Beauty & Misogyny

One person's dream can be another's nightmare. What influences our idealization is the content that inhabits our waking life. As a person of many demographics, the male one, is my most damaging one. Damning women, in turn, damning us all.

When the dreams a man conjures manifest itself at the expense of a woman, that's a problem. Even if you are a man who doesn't fantasize about hurting women: Andrew Tate, your limiting beliefs will eventually harm them.

Thoughts will bleed vitality into actions and words. We dream of a certain life, pleasures, and future. I trace my daydreams and wonder how many of them fail women. Before we discuss this meta, let us bring in the context.

Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys is a paradigm fractalizing read that will splinter your psyche into cream corn and bone shards. Though dated, the core principles are invaluable if you desire to have an honest mediation on ethics. The limiting belief that taint our dream fiction is objectification.

A person is sexually objectified when her sexual parts or sexual functions are separated from the rest of her personality and reduced to the status of mere instruments or else regarded as if they were capable of representing her.

What got me learning about objectification was a conversation with a dear friend. Disclaimer: his limiting beliefs are used here for analysis, not judgment. His stark words helped me understand the same illness, is also infecting me. We were going back & forth about a girl he was considering to date. Him resisting and me, gasing her up.

Yet, it came down to her "being too skinny." Objectively she was a normal BMI. However, she isn't the baddie or thicc archetype: a beauty standard invented by men, to please men, to regulate women into a sort of soft pornographic categorization. They have to look like porn stars, but hell if they act like one.

When do we stop sucking the milk glands of double-think? The trope of villains drinking milk, is a fitting hamartia for us. I get it, attraction is a necessary artifice for relationships. But she is a girl who is deeply introspective, intellectual, talented, a whole human being. Her inner landscape is an entire universe. A person who can't be proportioned on a pie chart, but resides on her own dessert.

To deny all of that because of an inherited narration of a woman's body is kind of absurd. It's absurd that it is thought instantaneously. It's taken for face value and not questioned. It's tragic because one's limiting beliefs are ingrained, neurochemically confirmed by dopamine and electricity. We reinforce wiring with narration, a faulty duo that we should reconsider inviting over.

Examples of misogyny in beauty:

Makeup expectations.

Plastic surgery.

Femininity: a form of subornation.

Force-feeding or starvation.

High heels, sex-centered clothing.

Female Genital Mutilation.

These things are the outcome of man's dream-fi. This is a fiction that we have written or at least co-authored. As I said, limiting beliefs bleed into actions and words. Though most men are not at fault, we are still responsible for how we proceed. Mediocre thinking is dangerous. I can't speak on what can be done, but we can come to a new meta.

Meta: an overarching theory or set of beliefs that guide what information we perceive and how we evaluate that information. A meta will trickle down and affect other theories like water droplets falling down a spider web.

As a poet and a writer, you can imagine how much cliché objectifying imagery perpetuates my works. Highlighting women as muses or objects to be critiqued or loved like a manufactured art piece. The problem is that we hold woman up to unrealistic expectations, devaluing how they actuating are.

Flawed-complex-grand humans who don't need to be graded to a metric of aestheticism. We quantify stars because of their power and mystery. We bend to the will of stars, and thus respect them. E.g. NASA and sunscreen. When we quantify woman, its because we sing songs of their femininity.

We reinforce our perception that they are things to acquire, like a new personality trait for our own self-actualization. We want to be better men through them. We want to be emotionally expressive through them. Secondarily, for them.

However, when we get out of their way, we can compliment them. Think about all the women who have changed the world: scientists, artists, philosophers, inventors, etc. When we desire them, it should be for all the higher functions they can do, not simply because they were born with a certain kind of dermis we fancy.

This world is going to change. We are going to invent new tech, new norms, and theories to govern our reality. This world was built on so much blood. Yet, we optimistically look to be better. I think we have that at least going for our species. Let us not exploit women as a tool to reach a final form, (that which probably doesn't even exist.)

The ocean is overused, the children are neglected, our world is dying.

We open up their door, help them put on their coat, and shield them from the weather. We walk them hand and hand into oblivion with a warm, "I love you so much dear."