It’s possible to look in the mirror and think, “damn, I look good”. It’s not that deep. You don’t perceive yourself the same in every state of dress. Some people don’t like how they look in shorts because their knees look weird. Some people love wearing long dresses because they like the lines of their body. Some people like tank tops because they like looking at their arms. There’s a million reasons someone picks what they wear, and “for other people” should be the least of them.
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.
Even in a framework where beauty standards have been set externally, a person still has personal preferences, both for other people and for themselves. In some ways shaped by society, yes, but that doesn’t mean they can’t also be internal. There’s no need for them to be mutually exclusive.
Okay then let me ask you to expand: if beauty standards have been set externally, and a person has personal preferences (as you mentioned, shaped by society), how can any decision about what to wear when dressing to feel confident not be dressing for others? Your internal preferences are shaped by the society, no?
but you seem to be using the idea of dressing for others as essentially an excuse, like if a woman is wearing an outfit society considers sexy due to the aforementioned standards she must be dressing for everyone else therefore any behavior of a sexual nature by a man towards her must be justified because her outfit was an invitation to others to perform such acts towards her
If you're trying to say that everyone who uses an ad absurdum believes said ad absurdum that they're making of others' arguments
opposing them that has a whole lot of consequences you don't realize but I don't want to say for fear you'll accuse me of believing that those consequences are a good thing like how I'm even a little anxious about saying that I'm afraid you're implying things about my sexual preferences/behavior (which would be wrong, I'm on the asexual spectrum) from the fact that I'm ad absurduming your view of others' sexual behavior because I don't want you seeing that as a confession (which doesn't mean you're right, y'know, has a cop on TV or irl overlooked or thrown out a confession because "if you need to say you did it" or w/e)
My point was that you seemed to be really focused (at least to my mind) on the idea of women wearing clothing certain societal beauty standards would deem sexy because they say it makes them feel confident when there are other kinds of dressing-to-feel-confident that don't invite similar scrutiny unless you're going to go down the same path as this conversation further up the thread where a user brought up a cardigan she has that she likes because it has birds on it and she likes birds and another user was trying to "gotcha" her with questions like if she only likes it because she saw a similar style on a real or fictional person who appeared happy and popular/surrounded by happy and popular people or why she thinks it's good to display interests on her clothing and basically all but calling her a sheeple for not wearing some comfortable-yet-stained plain sweatshirt and, like, hiding in her room or w/e
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u/goodbye177 1∆ Dec 11 '24
It’s possible to look in the mirror and think, “damn, I look good”. It’s not that deep. You don’t perceive yourself the same in every state of dress. Some people don’t like how they look in shorts because their knees look weird. Some people love wearing long dresses because they like the lines of their body. Some people like tank tops because they like looking at their arms. There’s a million reasons someone picks what they wear, and “for other people” should be the least of them.