Contemplating investing in my first quality pair of dress shoes - new member, noob questions :/

[raggedsweater]

My use and abuse of the word "may" is very intentional.

 

[starro]

1) There are a million examples of both contemporary and "pre-modern" cultures where beauty doesn't follow today's Western standard. I mean, seriously, the list is too long -- binding of feet, stretching of bones, ideas that corpulent people are more desirable because weight is linked to wealth, etc. Even as recent as the 1920s, women in the US sought to hide curves. Ever seen the painting Venus at a Mirror?

I'm going to unpack footbinding here, since I was the one originally to bring it up. According to you, mangled feet--which are the result of forcibly constraining the foot's natural growth, beginning when the girl is less than 1 year old and never removing the instrument until she's well into adulthood, forcing the bone back into the flesh and the flesh back into the bone, all in this unnatural attempt to eliminate a woman's mobility--can be considered beautiful by a sane and morally upstanding person?

For your theory of cultural relativism to work, you hold that while we Westerners find foot binding abhorrent, inhuman, and a definite form of torture--and as far away as one can get from beauty as possible--people from a different culture, a few generations ago, found beauty in such a practice. Since a bound foot is nothing but the creation of years upon years of unending torture and mistreatment, to find the product beautiful those same people--according to you--must also think highly of the creative process that gave rise to bound feet, and they must also by necessity approve of the creators (craftsmen if you will): both the original architect of the social policy and the men down the ages who administered this gruesome practice. Is not someone who approves the torturer, who delights in the act of torture, and who finds beauty in the final fruit of torture a sadist?

You claim that while "today's Western standards" finds no beauty in footbinding (and quite a lot of moral revulsion, I might add!), bound feet were accepted as beauties in another culture, only a few generations removed. For a culture to hold something as a symbol of beauty, a critical mass of people in that culture must believe that symbol wholeheartedly. So you hold that large numbers of East Asians only a few generations ago found the fruit of torture beautiful, admired the crafting process, and approved of the torturers and enablers. You believe that many East Asians a century ago were sadists. And the people in East Asian cultures today, you hold, are descendants of either torturers or sadists.

By emphasizing the distinctness of the West from the "pre-modern" East (your words), you are downplaying any role torturers and sadists have played in shaping Western culture. In fact, by citing footbinding as an example of subjective beauty, you make torture and sadism definitional of Eastern culture. And in this false dichotomy the West is automatically disassociated from any part of the torture and sadism that have shaped, and continue to shape, its culture. What do we call this Manichaean act of presenting the West as a force for good, and native cultures as a force for evil? We call it colonialism, since Western colonial powers use this form of propaganda to extend their rule. Your position for subjective beauty standards is a position in favor of colonialism. It is remarkably insidious how you use an incidence of torture and sadism to advance the cause of imperial colonialism.

Furthermore, your argument in favor of beauty as a wishy-washy concept absolves the very culprits who inflicted torture and sadism on that culture. In your defense of Western imperialist rule, you by necessity have to defend any other form of oppression, including the intra-cultural oppression of the fairer sex falsely sold as neo-Confucianism. It is your relativist habits that blind you to the naked and obvious truth: that footbinding has zero association with beauty, or its standards, but rather is a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful against the powerless. It is the wielders of that weapon, the torturers and sadists, who propagate the lie that their victims are to achieve beauty through their debilitating torture, and you--either gullibly or guilefully--believed their lie.

This is the ugly truth lurking behind relativism of any stripe: moral, aesthetic, cultural. The seeming acceptance of everyone's values as of equal weighting is the attractive veneer covering up all the dark forces we have experienced in this world: authoritarianism, subjugation, the denial of truth and reality. Whenever a dictatorial or fascist regime comes into power, relativists will espouse views such as yours, seeking to flatten any objective standards for truth and excellence. Wittingly or unwittingly, your position advances the cause of those dark forces, because while in an anarchy of society a strongman emerges to rule over the people, in an anarchy of ideas he prevents any opposition from toppling him.

We all know the implications if you wittingly adopts this position, in direct benefit of an oppressor, be it an individual or state. Even if unwittingly, the effects are just as far-reaching, for the oppressor finds his useful idiots to have longer shelf life than mercenaries or spies. And thus, ironically, your facade of egalitarianism is really a notch on the scoreboard for cultural superiority, atrocity minimization, and nihilistic propaganda.

 

[raggedsweater]

I must be stupid, too, because I don't have the attention span to read that. Whatever happened to brevity?

 

[starro]

I must be stupid, too, because I don't have the attention span to read that. Whatever happened to brevity?

Yeah! Why couldn't the Gettysburg Address be delivered in a tweet?

 

[raggedsweater]

I'm not THAT stupid :cough, cough:

 

[Caustic Man]

It's funny because the Gettysburg address was orders of magnitude shorter than the speech that preceded it. Which one does everyone remember?

 

[Kierrane]

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein (or whatever, i used google)

 

[starro]

Threads go off topic. It happens. The sad thing to me is that starro's lesser stupidity is distracting from K's greater stupidity. Or maybe that's a good thing. I haven't decided.

No you're the bigger idiot!

Have I made my point convincingly enough?

The personalities and "styles" on this forum are something else. I'm not used to the frank nature of people here, I suppose. Calling each other out, criticizing and name calling. I'm not sure if it's a reflection of reality or a product of relative anonymity. Maybe this isn't even representative of the forum as a whole... I'm not opposed to it. It's an interesting distraction on the Friday.

Okay, I'll chime in.

Starro: Beauty is subjective and categorically broad. Attraction is, in part, biological.

Dieworkwear: Our **** monkey origins may form the foundation for all of our social tendencies, hence the study of evolutionary aesthetics.

Kierrane: That was funny.

Caustic man: Even funnier.

I myself am stuck on a hospital bed, with lots of time to kill.

Feel free to hold whatever theory you wish. Once your unparticulated musings coalesce into a semblance of a position, you're welcome to step into the arena.

 

[raggedsweater]

When I don't understand something well, I don't try to say much. Then again, sometimes that's just not much more to say.

Beauty IS subjective.

 

[starro]

It's funny because the Gettysburg address was orders of magnitude shorter than the speech that preceded it. Which one does everyone remember?

Ok let me try again.

Objective standards, good. Relativism, evil. Ooh ooh, ahh ahh. Have a banana.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein (or whatever, i used google)

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not quite so sure about the former."
- Albert Einstein, aka Cousin F*cker

 

[starro]

.

 

[starro]

When I don't understand something well, I don't try to say much. Then again, sometimes that's just not much more to say.

Beauty IS subjective.

Beauty is NOOOT subjective.

There, another successful rebuttal.

 

[Kierrane]

Beauty is subjective, but so is taste and style. Yet we've had 6(?) pages on the point.

It is a good cure for boredom though

 

[raggedsweater]

A light bulb just appeared above my monkey brain. Styleforum - Of course it must have an inordinate share of vanity in here. Now, I can now go about and excuse anyone's behavior here. Par for the course.

 

[raggedsweater]

I've done extensive research (Google) on this topic and evidence suggests beauty is subjective.

https://www.google.com/search?q=is+beauty+subjective+or+objective&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8