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Old 07-14-2009, 07:00 AM   #61 (permalink)
dippin
Crazy, indeed
 
Location: the ether
Quote:
Originally Posted by jewels View Post
Yes, it is. And I've seen that movie.



Perhaps a more suitable word would be overgeneralizing? If American women wear too much makeup and color their hair, then it follows that European women bathe once a week and use perfume to cover their body odor. Gimme a break. The idea that any comment about a group of people is anything other than complacency and fosters biases is ludicrous.

If your proclamation makes something a beauty standard, that's definitely not Shell's problem.
who said anything about "too much?"

Again, you are seeing things you want to see. My original post only said that in my experience Ive noticed that American women use more make up than European women, something I backed up with relevant statistics. The idea that that makes them "superficial" as shell accused me of claiming is no where in my posts, and comes straight from any associations she can make. Similarly, the idea that it is "too much" make up comes solely from your head, as I never said that either.

And the idea that any statement about a group of people is inherently biased is incredibly shortsighted. Anthropology, sociology, history and even a part of economics all are based on the notion that a society is more than just the sum of its individual parts, and that there is something bigger that comes from societal interaction, something that we can only notice at the macro level. You know, culture, basically. There are a number of things that we can say about any group of people without implying that everyone in that group believes or behaves a certain way, but saying that a majority do.

We can talk about how French culture is more exclusionary of cultural symbols and styles that are associated with lower classes given its aristocratic history, like Bourdieu wrote about when he talked about certain things being class markers, and we can talk about how in the US, its more egalitarian history of small land owners has made so called "omnivores" more high status, as we can see from the rise of hip hop fashion, and as such American fashion is more accepting of informality.

And we can talk about a multitude of over things that are true in the macro level without necessarily being true for every individual. We can talk about hip hop being more popular in the US than in Europe and talk about the influence of black culture on American music, of soccer being more popular in Europe than the US given how it was spread by the British at a time the US was out of its sphere of influence, and that cosmetics are more popular in the US than in Europe. The idea that I defended a certain beauty standard, that I implied that the American beauty standard is superficial, or inferior, are not present in any of my posts, and are conclusions that she (and you) are drawing without any backing from my posts.
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