[zchris13]

Shes hot.

Bravo! Bravo! Excellent post! Really arguing your point there, aren't you! Great job.

[Jackrabbit]

Yes, try to contribute with a bit more than two words about how hot someone is.

[thezeus18]

She's really hot.

[umiman]

Yeah.

[Cheeetar]

Dude.

[sonerohi]

I've been lulsing away at this all day.

[zchris13]

I think I'm missing something.

[Jackrabbit]

Alright, fine, I give in.

[Footkerchief]

Ok, this is why I dislike these point-by-point rebuttals. They provide no overall argument other than "No, you're wrong."

That form of rebuttal makes it harder to misrepresent your opponent's position, and so is basically essential unless the participants trust each other to argue in good faith.

[Muz]

I usually hate point-by-point, but Jude made some sense there. Too bad I don't really care about the topic

[Aqizzar]

In normal arguments, you don't have the luxury of pointing to each specific statement in turn, and parsing out a response with all the time you need.  If anything, it's actually a wonderful form of rhetoric unique to the structure of the Internet.  However, our brains aren't really meant to process arguments in that way, and even if they were it would still be a big eye-gouging mess.  In the history of literary argument, you're supposed to take the whole text or big chunks of it and formulate a broader response, not try to retroactively turn a paragraph into a sentence by sentence rebuttal.

[bjlong]

Don't get me wrong, some point-by-point is useful, but only where people are debating the minute specifics of something, or a single logical proof. However, point-by-point arguments quickly get derailed onto a single piece of evidence, rather than the main body of work used to support an argument. And then there's that whole incoherence thing--basically, I'd be happy if people just started looking at the main thrusts of the argument and debated those, rather than individual pieces of evidence.