Quote Originally Posted by ReineD View Post
Amy Fakley, you’ve got things all turned around. The market responds to what people want, not the reverse. In the beauty and fashion industries, the market fundamentally addresses people’s needs to attract each other and also to show their socioeconomic status. Since most women are attracted to men and vice versa, the men and women will seek to make themselves attractive to each other through what is currently seen as attractive in any given society. Have you noticed, most media images that advertise beauty and fashion products feature young people, which happens to be the age range when most people are seeking mates? And separate from any attempt to attract the opposite sex, there is also the eternal quest for youth, but this is because youth is prized in our society and these products promise a more youthful appearance. Forty year olds get jobs more than sixty year olds.


It’s true that women are exposed to incessant marketing geared to impossible ideals of beauty (the use of female models who are in the top 5% on the human attractiveness scale and if they’re aren’t, they’re photoshopped to look that way), but that’s a separate issue. A lot of women are rebelling against this.
Indeed! What nearly every single person in the whole world wants more than anything, is to fit into, and be considdered a valued member of their peer group. Yes, the market responds to demand, but I'm not talking about the market, I'm talking about the marketers, and they are an entirely different thing.

A marketer's job is not to respond to the demands of the marketplace, but to create demand in the marketplace. What I'm talking about goes much, much further than unrealistic depictions of beauty (though that is a good small-scale example).

Yes it is true that throughout human history, there have been markets and salespeople, but what has not been static for most of human history is the balance of power. Since the invention of mass media, the power of marketers to bend the shape the society we live in towards maximum profitability has become progressively more and more extreme, to the point that ... I guarantee you right now there are probably 50 different processes running in the background on my phone as I type this ... recording where I am, what news I'm reading, what people I'm talking to, and what I'm saying ... all so that there is the best possible chance that I will be receptive to the next advertisement thrown at me.

You can't fight that. You might as well stand on the beach and try to beat back the waves. It is ubiquitous, and utterly pervasive.

What I am proposing is that where this marketing intersects with gender, we have essentially a billion watt amplifier that distorts existing cultural notions of gender, bending them toward the most extreme ends of the spectrum. This is done because two strategies can reliably sell just about anything in existence: insecurity and sex appeal.

I propose that this is a big aspect of why gender nonconforming behavior so often illicit knee-jerk hostility, which upon thoughtful reflection usually dissapates greatly.