It seems that people assume that if only we got rid of conventional beauty standards that everyone’s internal beauty standards would default to some standard that placed themselves at the top. I haven’t seen anyone ever argue for that position explicitly though. I could just be misunderstanding the logic behind other peoples hatred of conventional beauty standards. (I also might be biased because my internal beauty standards don’t seem to be influenced by external culture in a straight forward fashion.)
even if we got rid of conventional beauty standards I suspect that many people would still inexorably end up fixating on a particular aesthetic that isn’t physically possible for them, so transhuman body mods all the way baby
sometimes I fantasize about how nice it’d be to just automatically look really great all the time, like perfect skin, effortlessly excellent posture, everything in place all the time, don’t have to mess with your clothes, and so on, because I covet that look but just do not have the discipline to put the effort into that. BUT
inevitably this leads me to reflecting on how, if everyone was like that, we wouldn’t have a world where everyone is effortlessly beautiful, we’d have a world where people put the same amount of time and expense into their appearance that they do now, and expectations are just as uneven, only the bar is higher, so it’s like you’re totally sloppy if you leave the house without painting a unique abstract art composition over your entire body and crossbraiding your hair with live flowers
like most superpower fantasies, it only works if everyone else is denied it.
I think the actual position that people unconsciously hold is that we’ll stop having beauty standards, in the same way that naive anarchists think that we’ll stop having power dynamics if we get rid of the current government.
So…I think that there are (at least) two mostly-separate psychological phenomena that manifest as The Dream of Being Beautiful.
There’s the desire to be recognized as a Beautiful Person, someone who is noteworthily more-attractive-than-the-masses by conventional standards. This is a semi-specialized social role that comes with its own perks, in the form of certain kinds of status and attention and identity-validation etc. (It also comes with its own burdens, of course.) Some people covet those perks, and so find it painful that they don’t have the looks necessary to get them. Such people, when they’re wise and thoughtful and self-aware, don’t usually rail against beauty standards in the abstract, because – as @discoursedrome implies – the thing they want actually requires that some kind of beauty standards exist. They want to win the status competition, which means there has to be a status competition.
(I should be clear, here, and say that many people in this category do rail against beauty standards. That is because they are being hypocritical, or otherwise failing to achieve integrity and self-awareness. They are sleight-of-handing their way to the fantasy of a world in which they are the beautiful ones, not those hateful Chads / popular bitches, but otherwise nothing much has changed.)
Then there’s the desire to be Beautiful Enough For Practical Purposes, which is in fact pretty different. There are lots of people who don’t particularly wish to be remarkably attractive, to be the best-looking person in the room, and who would actually find it kind of weird and unpleasant if that got folded into their identities. Many of them nonetheless want to be free of physical flaws that they or others might find actively off-putting – want to be sufficiently attractive that they can feature in fond romantic/sexual imaginings without dissonance – want their preferred partners, who probably aren’t super invested in the have-the-hottest-mate status game but who do probably have normal levels of preference for an attractive-looking mate, to be totally satisfied – etc.
This is the desire to live in an anime world, fundamentally. In an anime, some people are marked as being noteworthily more attractive than others, just like in real life, and everyone treats them as such…but even a universally-acknowledged “plain” character is in truth physically flawless, and his level of physical beauty isn’t ever going to cause a problem for him in a relationship that’s largely based on other things.
Assuming that “make reality look like an anime” sadly isn’t an option, “widely-available body mods” is a pretty good solution for such people. You can’t guarantee that you’ll win the status contest no matter what you do, but you can probably guarantee that you’ll be perfectly acceptable by your own lights and the lights of your ingroup. “Eliminate beauty standards by enlightening humanity” is a terrible solution, in that I think it would be easier to eat the moon than to make it happen, but it does at least attempt to address this kind of suffering face-on.
All very true, though there is also the third type, which is the purely relativist desire to be “more beautiful than I am now,” or “beautiful enough” where “enough” is a bar that is always out of reach.
It’s typical status-anxiety that most people face some sort of, but is probably most starkly illustrated in the memoirs of people with anorexia.
