personal aesthetics?

[keryx]

A followup, based on the predominance of people saying they remove hair solely based on "personal aesthetics" in my hair poll.

[Poll #412789]

Explain the logic of your answer in comments, if you'd be so kind.

Comments

[fierceawakening.livejournal.com]

Or, for something that actually matters:

Are you into SM?
Yes.
Why?
I don't know.
Well, don't you realize that the patriarchy came up with domination and submission to... etc.
Oh shit. Forget that then. Wait... why does it still make me feel good?

[keryx.livejournal.com]

OT for a sec - WHAT is going on with your icon? The text, I mean? ;)

Back on topic... Honestly, I think feminist arguments against BDSM are stretching it. You raised what I think is a useful criticism of feminism, that it can become dictatorial, proscribing preferences as unfeminist without examining the complexities behind them. Like the power thing in heterosex; you could assume all power exchange in sex is patriarchal ergo bad, but then you'd be using overly simplistic logic and actually ignoring big parts of the cultural context of BDSM.

[fierceawakening.livejournal.com]

My icon is a joke stretched to the outer limits of recognition. :)

Way back when, there was some sort of thing spreading around the Internet of someone who claimed to have -- I think it was a pic of one of the actors in the LOTR movies, nude. It was clearly a fake, and people made fun of it by saying "He says, 'MY HED IZ PASTEDE ON YAY!1!11!!!!!1!'"

So there were a few icons and such floating about reading MY HED IZ PASTEDE ON YAY!!11!!!

I decided to make that the text of my icon because, in a supreme twist of whateverness, his mask is actually pasted on in a sense, so it's funny.

You raised what I think is a useful criticism of feminism, that it can become dictatorial, proscribing preferences as unfeminist without examining the complexities behind them.

:)

Yeah. Occasionally people espouse stuff like that, which can still make me uncomfortable. But I'm really grateful that I learned that's not what feminism is, and very grateful to the women who took the time to listen through my anger and understand and explain why feminism isn't about that.

[skelkins.livejournal.com]

Is it possible to agree with both of you?

I think that it is beneficial for people to examine the possible cultural conditionings underlying their own aesthetic preferences, if for no other reason than that I'm a believer in the gnothi sauthon principle.

Ascribing motives (even unconscious ones) to other people, on the other hand, is just plain rude, and I do think that it is far too often used as a means of harassing others about preferences not to the perpetrator's liking.

Sadly, this does seem to be a very popular form of rudeness, and one that is in my experience by no means the exclusive province of the challengers of the cultural status quo.

As for BDSM, that's one of those situations where my own personal answer to the soul-searching is: "I'm certain that the reason I find it a turn-on is because of some really nasty social factors, but what of it? In other areas of my life I work hard to try to make my society less power-obsessed and more egalitarian. If that goal should ever be reached, then maybe it's possible that people in the future would find BDSM very alien indeed. Does that thought bother me? No, not really."

BTW, your icon makes me giggle madly every time I see it.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

I don't think trinityva and I completely disagree (though hey, I may be wrong). Or at least, I think the same guidelines apply to questioning others' choices as to any polite conversation: you can't assume your perspective is 100% right, and you have to actually listen/be open to other information.

What is this gnothi sauthon, by the way?

[skelkins.livejournal.com]

Gnothi Sauton="Know Thyself" in Greek. It was supposedly carved in stone over the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi.

Sorry, didn't mean to be obscure. I'm just a big ol' classics geek.

[fierceawakening.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree with you. I think we do need to examine these things. That's why I wasn't sure whether my answer to the poll was "Yes" or "Well, yeah, and..."

As for BDSM, that's one of those situations where my own personal answer to the soul-searching is: "I'm certain that the reason I find it a turn-on is because of some really nasty social factors, but what of it? In other areas of my life I work hard to try to make my society less power-obsessed and more egalitarian. If that goal should ever be reached, then maybe it's possible that people in the future would find BDSM very alien indeed. Does that thought bother me? No, not really."

The interesting thing for me there is that I think my personal answers are different.

I don't think it's obvious to me that my desires for BDSM totally stem from social weirdness. They're not about gender roles or conceptions of femininity. Some of my top persona may be problematically masculine, but if it is then I suppose so's the rest of me, in similar ways.

I see them as stemming from having to come to terms with physical pain, due to the physical parts of my abuse and several surgeries I endured as an adolescent. My relationship to pain changed drastically. I began to think a lot about the different ways we as humans experience pain, see it as a warning or a benefit or a curse, and why. I began to notice that certain emotional states, arousal being one of them, could radically alter how I and others experience pain. I found that, and find that, endlessly fascinating.

I think I find control fascinating for reasons that tie much more to this than directly to patriarchy, though I recognize that the sorts of harrowing nonconsensual experiences with control that happened when I was abused may well have imprinted problematic associations with "hierarchy" and oppressive systems in general.

To me, it's much more about SM than anything else (though I do a bit of everything), about using the body's natural systems and drugs to play with and craft experience. For people who are more strongly D/sers, perhaps societal expectations' influence is more blatantly obvious.

I think BDSM might look very different if there were no patriarchy/white supremacy/such hierarchies. But I do not think that sort of crafting of experience would not exist. The body is complex and interesting, and playing with its reactions and responses seems quite natural to me. As does playing with the mind's reactions to experience as well.