Im bordering to being underweight (BMI of 20.1 and yes I know BMI is not an accurate scale but still) and I have stomach rolls. It is the most normal thing ever.

social media will repeatedly show you all sorts of things including like chemmed up and knifed up muscle men and beauty queens that make people doubt the normalcy of their own bodies

I’d say someone obese wouldn’t have these “rolls”. Source: I am fat.

Depends on how one thinks about rolls it seems.

Option 1: Stomach rolls are inherently bad, and the stomach in the statue does not have rolls.

Option 2: Anytime a stomach folds over, especially with more than one crease, that is a stomach roll. Stomach rolls are not inherently bad.

Options 3 to infinity: Other opinions I have not yet considered.

I believe what option 2 states and honestly had never considered any other ways of thinking about it. Others may have different opinions. I’m interested in hearing them.

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War, pieces of Greek statues were a popular memorandum for soldiers throughout history.

Exactly. It’s called “having skin”.

Yes this really doesn’t need to be marked as NSFW

I saw people posting pics of their dog with its nipples censored

With the rate of change on food prices, we’ll get back there.

Well also I think this body type is and has always been attractive to the vast majority of people. Beauty standard are not very attainable (like you said, it’s a status thing), but they aren’t even what most people actually like.

She’s also missing an arm in the one pic.

Does this make it abelism or disabelism? /s

This example shows how arbitrary beauty standards are.

Like yeah, your observation is correct, studies have been done on this, but it doesn’t mean that the beauty standard is good or natural or correct. If anything it means it’s wrong.

Also, today’s relative abundance doesn’t mean that size is entirely a matter of personal responsibility. Fast food and cheap processed food are often people’s only options when they can’t afford the time or money to cook meals properly. That food is worse in nutrition so they have to eat more of it, and it’s full of junk that capitalists have figured out will be useful in addicting people at the expense of their health, usually a mix of excessive salt and sugar.

There are literal scientific studies about how to make the ideal food that is moreish but doesn’t sate hunger, so people will eat lots of it. It takes willpower and resources to fight against that. No wonder there is an obesity epidemic.

So ultimately the beauty standard is still about classism, about wanting someone who is wealthy instead of poor.

If it only exists due to structural inequality where you can have a clear distinction between rich and poor, then it stands to reason that in a world where people generally could expect to thrive and not struggle to make ends meet, so that anxiety about it wasn’t commonplace, then a wider array of body types would be generally accepted.

Edit: I hope this comment doesn’t read too argumentative. Nothing you said was wrong, I’m just adding to it, and I’m aware that people reading your comment could use it to justify or attack beauty standards, and I’m using it to attack.

But we want not just a piece of the cake, but the whole damn bakery!

Plato, you stupid science bitch

And Aphrodite said hold my ambrosia and turned lonely Pygmalion’s waifu statue into a flesh and blood sea nymph Galathea.

Then in 1941, on the Island of Themyscira, as a favor to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, Aphrodite turned a clay infant into Diana, who would come to the western world as Wonder Woman. (This would be retconned in 2011 as Diana being fathered by Zeus to Hippolyta or Zeus giving the clay infant life, even though that’s Aphrodite’s superpower.)

I fucking hate thos saying. The moralizing of vanity is just another way to feel superior. The people who put a lot of work into how they look do so for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it’s because they are just having fun but other times it’s because they grow up being told that they are never enough. That they are simply being deficient for not trying hard enough in which case their lack of vanity becomes instead the moral failure of gluttony or sloth. There is no win state. So then you are simply reinforcing that who they are aside from their appearance is worthless because they are empty voids for caring about the one thing that might be a rare source of validation. We all experience the effects of the privilege of attractiveness or it’s lack. A lot of us spend lifetimes unpacking the toxic effects of that programming. This isn’t the way to go about stopping that cycle.

“Vanity makes a person ugly inside” is just another way to put someone down so the person wielding this cliche can feel big. It’s moralizing someone’s relationship to their physicality and preying on places where people are trained to be weak.