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Comment by leidenfrost | Hacker News Reader

This relates to a criticism I have for woke and SJW people: Do they follow the same tendency?

Most SJW people I know tend to be critical of the idea of a beauty standard at all, which is an interesting initiative if they can actually pull it off. And I do agree that it would be nice to stop being biased towards conventionally attractive people.

Then, with that logic, we should be seeing "woke couples" who don't follow that tendency: "Conventionally attractive" people with "conventionally ugly" partners, not with the idea of having a trophy or "liking ugly people", but with the same power dynamics as a couple where both parts are equally attractive. Since both are woke, in their own eyes the idea of being ugly or pretty either shouldn't exist, or be based around some very different personal attributes (like empathy or intelligence, perhaps).

Sadly, I almost never see it happen.

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I don’t know if you get it. Just because someone isn’t stereotypically attractive doesn’t mean they aren’t hot in some other way.

I’m close to conventionally attractive but my type is shorter, overweight bearded guys (balding optional). There is no virtue signaling here, or “being attracted to what’s on the inside”. It’s still attraction, it just falls out of the standards set by men’s health magazine or w/e.

That’s what “woke” people are talking about when they say there’s not an objective 1-10 scale for attractiveness. We all have different types.

As a “woke SJW” I don’t think we’re on the same page for what it means to be “critical of the idea of a beauty standard”.

For example, to me being critical of a beauty standard is rejecting the following statement:

“All else equal, a person with double eyelids is more attractive than a person with single eyelids”

Widespread acceptance of the above statement culturally is an example of a beauty standard, and it’s the reason why eyelid surgery is the third most common cosmetic surgery in the world.

Rejecting this beauty standard does not mean I need to be attracted to every person with a mono eyelid nor have a partner with a mono eyelid.

> Rejecting this beauty standard does not mean I need to be attracted to every person with a mono eyelid nor have a partner with a mono eyelid.

You don't need to be attracted to _every_ person with single eyelids, unless you're attracted to every person with double ones. It's about treating both groups with the same standard.

And it also comes down to dating. If you don't try to incorporate your belief system into your own life, are you really rejecting it?

I see this all the time: I have fat friends, whose friends are all in for fat acceptance, yet when it comes to their own life, they avoid getting fat like the plague. They avoid being fat, their partners are almost never fat, and they share memes where the subject of ridicule is a fat person (not for being fat, but some other despicable attribute. But in the joke, they're always fat. Never athletic nor muscular).

Of course, it's not a 100% rule. We are all free to do whatever makes us most happy and nobody is obliged at gunpoint to do a radical shift overnight.

But If anyone subscribes to a core belief, it's expected to turn that belief into concrete actions in their life. Otherwise everything ends up being "web activism", and when you close the browser and go to the real world, everything stays the same.

Right, I largely agree with everything you’re writing. If you see an otherwise attractive guy and then he stands up and you realize he’s under 6’ and you are instantly turned off, you should examine your own preconceptions of beauty and reflect why you have such a toxic standard on height.

And so on for everything else.

I don’t even bring up weight because if you talk about being fat on the internet you get the “but you can change it” and “it’s for your own health” flame wars, and I don’t want the broader topic derailed.

GP made it sound like “I see SJWs with attractive partners, why are they such hypocrites” and while I’m sure there are hypocrites it’s also not the responsibility of any person to pick a partner that affirms their belief system. And certainly not for the sake of broadcasting this to internet commenters who want to feel confirmation bias about their views on “woke”

Your example is overly focused on a small detail. I think what the parent commenter means, is that it's fairly uncommon to see highly attractive women who subscribe to the idea of "everyone is beautiful" date conventionally unattractive men.

“Conventionally (un)attractive” aren’t well defined, but usually mean someone at the intersection of several/many beauty standards. Thin, busty, blond. Tall, dark, handsome. Pale, smooth skin, double eyelids. I just used one example for my post but the concept applies broadly.

And the same applies to attractive men with unattractive women. It's not necessarily a women vs men issue.

I don't think that many progressives actually believe or advocate that beauty doesn't exist. Generally what they advocate is that there is a wider variety of attractive body types than what is often depicted in media, that being unattractive should not be treated as a moral failure, and that society should avoid elevating physical attractiveness over competency for women.

There is an absurd tendency to deny and reject the presence of certain traits and behaviors that are common to animals and humans. The fact that we are aware of certain tendencies doesn't make us free from them. There is a clash between how we would like the world to look like and how it is. In the real world, women in general are physically weaker than men, most of them menstruate and so on. We can consider these things unfair but we can't change it, just like we can't change the fact that we feel physically attracted to attractive people, even though in some cases we might find them mentally/morally etc. repulsive. This constant denial is creating only problems for everyone, not just the people that have these beliefs.

Human nature is sometimes more malleable than we think.

Many aspects we attribute to human nature are products of a more subtle tribal instinct, yet influenced in a particular way by culture and nurture.

10,000 years ago people didn't consider other tribes as human. 100 years ago some people didn't even consider other races humans. Now, while racism still exist, we don't have those ideas anymore.

In short, let people cook and see what it changes over time.

Sometimes we see positive changes in our society.

Sometimes those movements crumble down due to its own futility.

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