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.
That’s only true if the thing in question is 100% positional. If it has both a positional and absolute component, then increasing it across the board is still a benefit. And besides that, it seems to me that ugliness is a distinct thing from beauty. The mere absence of beauty is just plainness, and raising everyone to at least that level would still be an improvement.
Endorsed.
Additionally, is not a world where beauty is determined by how fashionable you are, and not how you were born, an improvement?