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No, I'm not. "I think Sydney Sweeney is hot" is a subjective value judgement. "Sydney Sweeney is considered exceptionally attractive by millions of people" is a statement of fact, as is "millions of men would give away all their worldly possessions for one night with Sydney Sweeney". If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", it logically follows that a person considered beautiful by 1 million independent beholders is 100x more beautiful than a person who is only considered beautiful by 10,000 independent beholders. Given that, to the best of our knowledge, Sydney Sweeney's appearance is ultimately the product of her genes, it follows that Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce traits which are considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population – traits that a huge proportion of the population would either like to have for themselves, or would like their romantic partner to have. A reasonable compression of the previous sentence is "Sydney Sweeney has good genes".
Schizophrenia is estimated to be between 70-80% heritable. If presented with the option, would anyone choose to be schizophrenic?
There is no "differently abled": some traits are just intrinsically less desirable than others, and nobody actually believes that we're all created equal, much as they might pretend to (or cope by so doing). You can play this "no one is 'disabled', society has simply chosen to accommodate certain traits and not others" game as long as you please, but it's nonsense and everyone knows it.
The belief that "some people are more attractive than others" does not lead inevitably to Auschwitz.
I don't think this works with other forms of subjective taste. Most people like M&Ms better than they like aged Shropshire Blue - would pick the M&Ms over the cheese if given a choice of a free snack - but I don't think "M&Ms are better than Shropshire Blue" is a reasonable compression of that statistical fact, let alone "M&Ms are good snacks (and Shropshire Blue isn't)". This is what I mean when I say that I value diversity.
I feel very keenly that the world would be a worse, duller place if everybody conformed to bog-standard majority tastes - if nobody liked blue cheese. There's nothing wrong with sophisticated gastronomy being a niche taste, there's nothing wrong with most people finding Sydney Sweeney to be the pinnacle of attractiveness, but the moment you try to turn a subjective trend into a normative statement, you necessarily imply that in some sense, people who aren't attracted to Sydney Sweenney are in some objective sense "wrong", that it would make more sense if everybody was into Sydney Sweeney and M&Ms. That way does not necessarily lie Auschwitz, but accepting such a precept does lead in a very direct sense to envisioning a utopia as a conformist, monotonous Brave New World-type society that massively curtails the wonderful variety of possible human experience.
You seem positively hell-bent on misunderstanding what I'm saying.
Let's compare with financial capital. Alice has $1,000 in her bank account, and Bob has $100,000 in his. No one would dispute that, all things being equal, Bob has more financial capital than Alice. There are certain disadvantages associated with having more rather than less financial capital (as they say, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose), but all things being equal, most people would rather be in Bob's shoes than Alice's. There might well be people who would refuse to do business with Bob on principle, but no one really disputes that Bob's financial capital affords him a greater range of opportunities than are available to Alice. This is not a normative statement: I'm not saying "it is an inexorable law of the universe that having $100k is morally superior to having $1k". It is simply a factual statement that, ceteris paribus, people with $100k in their bank account can do more things than people with only $1k, and hence that most people would rather have $100k than $1k if they could help it. This statement remains true even if you, personally, would rather not have $100k in your bank account, for one reason or another.
Now consider Sydney Sweeney. Her appearance affords her a great deal of social capital. Men will buy her expensive things in hopes of going to bed with her. People likely assume she possesses positive traits unrelated to her beauty which she may not actually possess. She has the privilege of working in, frankly, physically and mentally unchallenging jobs, in which she's paid extravagant sums of money largely just to show up and look pretty. (For the "jeans/genes" ad, she probably got paid more for eight hours' work than both of us will collectively see in our lifetimes.) If she wanted to, she could surely marry a wealthy man who would provide for her and fulfil her every whim, all for the low, low price of keeping herself trim and fetching (which she was doing anyway) and missionary sex with the lights off every other week. Of course not everyone is attracted to her, but that doesn't matter: enough people are that it's a fact about the world she can take advantage of. These facts don't in any way imply that her beauty is the only "correct" kind of beauty, or that the only beautiful women are women who look like her: there are doubtless women who look nothing like her, but whose appearances afford them a comparable level of social capital (e.g. female K-pop singers, Bollywood starlets etc.). Doubtless there are certain disadvantages associated with being unusually attractive (even before she was famous, she probably faced a disproportionate amount of street harassment, and probably struggles to be taken seriously) – but all things being equal, most women rather be in Sydney Sweeney's shoes than the shoes of a less attractive woman.
So when I say "Sydney Sweeney has great genes", all that means is "Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce physical traits considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population, a fact which affords her a great deal of social capital". This is not a value judgement, nor a normative statement: it is simply a statement of fact. It doesn't imply that there's anything wrong with you if you don't want to fuck her or would rather not look like her. You might personally find another woman (whom the average man might consider a 6 on a good day) more attractive than Sweeney. That's a perfectly legitimate preference to have – but it doesn't change the fact that Sweeney has more social capital than the 6 in question. And you might say that a big chunk of the social capital Sweeney enjoys is not because she's hot but because she's famous – but that's bullshit. Even in the counterfactual world where Sydney Sweeney wasn't famous, if she found herself in the same nightclub as Rebel Wilson, I know who'd be paying for her own drinks.
Compare with your M&Ms example. The statement "M&Ms are delicious" doesn't in any way imply that Shropshire Blue isn't delicious. But more people consider M&Ms delicious than consider Shropshire Blue delicious, a fact which is reflected in the respective net worths of Mars Inc. and the Colston Bassett Dairy. If I asked a hundred people "would you rather control the assets of Mars Inc. or the Colston Bassett Dairy?" almost everyone would say the former, including people who personally prefer Shropshire Blue to M&Ms. Likewise here: if given a choice between becoming Sydney Sweeney or becoming a random unattractive woman, the overwhelming majority of women would pick the former, including women who don't personally find Sydney Sweeney physically attractive. And that includes women who claim to believe that men only find Sydney Sweeney hot because they've been "brainwashed by Eurocentric beauty standards" or whatever. I don't think the responses would be especially different if you clarified that, post-transformation, you don't get to keep any of Sweeney's monetary or tangible assets (I mean, obviously the... err, other assets are part of the deal): women understand that Sweeney's appearance alone affords her an enviable amount of social capital.
Oh sure, sure: some woke women would answer my hypothetical with "I'd rather live in a world in which a woman's social capital was not primarily determined by her appearance" or "I'd rather live in a world in which everyone enjoyed exactly the same amount of social capital". But gun to their head, even these women would pick being Sydney Sweeney over being a random unattractive woman.
Last point: Freddie deBoer has long argued that the most common pathology among people who describe themselves as on the left is a fundamental failure to understand the "is-ought" distinction. As I say, when I said that "Sydney Sweeney has great genes", all I mean is that her genetic makeup means lots of people find her very attractive, which affords her a great deal of social capital. I'm not endorsing this state of affairs: I'm not saying she deserves to possess the social capital she currently enjoys. No one is arguing that she isn't a winner of the genetic lottery. But it's indisputable that she does enjoy a great deal of social capital, and that this is primarily due to her genes. Denying that she has "great genes" is tantamount to denying that she has social capital, which is obviously ridiculous.
Ah. I understand what you meant, now - you're analogizing the "good" in "good genes" with the "good" in "good investment". I don't think people who use of "good genes" colloquially would define "good" in this context as "contingently socioeconomically valuable genes", which is a jarringly cynical way of seeing the world. I don't think that a woman faux-modestly boasting "Guess I just have good genes" when complimented on her beauty is saying "My genes make me a valuable market object in the society I live in". I think what she has in mind is some vague underlying belief in objective beauty standards. I think she would say that her genes would still be "good genes", and her looks "good looks", on a desert island. That's the assumption I've been arguing under. Perhaps you think the average American in 2026 is both more clued-in to the fundamental subjectivity of all aesthetic judgements and more ruthlessly mercantile in how they relate to the world around them, but if so, that's the crux of our disagreement/misunderstanding. I think that when people who joke about "good genes" they are flirting with an unexamined belief in an objective value system, and that belief in such a value system is potentially morally hazardous. If you think that they aren't doing that in the first place, fine.
Well, some genes certainly are "good" in the sense of an objective value system. If given the choice, no one would choose a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia or ovarian cancer. All things being equal, people without such genetic predispositions are genetically superior to people with them.
In terms of beauty, progressives believe that what people find beautiful is contingent and socially constructed. This is true up to a point, and yet there are obvious commonalities in what's considered beautiful between vastly disparate cultures. Show me a culture where the average man finds middle-aged women more sexually desirable than women in their early twenties, or in which short men are seen as more desirable than tall men, and then we can talk about how malleable beauty standards really are. In pretty much every culture, most straight men are attracted to young petite women with symmetrical faces, healthy BMIs, narrow waists, wide hips and large breasts, while most straight women are attracted to tall men who are older than them with symmetrical faces, strong jawlines, wide wingspans and broad shoulders. (The fact that so many of these traits are clear proxies for reproductive fitness seems so obvious as to hardly even be worth mentioning.) Black guys place a larger premium on big asses and Asian men place a larger premium on slimness, but if you were to find the ideal female physiognomy (as rated by straight men) for every country in the world and compare them, I daresay they'd exhibit far more similarities than dissimilarities.
One of the ways Scott demonstrated the lunacy of the "social model of disability" is by pointing out that being blind would be disadvantageous even if one got stranded on a desert island, in which the concept of "social accomodations" simply wouldn't apply. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, with the corollary that being beautiful is only socially advantageous if there are beholders around to behold you. If you were stranded alone on a desert island, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference if you were a 2 or a 10. But the nearest equivalent thought experiment is: if Sydney Sweeney was teleported to another part of the world completely at random, would she be seen as more desirable than the average woman there, and could she convert that into social capital?
Beauty standards do vary from culture to culture, but my guess is that Sydney Sweeney would be considered unusually desirable in just about any culture in the world. This seems as close to "good in the sense of an objective value system" as makes no difference. Stranded alone on a desert island, being sighted is always preferable to being blind. When moving to a new town where you don't know anyone and barely speak the language, a petite young woman with a symmetrical face, healthy BMI, narrow waist, wide hips and large breasts will always have an easier time of it than a woman with none of these traits. I mean, is this even controversial? What's the difference between "my appearance would provide me with a competitive advantage in essentially any social environment" and "I am objectively attractive"?
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