beauty standards are all bad but one that sticks out to me is the idea that women should be free of body hair, because literally no-one has naturally no body hair like what are we trying to emulate here?
oh, except children
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - No. Fashion trends historically are nearly all about showing off how much time and money you have. Shaving off hair takes time and that means you have less time to work which means you must have the money available not to work (or so goes the theory). Only people who are ‘poor’ ‘dirty’ and therefore ‘busy’ but also ‘lazy’ because those get thrown around too - are the ones who cant. (I dont agree with this attitude but this is what its about.) Being overweight used to be fashionable because it meant you could afford excess and never have to exercise - now being thin is fashionable because a healthy diet is expensive and exercising around long work days is difficult. Less and less jobs are physically taxing and more often we have to make a physical effort to keep weight down or lose it. Among white people, being pale used to be fashionable because it meant you were wealthy enough not to be in the sun, now a tan is because it means you have enough money to go to other countries or tanning rooms or whatever. Long nails hinder work, shaving beards take time, long hair requires more care. Fashion and wealth go hand in hand, and its rarely trying to emulate anything other than “look how much money I have.” Nobody thought a bustle was a real butt - but they did think you needed an extra couple of meters of that expensive fabric to cover it. Then stuff because unfashionable because it becomes “common” and “Dated” and as it becomes cheap because everyone can afford it, it goes out of fashion.
Thank god for this explanation because I actually got really freaked out by this post initially
