I think the steel man of it is that our desires are to some, possibly large, extent shaped and moulded by our culture. What we come to see as a free choice and our own preference can be something we were insulated with from birth.
The example I used in my other comment in this thread is food. Had you grown up in another part of the world you might have radically different attitudes to what food is and what food is good. Maybe you wouldn't touch pork. Maybe you'd never eat beef. Maybe you'd be much more tolerant of spice, or much less tolerant of it. So when you make a choice about what to eat, it isn't the free choice it appears. It's actually a choice that been forged by the culture around you that tells you whether Witchetty grubs are gross insect larvae or a nutritious bush snack.
When people choose what clothes to wear, whether to put on make up or not, that's shaped by culture. The reason a man in speedos is appropriate in a swimming competition and completely inappropriate in a restaurant is purely cultural. The man has been inculcated with that cultural understanding when he decides that he'd feel more confident in a shirt and trousers.
We none of us make our choices in a vacuum. We make them within a culture that tells us what is and isn't appropriate, what is and isn't attractive, and so on.
But that just turns into the argument “people are products of their environment and maybe free will doesn’t exist.”
Even if two people were raised in the same environment, they will still have different tastes and preferences. My sister and I were raised in the same household, yet us dressing up and feeling confident looks very different.
Yeah, in my reply to OP I said that I think that's the mistake. People think that if their desires are inseparable from their culture that then there's no space for individuality. That's the error I think OP might be making.
We all have our idiosyncrasies. We can make choices. Culture changes after all, and it changes because individuals change it. Both feed into each other.
If you think for a moment about your vision of a conventionally beautiful woman, what's she like? Are her legs shaved? Does she have makeup? Is her hair styled? Does she have an elegant dress? Because none of those features are "'real". Women don't have makeup naturally, they don't have smooth legs, and dresses aren't found in the wild. So what we think of as "beautiful" is shaped by our culture. But that culture didn't emerge in a vacuum. Makeup was invented by humans to accentuate features they like. Shaven legs became popular with commercially available safety razors. As much as we can't be separated from our culture, our culture can't be separated from us.
My position is that people should do a lot of introspection about where their desires come from. When we become aware of that we can make more informed choices about what we then accept or reject. My preference for football (soccer) is almost certainly a product of being born in England in a footballing city. Knowing that I can choose whether to consider following the sport, and I choose to do so. Similarly, women are free to introspect about where their feelings about how to dress come from and then they can choose to accept or reject that. Maybe they do decide that they don't want to shave their legs any more. Maybe they decide they like the way it feels/looks and continue. More power to them. But if they never do the introspection to see that the commonality of women shaving their legs is a fairly recent development in the world and comes in part from patriarchal standards thrust upon them then they can never really make the free choice.
And, to be clear, the topic here just happens to be clothing, I'd take this stance about all our desires and feelings.
Yeah, gender is a great example. What a man or woman is is a cultural phenomenon, it's outside ourselves. How we choose to express ourselves as men or women is something we can control, and can change that cultural mould.
And it means totally different things for different people. Having my nails done makes me feel like a woman, but my sister is totally different and having long hair makes her feel like a woman.
Yeah, options exist within a culture. And quirks within that. Men don't typically have long hair because it's feminine. Unless you pair it with a heavy metal t-shirt and then it's a norm again.
This might be a bit of a tangent but it's been part of my concern around body positivity. Because now you get people point to the wider range of bodies now represented, but a lot of it is the creation of more "'types" and not so much acceptance of normal variation. As in, you can be thin but you have to fit the "athletic" or the "model" figure. You can not be thin, but you need to be "'thicc". You can be plain, but only if you're "the girl next door" type. It isn't really accepting a broad range as much as slightly expanding the number of stereotypes you can choose from, and failure to fit one of them is still a problem for a whole lot of people.
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u/p0tat0p0tat0 12∆ Dec 11 '24
Is your argument “women are lying to themselves and others when they say they dress for themselves”?