Rosencrantz2
13d ago
But the assertion "I dress up for myself" directly implies that dressing up would be equally enjoyable regardless of whether one has an audience or not.
I think this is overstated. 'Dressing for yourself' can surely include feeling good when dressed up in public. You are participating in status games, you are expressing yourself, and you are turning heads because you enjoy the feeling of power that it gives you or because you are free of the anxiety of being judged or shamed when you know you're looking your best and your flaws have been minimised. That's markedly different than enjoying turning heads specifically because you want to make men horny. This is the difference between someone who dresses skimpily and whose primary satisfaction from that is attention from men, and someone who is interested in fashion and experiments with things that are orthogonal to basic male attraction (and the latter is a large amount of what people talk about on, say, your average style podcast – they are not always discussing how to be sexier in veiled terms, though they sometimes are, a lot of the time they are discussing trends, novelty and details of a kind that I daresay most men are pretty oblivious to and that are more to do with status, social impression, coolness and craft than sexiness).
By way of analogy, if everyone who claimed to be eating food "just for the taste" incidentally happened to be consuming a varied, balanced, nutrient-rich diet and expressed no interest in consuming tasty food with little nutritional value - it would be reasonable to discount their claims that this was their real motivation. Likewise if every male person who claimed to be pursuing orgasm purely for its own sake incidentally happened to only engage in sex acts which were likely to result in procreation (i.e. unprotected vaginal intercourse with nubile fertile ovulating females) and expressed no interest in pleasurable sex acts with little likelihood of procreation resulting. Or moreover, the counterfactual world in which food only tastes good if it's rich in nutrients and tastes disgusting otherwise; or in which orgasms only feel good if they are likely to result in procreation, and feel uncomfortable or painful otherwise.
I think the analogy for this would be a woman dressing with effort even though she doesn't want sexual attention and might actually be annoyed by it. That's pretty easy to imagine isn't it?
I also think you need to tease out many gradations of possible meaning in the spectrum of dressing for yourself vs dressing for others. I would think the primary meaning is that your objective is to feel good in such contexts that others think you look good or have matched the occasion (a form of female success). This inner feeling is going to be distinct from dressing up instrumentally just because you want e.g. male attention. Now sure there is an extreme interpretation of doing something for yourself that means you would get the pleasant feeling even if no one else can notice. But I don't think that is particularly central natural language usage. If you do carpentry for yourself as a hobby, you might be disillusioned if you were never allowed to give your wooden creations to anyone or show them to anyone. Part of their value lies in the pride you're able to take in showing them. But a lot of it is also in the feeling of mastery you have when working with wood and being able to create the 'kind of thing' that others would value. I think it would still be fair in such a scenario to say you were pursuing carpentry for yourself.
I also think it would be okay for a man to say they were pursuing orgasm for its own sake even though they actually could just get that via porn. (There are different flavours of orgasm only achievable with others.)
As an aside, I think women actually do often dress up by themselves. This is experimentation and practice I guess, but I think they enjoy it loads, from girlhood on.
Rosencrantz2
13d ago
Okay so compare: 'Evolution gave us a brain that enjoys different flavours because it gives us the nutrients to survive." With: 'Anyone who claims they eat food 'just for the taste' is full of shit. They are really doing it to get a proper range of nutrients.'
Or: 'Evolution gave us a brain that feels good during orgasm because it leads to reproduction." With: 'Anyone who claims they seek orgasm just for its own sake is full of shit.'
We find ourselves with the brains and reward systems we have. The good thing about human autonomy is that (in theory) we can often co-opt these systems for other motivations. Is it a neat capability we are in full control of? Absolutely not. But we can still distinguish why we do x from the historical reasons and general reasons for our proclivity to x.
Rosencrantz2
13d ago
That's not the crux though, one would expect evolution to give people a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive in public, rather than in private.
Rosencrantz2
13d ago
But humans also have brains big enough to create elaborate, usually post-hoc justifications for actions they take, and so they can pretend that dressing and acting in a way that effectively short-circuits the other sex's thought processes (b/c horny) and claim its all solely motivated by self-empowerment.
Is that really hypocritical though? Suppose evolution makes it enjoyable to dress in a way that's sexy to men. Why can't women now take that system of enjoyment nature has given them, and use it to intentionally get enjoyment for themselves with attracting men becoming a side effect? It seems kinda similar to evolution making us like certain flavours to help us get the right range of nutrients. Modern foodies taking that capacity for enjoyment given to us by evolution, and employing it for their own non-survival ends. At least in theory, the original evolutionary cause of the impulse can be acknowledged, but then co-opted.
Rosencrantz2
14d ago
Gonna disagree, why wouldn't evolution just make it feel good to be attractive, without providing us with its chain of reasoning?
Rosencrantz2
14d ago
"The way I dress/makeup is solely to feel good about myself! That it happens to 90% coincide with what makes men lust after me is completely irrelevant, its not about men's desires!" is the purest cope imaginable.
I don't think it has to be cope. Evolution isn't transparent to us: it is totally plausible that women naturally want to look good without actually 'feeling' the evolutionary reason why it benefits their genes to do so.
Rosencrantz2
27d ago
You could be arguing that, yes. I personally don't agree. My point in the above though is just that defending them against charges of being destroyers of society is very different to celebrating them as role models.
Rosencrantz2
27d ago
The dynamic is that someone (like JD Vance) attacks the childless cat women as destroyers of society, then others defend them, and that defence appears to some as if the childless cat women are being elevated into heroes. I think this is maybe sometimes a genuine mistake but probably more often a wilful misunderstanding done in order to deliver the minor vindication of being able to say, 'See how unfair it is? 40 year old women are portrayed as valuable empowered role models but us 40 year old men are once again seen as worthless.'
I would care if they were doing it even on a small scale, unless there was a good reason, but I don't think that particularly implies that bees' suffering matters. I think I'd be aggrieved by anyone buying any cool thing in order to pointlessly destroy it, living or not. And bees are cool.
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