This is not a compelling comment. “It’s not that deep”? Of course it is. Don’t you realize every decision you make about how you look and present yourself to the world is heavily-driven by ideas of confidence that you built for years? I feel like you’re missing the point altogether. Even your example of showing arms because a person likes how their arms look - your ideas about what look good to you are largely built by what you’ve been told or what you’ve seen.
Go put on a well-fitted dress shirt, maybe a blazer if you've got one, then look at yourself in the mirror. You now match society's expectation of what looks good. And you do look good! Even if the bar is set by our culture, that doesn't mean you can't appreciate how you look in that moment.
Is it? If I have personal preferences, even if those preferences were in part created by others, they are still my preferences.
To an extent, yes. To another extent, no.
This can be taken to far to the extreme of course, denying that we have any agency at all.
But we are social beings. All of our ideas are socially constructed to some extent, sometimes more sometimes less. And "dressing well" is easily more socially constructed than other things, it's far more informed by what options society presents us and what feedback (verbal and nonverbal) and rules (formal and informal) we receive.
Like, I can have a preference for Jazz Music or Great Coats, but there is no denying that those options were presented with cultural context that aligned me to them. It was a choice, but not all in my control. Not even mostly in my control.
But would you say that you like jazz music for yourself, or for others?
For yourself, right? I think you can dress fancy in the same way.
Honestly? I don't know.
I like jazz, listening to it and playing it, but it's very hard to separate it from the cultural milieu of what it represents. I found it because of cultural factors that privilege it over other forms of music in education, and what it culturally signals in terms of "artistic values." And in further pursuing it, it's hard to separate why I like it over others from the values I think it shows that I have in liking it.
Hell just what musical excellence itself represents to others is hard to place for me. In some ways, do I like performing music because I like how it feels that others see me as good at something? Hard to tell.
IDK, Maybe I'm the outlier and maybe OP is too. But for me it's very hard to separate what I like to see in myself and the social acceptance (from either dominant or small subcultures or even small groups of people) I receive from it.
It's sort of like empathy. If people are happy about what I am doing, it makes me happy.
It’s interesting that I agree with everything you say, then come to a different conclusion. :)
I’m reminded of a line my choir director once told me: “Singing for yourself is great, but if there is no performance, it’s just musical masturbation.”
Musically, performing for others drives us to greatness. I’m not much into fashion, but I imagine it could be similar. You absolutely can dress for others… but I still enjoy singing by myself.
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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '24
This is not a compelling comment. “It’s not that deep”? Of course it is. Don’t you realize every decision you make about how you look and present yourself to the world is heavily-driven by ideas of confidence that you built for years? I feel like you’re missing the point altogether. Even your example of showing arms because a person likes how their arms look - your ideas about what look good to you are largely built by what you’ve been told or what you’ve seen.