Challenge: reset standards of physical attractiveness & unattractiveness

Fenestella

Banned
One school of thought says that most people are attracted to the widely appreciated traits such as symmetry, just pupillary distance, mild or minimal nasion depression, steep forehead, orthognathism, callipygousness...because of culture rather than nature.

So how to cultivate the masses to be attracted to the unappreciated traits which have led to ridicule, rejection, insecurity, and involuntary celibacy?
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
One school of thought says that most people are attracted to the widely appreciated traits such as symmetry, just pupillary distance, mild or minimal nasion depression, steep forehead, orthognathism, callipygousness...because of culture rather than nature.

So how to cultivate the masses to be attracted to the unappreciated traits which have led to ridicule, rejection, insecurity, and involuntary celibacy?
Almost everyone, in every culture prefers symmetry. It’s biological instinct not cultural. Symmetry is a sign of good genetics.

I think this probably belongs in pre-1900 or Chat.
 
So how to cultivate the masses to be attracted to the unappreciated traits which have led to ridicule, rejection, insecurity, and involuntary celibacy?
This happened multiple times in Europe, for example before the 1850s(?) the female gold standard of beauty was being overweight and pale, women of status carried sun screens with them wherever they went well into the 1900s. This changed to thin and bronze colored, thin because being overweight became a sign of poverty, you cant afford proper, healthy food, and tanning becuase it shows you have time and money to travel to exotic, sunny places. In East Asia being pale is still the beauty stanard, there on beaches you'll see plenty of women wearing full body swimsuits covering even their faces.
 
It's hard to mess with the principles of evolutionary biology, most of the traits we associate with attractiveness are a proxy for some combination of health, material wealth, and social status. I doubt there any societies where severe acne or morbid obesity are considered attractive.

Maybe if a cabal of incels and fat positivity activists takes over a developed country they would launch a genetic engineering or selective breeding program to make a dystopia where everyone is equally unattractive (essentially redistributing attractiveness), but that seems like a low probability scenario.
 
This happened multiple times in Europe, for example before the 1850s(?) the female gold standard of beauty was being overweight and pale, women of status carried sun screens with them wherever they went well into the 1900s.

I suspect this was just a thing for aristocrats, and not adopted by the rest of society. Certainly the aristos spent considerable time and effort banging hot young common women.
 
I suspect this was just a thing for aristocrats, and not adopted by the rest of society. Certainly the aristos spent considerable time and effort banging hot young common women.
Their ideal of beauty would be influenced by all the baroque paintings around them, not exactly todays standard of beauty, though i'm pretty sure that anything was fair game, just as it is today.

492px-The_Three_Graces%2C_by_Peter_Paul_Rubens%2C_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg
 
My hunch is that a long-term reset would be impossible because so much of what we consider attractive is hardwired into our biology. Think about ancient Greek sculptures of warriors and goddesses etc; the men are still ripped by modern standards and the women would still command attention today. Albeit that they would be more attractive if their arms and noses hadn't been knocked off.

Fashion, that's another matter. I've always assumed that the vogue for overweight women during Rubens' time was just that, a fad. This is assuming that he was painting the feminine ideal, and not just the models he could get for the price he was willing to pay, and furthermore I've never liked the idea of basing our view of the past on classical paintings. Sculpture is another matter because even in Greek times the goal was generally to create an accurate copy of real life, whereas painting gives the artist considerable leeway to gild the lily.

Fashion is another matter. It just takes a lot of advertising. But it doesn't last. When the advertising stops the fashion dies off. When I was very young punk fashion made a kind of anti-beauty attractive - the designs of Vivienne Westwood were deliberately provocative - and more recently tattoos, piercings, buttock injections have come into vogue. Someone like Blac Chyna does not conform to traditional western notions of beauty, but I'm skeptical that her highly artificial look has lasting power.

Blac Chyna doesn't pop up on Alternatehistory very often.
 
One school of thought says that most people are attracted to the widely appreciated traits such as symmetry, just pupillary distance, mild or minimal nasion depression, steep forehead, orthognathism, callipygousness...because of culture rather than nature.

So how to cultivate the masses to be attracted to the unappreciated traits which have led to ridicule, rejection, insecurity, and involuntary celibacy?
ASB or pessimistic FH. Your choice. You'd need a literal incel revolution. The way this 21st century is turning into a shitshow expect it to happen sometime in some small country within the next 50-75 years.

You think communism leads to bodycounts? imagine the pent up rage of incels given a piece of land and serfs to lord over.
 
If a severe uptick of anorexia were to happen, a strong societal/governmental pushback might see acceptable weight norms revert to 19. century.
 
Back in the old old days esp in Europe , fat women were seen as healthy and attractive while skinny women were viewed as sickly and unhealthy
 
ASB or pessimistic FH. Your choice. You'd need a literal incel revolution. The way this 21st century is turning into a shitshow expect it to happen sometime in some small country within the next 50-75 years.

Incels are a western ideology/community, the non-western version manifests itself as the people in China who do mass stabbings or in the Middle East as recruits for ISIS/other terrorist groups. An incel revolution wouldn't make any sense except in a country which has a severe gender imbalance, which there are several, but the men in those societies wouldn't rise up over being incels. Rest assured, you won't see some major city being renamed "Elliot Rodger City" by some brutal regime except in some work of black comedy.
 
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