Book recs/opinions: society telling women that the way they look should relate to them being believed?

Reading this back I feel really rude.

I didn't mean to get into 'blah blah blah me me me' and I have, and I meant to ask for book recs and opinions only.

I can get this deleted if people like.

(Sorry, that sounded really negative, it wasn't meant to!)

It's just, I've been so fascinated by this for ages, why we do get sucked into accepting 'oh yes, blonde is pretty' even when we know we have the cognitive dissonance going on. I think fiction is a big part of it and I am trying to put the pieces together on that, I guess, without wanting to change disciplines totally and look at modern film or modern books.

I am a bit hesitant about collaborating, because it's rare in my discipline and because at the moment, what I primarily need is a postdoc and an institution to attach myself to, so for now, it needs to be an individual proposal, I think. I might rethink that later.

Your project sounds very cool, btw.

I don't know how practical this is, but I kind of wanted to get engaged with people who weren't academics, anyway. Because part of the point of focusing on the texts I'm looking at is that people both then and now used to put them down because they were popular, and because they were popular with women, and so sort of 'trash lit'. And I was thinking how women tend to get pushed into doing our thinking in the context of trash lit (or romcoms, or whatever you like), don't we? I mean, I know there's academic study of romcoms and so on - and I know someone who did a whole Phd comparing Middle English romance to Mills and Boon. But it would be kind of cool, methodologically, not to going all academic but to be getting a certain amount of 'general public' imput.

I don't know if that's even vaguely likely to work.

I do think this thread shows it is something we're all aware of, though, everyone has 'got' it as soon as I posted and has experiences of it, with things like being expected to smile or getting treated differently for blonde hair.

I also very much want to take a crack at that ever-repeated idea that things are sooo much better for woman nowadays, and what are you complaining about, cos it was horrible in The Past (with 'The Past' being some vague imagined time a bit like the 1950s and a bit like Game of Thrones).

Because it seems to me that young women and girls have fewer strategies for processing what messages they're getting from culture about how to look and how to be believed, not more. And it seems to be tied to saying, well, it's the internet age, you must expect to control your image. I find that very sad and a bit shit.

Oh, sure, I think that is the risk with it being distant. But what I am hoping to do is to trace the emergence of some of these stereotypes in these stories, and to say, look, they're still here and some of them have even become sort of fossilised into our ideas, even though the social and cultural situation they were rooted in has changed hugely.

So yes, very much as you say, I want that shock value.

I don't know how much I will manage it. I had a vague idea that if I could get this project up and running, it would be a good one to do both some academic work on, and some public engagement stuff.

I won't and can't do it purely as feminist polemic (though I wish I could), I need it to be valid research in my subject as well.

Yeah, but you missed out the 'hopefully'!

I don't know if I can do this, but I think it would be useful. You see, part of what I was thinking was, when we try and explain these messages to lots of people, they feel attacked. It is hard to say 'well, this film you love is actually really shitty because it sends out messages x, y and z about women' or 'this advert you saw was actually telling you a, b and c about women, even though you didn't notice'.

So I thought maybe it would almost be easier to understand these things by looking at a culture that's a bit more distant from ours, and the fact that this culture actually developed into and influenced ours makes it a bonus.

(And internet randoms' opinions were exactly what I was going for! )

That is completely bonkers and brilliant.

Eww. Lovely.

(Not heard of 'red pill' before, btw.)

I think I'll survive without looking into it more deeply. What I think is tricky is that it is so hard not to internalize these messages about how we shold look, and not to make assumptions about people's behaviour based on them. And I don't know at what stage we learn that, or how we learn to stop people picking those messages up.

I know there's stuff like studies with children who're in the ethnic minority in their class who pick white faces as the 'pretty' ones, and this seems to go away if you expose them to enough images of non-white people (obvious, I guess). But it seems harder to do with women because all kinds of women's appearance are associated with something negative, often all at the same time by the same people.

Really?! That is fascinating. I have not come across this about blond men, but interesting to know.

Isn't not being maternal also seen as something that's distrusted in women? So we walk a really fine line.

Yeah. I take your point about Hollywood.

It's interesting about men staying more or less the same, and women's body shapes. I can't think of anything Western men have deliberately done to their bodies that would actually change them forever - like footbinding or corsets did. I'd be interested to know if such things ever happened, or if I'm missing obvious ones?

I'm actually using the films stuff as a gateway to look at medieval romances, but I want to keep in mind that it's basically not dissimilar to modern pop culture, and hopefully what I find out will say useful things about how these messages get constructed in modern culture as well as in history. I dunno.

I think the sexuality point is important, btw.

Sorry.

I may as well put my cards on the table and admit this thread is me trying to get my ideas in order for an academic project proposal, so I've got jargon in my brain.

Aesthetic theory is just theories about why something is beautiful (or ugly) and what it means to judge things as beautiful or ugly. A lot of it is really nasty judgements of women's bodies. And it gets all tied up with morality because historically there's this very old idea that if something is beautiful, that tells you about how good or bad it is.

What I'm interested in is stuff like, you know how when you start watching a film, you can usually tell who the 'good' woman is because of how she looks, and there are cues from appearance that tell you such-and-such a woman is probably going to come a cropper because of how she looks? It's really unpleasant.

Thanks scallops. And no, you wouldn't.

nice - I'd like to know.

I am trying to get my mind around where I stand on aesthetic theory, I guess, because I feel really uncomfortable with a lot of it and historically there seems to be such a shedload of misogyny around appearances. Is there any positive way to approach all of this?

I'd like us all to be happy with how we look, and I don't know how we're going to get there.