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[quote=Anonymous]I really hate this thing women do where in order to challenge beauty conventions, they have to denigrate women who naturally conform to them.

I mean, yes, there have been preferences for blonde hair and blue eyes in the past and there are awful examples of fascists using this "ideal" to justify violence against people who did not conform to it. It's awful. But that doesn't mean women with blonde hair and blue eyes are ugly or less attractive. It means that it's racist and terribly to idolize blonde hair and blue eyes over other features. Many (but not all) cultures on the planet have troubling colorism standards that often preference lighter skin over darker skin. Also terrible! Does not mean having lighter skin is bad, just that it's not better than darker skin.

And you see the same stuff when people talk about expectation that women be thin -- people will start claiming thin women are ugly, that "real women have curves" and other efforts to simply flip the script and elevate one body type over another. It is so tiresome.

I honestly believe you can find great beauty in people of any skin tone or hair color or eye color, any body type. I also think that being beautiful is not the most important quality a person can have, and that it should matter a lot less than we make it out to. I especially think we should stop conceptualizing female beauty based on the preferences of men, as though women only exist to be visually pleasing to men, or as though we only exist to be visually pleasing at all.

Just stop. We can reject the toxic racism, colorism, and fat phobia in our culture without simply reversing it. No one was ever being oppressed by an army of powerful, thin, blonde, blue-eyed women. They were oppressed by angry men who decided to make that the standard as an excuse to punish people they didn't like. Reject Hitler, not Christy Brinkley. She didn't actually do anything to you.[/quote]

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