-14 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: What's something you never understood about the opposite gender?
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Comment by ladyteruki at 09/03/2025 at 00:44 UTC
22 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I don't think jealousy and cattiness are the main by-product of this. The first victims of these comparisons are ourselves. We're supposed to be like the depictions of beauty we see everywhere. And at its core, it's a violent experience.
Here's the thing : for men, seeing beautiful women on billboards, tv, video games, magazines, the Internet, etc., means they can consume that beauty. It's primarily something positive for them. But for women, seeing beautiful women on billboards, tv, video games, magazines, the Internet, etc., means pressure. It's implicitely negative because the reminder is constant that you don't look like that, or not enough, and that your value as a woman depends on it. Should we feel that way ? No, of course not. It'd be nice if we could just objectively decide to ignore it overnight ; but women just as well as men evolve in a society which has expectations for them, and it's hard to escape them entirely (and the social punishment for doing it is nothing to ignore).
That feeling of inadequation is everywhere, it's embedded in dozens of industries with billions of profit from it. So it's not a matter of jealousy or cattiness, it's a matter of being reminded constantly that we are expected to look better than we do now, even though we are perfectly fine right now. Even though we have so many other worries than our appearance...
The violence here is not turned against other women (not usually, at least), we mostly turn it against ourselves, by adding 5 more steps to the skin routine, depriving ourselves of more foods, buying additional products, spending increased time worrying about what we look like, and so on.