I have written a number of articles that friends thought might get me in trouble, particularly with women. Imagine my surprise in finding this article in my in box, from a woman who could not get published in a women’s webzine. It is about body imaging as social tyranny. I find this subject fascinating as an avenue for the exploration of our denatured society. As a man today, I understand that women under 35 are generally horrified by chest hair on men—indeed male models shave themselves to remove excess levels of masculinity from their image. This trend is new, younger than I. But the trend toward the body type of the 14 year-old-girl as the female body-image standard began in the early 1930s with the birth of modern advertising. Recently, the famously curvaceous women of a Polynesian island have been starving themselves to death in order to look like Hollywood women, all in response to the advent of TV in their small nation. Taken together, these two visual ideals point to a denatured society stilted toward gender homogeneity. In my view, perhaps the only good wrought by rap is the increased appreciation of classically feminine hips, albeit for prurient rather than maternal purposes. Check out Lili Huns piece below for a woman’s view of the hipless female ideal embraced by our sissy society.
Skinny Fuck-Faced Faggots
On August 20, I woke up with two words on my mind: social tyranny. This was the result of personal conversation about what makes a woman beautiful. My own muse was speaking to me, angry at finding herself discarded in a gutter somewhere for most of her life. It seemed to me that even a nice rest under a shady willow tree at high noon in the heat of summer had been denied to her. I decided to run with her two words of inspiration to see where it would lead me. She suggested that I compose a list of these, using only my own tired brain cells, and this was the result:
All forms of entertainment and consumerism which dumb down and numb the person engaged in such activities. Think "mainstream."
The media/news which has become fiction via its biased spins and spoon-feeding interpretations backed by the politically correct and social engineering agenda.
Preferential treatment accorded to conformists in the form of higher position and salary, and particular groups within the material caste system, in the form of money, lodging, food, and any other unmerited acquisitions based simply on one's place in the caste system.
Industries based on fear, inadequacy, lack, belonging and conformity mongering, which lead to rampant consumerism in said industries, including weight loss, exercise, body building, sports, image (spas, hair and nail salons, stylish designer clothing, etc.), sex (lingerie, related tools of the trade, porn, films, etc.), wealth, ownership, general attire, club memberships, the many forms of status symbols, found in the auto, housing, and who knows what other industries, that provide for our artificially imposed needs, and finally, my favorite as an introvert: formal attire for specious social events.
And if all of this weren't enough, there's also a de-stressing industry to counter the negative effects of all the other ones. A medical industry for your loss of health while pursuing or engaging in the activities these industries provide.
Ultimately, all of these serve as symbols of your worth in our society. Only one problem with this: if your value system won't allow you to live on the material surface of things, you'll be swimming upstream from the time you are quite young, and no matter who you are or how you may compensate for your inability to swim in the community social pool, it's going to hurt. A lot, sometimes. (Enter the psychology and psychotropic meds industries to help you cope or fit in with this accepted reality...really?)
And the cog-in-the-machinery or wage-slave jobs which inflict mind-numbing boredom and crush the spirit (thank you, industrial revolution).
So if you're not in the top 20 percent of earners in this country, after which there's a sizable gap between them and us, the folks in the lower financial ranks, your life is largely predictable based on the material resources you have to work with.
My muse next assigned me some research to round out my meager thoughts, so I googled the words, "social tyranny." Tough search.
Who comes up? John Stuart Mill, a philosopher, so it goes without saying that if I want to get my thoughts out, I'm not going to do a fair study of his work before I do. Two of his concepts served me: that personal freedom is equally endangered by either popular will or despotism, and that social tyranny penetrates to the soul.
Good enough, but since all of this grew from a "simple" conversation about what makes women beautiful, how does it relate?
As I dug around online, I began to compose a list of keywords based on my findings:
Hegemony, status quo, narrative, ideology, entertainment and fashion industry.
Whew. Gotta go bark up the hegemony tree to see what I can find: economic class, relating to social class, artificial social constructs, and cultural hegemony.
The wisegeek.com defined it clearly: The term "hegemony" refers to the leadership, dominance or great influence that one entity or group of people has over others. Modern uses of "hegemony" often refer to a group in a society having power over others within that society. This might be done by controlling forms of communication...
Powercube.net also gave a nice summary:
By definition hegemony is the process by which dominant culture maintains its dominant position.
Hmm...what was that about controlling communication? Back to my original list of keywords: status quo, narrative, ideology, media, entertainment and fashion industry. Material for a separate article.
Dug some more and found a Turkish woman's master's thesis entitled: Women Under the Hegemony of Body Politics: Fashion and Beauty. A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School of Social Sciences of Middle East Technical University, by Elfcan Karacan.
And these were her keywords: Beauty Ideology, Fashion, Body Politics, Consumer Culture.
Notable for me were these two sets of key words due to their relationship to each other: Beauty Ideology and Consumer Culture, because ideologies, it seems to me, form the beliefs dispersed by whoever is holding tightly onto the reins of our cultural hegemony, which includes standards of beauty and those who set them. (Frankly, if it's a rich, skinny-assed faɡɡot who wants me to be ashamed of my curves and fit into boys pants, he can kiss my arse for all of the trouble he's caused.)
And one of my pet peeves appeared, explored briefly by this research: “Gender and Hegemony in Fashion Magazines: Women's Interpretations of Fashion Photographs,” (Crane 1999). She states that, “Few empirical studies exist that examine how women respond to these types of materials.”
I think that the exponential rise of bulemia and anorexia is empirical enough. Which brings me back to my pet peeve: where the fuck are my curves represented in the skinny gay guys' fashion industry adopted by women sporting the post-concentration camp release look?
Two other researchers concurred: ...that fashion photographs generate enormous dissatisfaction among women because they create unrealistic expectations that most women are unable to meet (Lackoff and Scherr 1984).
When did large breasts and hips become anathema? Thank you very much, I did not join the c-section club nor spend more than a few minutes pushing my babies out. (So my genes would have stayed in the gene pool longer, you skinny fuck-faced faɡɡots, and your moms would have died giving birth to you, a waste in any event, since you're sausage tasters...)
So what are my points? There are so many forms of social tyranny aimed at us. And relating to the original subject of discussion of what makes a woman beautiful? Well, some definitions of beauty are the product of cultural hegemony. We see the ones which hurt us most, which varies based on our combinations of characteristics and how that allows us to survive said hegemony. That we are relieved when a socially undesirable characteristic does not describe us (ugly, crippled, irregular, poor, sick, you name it), and we are delivered from additional social pressure.
Men are pissed at being judged by the thickness of their wallets, the number of their possessions, including a status wagon and a fine castle, their future ability to provide, and whether they pass as good-looking enough to merit the interest of a good-looking woman.
However, the other side of this coin, the elitism and materialism which define beauty
as something that only well-moneyed women can afford, often escapes their awareness.
If the women whose names show up in the media, and have become household words in man caves, are part of an affluent elite, what woman is going to want to pale in comparison to these women in her man's eyes? She won't, and that is one reason she's paying attention to the thickness of his wallet.
So while you're decrying women's materialism, which measures men up, among many other things, for their ability to provide for remaking her according to this affluent image, you are also positively drooling over that which material wealth enables: mainly an illusion or image created by makeup, hair styling, clothing, personal services, which your average female wage slaves cannot begin to compete with for lack of resources. And if you overlook this, don't wonder that she lacks confidence or sometimes hates herself or you for comparing her to something that's not too real in the first place and definitely not attainable by her. She's tired of falling short to one of materialism's tyrannies.
Don't believe me? Google models and actresses without makeup. You'll see some true beauties, but you'll also see some women who are only pictured in a glossy collection of pages due to their elite status and someone's talent as a makeup artist. Some of them look quite ordinary without their props. And if they had to work a full-time job and wipe their own asses, well, you know where I'm going with this...
In sum, if you find that you subscribe to some of these tyrannies which don't affect you personally, while rejecting the ones which do, you're probably just a member of this culture. However, if you're on a learning curve, discovering your blind spots as you go, that is truly admirable. See you on the curve.
References:
From those of us who love the soft, curvaceous, busty as well as sweet woman....thank you. My wife is all of that as well as strong, caring and loving. Life is good with her at my side.
It is nice to here from you, Alford, and that you got so lucky in love.
Thank you, Phillip, for your encouraging comment to those of us who haven't looked 14 since we were 11. All the best to you and your wife.
James, thank you also for mentioning some other tyrannies, including those now aimed at men who look like men.
It reminded me of a friend's personal story of sitting in a law class with two females behind him, who felt so emboldened that they made quite audacious sounds of disgust and nasty comments about the hair showing above his neck line. A Russian massage therapist (female) had also offered to wax his back so he could be more attractive to women—-the stuff of Gulag Archipelago torture stories... He also recounted a check up, where he became aware of the nurse's rather primal reaction to seeing his hairy chest. Not being under 35, this didn't surprise me.
It really does go both ways. Listening to a young co-worker list all of the qualities, physical and otherwise, that would knock a candidate for boyfriend out of the running, made me shake my head in the privacy of my wage slave cubicle.
Lili