Discussion Beauty Resistance is Gender Resistance
Discussion Beauty Resistance is Gender Resistance
10 hours ago
Let's start off by pointing out trans-women are roughly three times as common as trans-men. In fact, what we today call the gender identity issue used to be almost entirely a male problem. It's only truly become otherwise in this century. And when girls and women do seek to disavow womanhood, they rarely go so far as to aspire to maleness. On the contrary, girls and young women living under the trans umbrella usually choose the more neutral gender identity called "non-binary". Why the disparity? Why do many boys and men wish to belong to the other sex while girls and women almost never do? Because Valerie Solanas was right, not an hysterical loon: deep down, we all know that men are inferior to women and the contours of transgenderism are simply one especially stark expression of this reality among countless others. There are a thousand different proofs of female superiority, but I'll take just a moment here to hook you up with just a few more of them, courtesy of Womad:
Quote:Some data on the parasites
I'll keep updating this post with more
Daughters increase longevity of fathers
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16634019/
Daughters spend more time caring for aging parents
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/08/20/daughters-spend-more-time-caring-for-aging-parents-than-sons/
Wives increase husband's lifespans while husbands decrease wive's lifespan (correlation is even greater when age gap increases)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512062631.htm
Men with sisters are happier and more optimistic
https://www.tlc.com/life---relationships/study-says-having-a-sister-makes-you-more-optimistic-kinder-and-happier
Women with brothers earn less money
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/women-brother-gender-pay-gap-earn-less-study-research-cornell-university-a7959166.html
Women with brothers are forced to conform more strongly to gender expectations
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-021-00830-9
Mother's lives are reduced by giving birth to sons
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/having-sons-can-shorten-a-woman-life/
No shit: Women are happier without parasites and children
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert
The Kinsey Reports found out (in 1948) that at least half of m*les have cheated on their female partners. 24 percent of these subhumans 80 years or older report cheating while only 6 percent of women say the same.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02693241
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/11/dr-kinseys-revolution/303649/
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/age-married-men-most-likely-044145609.html
In short, moids are far more emotionally dependent on us than we are on them. Physically we may not be the stronger sex, but emotionally we definitely are. The further away girls and women are from their male counterparts, the happier and healthier we tend to be. Moids get their health and happiness by attaching themselves to us and draining ours. They extend their lives by reducing ours. They are literally emotional parasites. This simple fact proves the misogyny inherent in leftists' frequent arguments in favor of narrowing the sex gap in life expectancy. A gap only narrowly favoring women suggests male privilege. The freer women are, the longer we live, the shorter men are going to tend to live because they can't mentally-emotionally make it without us. They lose it and die younger. A world in which girls and women were as well off as possible would be one with a wider life expectancy gap, not a smaller one.
The way I see it, male nature encompasses both dominance and submission while female nature trends in a more collaborative direction overall. It corresponds to these realities that men prefer starker expressions while women tend to prefer more neutral ones. It also reflects the different ways that our brains work. The female brain is more neurally interconnected than the male brain, so it follows that we would tend to view the elements of life as being more interconnected, more related to each other, while a man will see things more in isolation, in poles and separations.
Anyway, I bring up the sex difference in the way transgenderism finds expression because it's key to understanding what's happening at the moment. There have been a few studies of late (example), along with a mounting volume of circumstantial evidence in the culture (example) that queer identities have begun receding in commonality here in the U.S. in the last few years, but with a clear subgroup skew:
Quote:Specifically, there has been a decline of between 3 to 6 percent in the number of students identifying as non-binary in 2025, compared to 2023.
Additionally, the researchers found that there has been a "return to heterosexuality," even though students identifying as lesbian or gay have remained "stable" in recent years. That said, the number of students identifying as heterosexual still remains 7 percentage points below its level in 2020.
Those identifying as bisexual have varied the most, increasing from 10 to 17 percent of students between 2020 and 2023, and decreasing to 12 percent by 2025.
This brings me to the question of sexuality because when we're talking about "bi" people, that too is a very female-skewing group. In keeping with our theme of girls and women tending to favor more neutral expressions, this applies to sexual identities as well. Girls and women have been significantly more likely than their male counterparts to consider themselves "bi", while men have been more a bit more apt to identify as gay than women have been to call themselves lesbians. My point is that we're talking about the same demographic here in both cases: girls and young women are the ones who in the last 15 years or so became far more likely to call themselves bi than in the past and likewise have been the driving force in the uptick in gender-queer identification, led heavily by newfound "non-binary" self-classifications. Let me suggest to you that these are the same girls and women. Basically "non-binary" is a subset of the bi trend that is now receding in the culture. As bi identification declines, so too does non-binary ID. The two things go hand-in-hand because they are closely related and very, very heavily overlapping in truth to the point of being close to synonymous.
The study linked above suggests that the aforementioned receding began after the pandemic lifted and people started being able to access therapy again and whatnot and the public's mental health in general began to notch discernible, statistically-measurable improvements. In other words, there is evidence of an perhaps causative connection between poor mental health and bi and non-binary identification in that, as mental health improves, these sexual and gender IDs become less common. Causation isn't firmly established here, but the correlation has to be taken as significant for sure. It certainly would help validate feminist arguments that gender identity is a social contagion, not a naturally occurring phenomenon unrelated to mental health or illness. But this would suggest the bisexual identification to some considerable extent may also be part of the same social contagion, which would be new territory for the consideration of modern feminists.
I specify "modern feminists" above because there was a time when women's liberationists may have been less surprised. In the 1970s and '80s, political lesbians would sometime argue against social acceptance of bisexual lifestyles on the grounds that they compromised the integrity of female separatism in a way that would lead to the dilution of our class consciousness. We know which side won that debate in the end, but the dissenters have well-documented the subsequent ascendancy of queer theory in academia, with its attendant normalization of trans politics. In other words, ideologically speaking, this can be considered a beast of multiculturalism; of the individualist ethos sweeping the women's movement as various legal reforms and victories were won and a certain bourgeoisification was achieved.
None of this is to suggest that there's no such thing as a genuine bi woman or that all bisexuality is false or fabricated in every case, but it does kinda dovetail with the well-known reality that very few so-called bi women bother to date other women (especially more than once). It does kinda seem like the immense majority of them are basically mentally-emotionally deeply pained and struggling heterosexual women with some very broad identity issues going on. The bulk today seem to be young, recent "converts" who really just latched onto the marriage equality movement strongly enough that they wanted to be gay or wanted the attention and public sympathy that seemed to be there for gay people in and around the height of the marriage equality movement, something like that, and so essentially found a way appropriate a gay identity without actually being, you know, gay. Now that they're in a better place in terms of mental health and it's no longer cool to be gay, they're increasingly straight again. The same is true of "trans" folks, but the non-binary group in particular. Same principal demos. It's noteworthy that, by contrast, the number of lesbians and gay men "has remained stable", i.e. seems unaffected by changes in the public's general mental well-being. Perhaps because that is a naturally occurring phenomenon.
The crisis of female identity I'm discussing that swept much of the globe, from the United States to Pakistan and all manner of places in-between, had exceptions though, and no they weren't all heavily agrarian societies with comparatively minimal internet access. The case of South Korea has long struck me as especially significant in this connection. Where here in the U.S., and much of the Western world, the 2010s were significantly defined by a marriage equality movement, in South Korea the young women experiencing this same crisis responded by instead engaging in beauty resistance. It looked like this:
The first image above is a before-and-after picture of a young Korean woman meant to promote her transformation from decorative male appendage to autonomous human being that she posted to social media. The second depicts a Korean woman's destroyed beauty products, also posted to social media. This was, in other words, not meant to promote the value of personal choice per se, but rather as prescriptive. These radical women concluded that the problem wasn't within them, but with society; that femininity was the problem, not their natural lack of it. The women of Womad, who led the charge, describe the sort of gender expression they promote as "androgyny" and believe it is the natural social expression of the psychologically liberated woman. A solution for all of us rather than distinct solutions for each of us.
The next question is why. Why did this happen in South Korea and not elsewhere? What circumstances caused so many young women there to respond differently to the modern female identity crisis? To highlight some of the backdrop pointed out by Hyejung Park, Jihye Kuk, and Caroline Norma in their article on the "take off the corset" movement linked above:
Quote:...In April [2018], The Telegraph reported on a growing movement against “cultural violence against women” in South Korea, which rose up in response to the fact that women in the nation were undergoing more plastic surgery than anywhere else in the world. Emanuel Pastreich, head of the Asia Institute, told Julian Ryall:
“Korean society has become completely distorted by this rush to undergo surgery and, speaking personally, I believe it is very sad that it has shifted to the point that women are seen merely as sex objects that have to undergo the scalpel to be perfect.”
This movement had success in November 2017 when Seoul Metro, which runs trains and buses in the world’s most populous city, banned cosmetic surgery ads in its stations.
Beauty practices are enforced more strictly for South Korean women than perhaps any female population on earth. Women’s ability to flourish and live autonomously, in a political, economic, and social context, is kept in check through intense pressure to get plastic surgery, to diet after graduation in order to compete in the job market, and to spend money on skin treatments, hair styling, and body hair removal treatments. Even for underage Korean girls the regime is fundamentalist: it’s hard to find a girl not wearing makeup by sixth grade, and some middle school uniforms for girls come with inner pockets for lip gloss. Female students in secondary schools are told not wearing makeup is socially impolite.
Under this regime, the beauty and personal care industries are extremely profitable, and whole sectors of the economy are dominated by cosmetics, dieting, and fashion. One extreme plastic surgery procedure popularized by K-pop stars is called “V-line surgery,” and involves shaving the jawline to create a V-shaped face. The Verge reports, “Technically called ‘corrective jaw surgery,’ it’s a procedure that requires the jaw to be wired shut for six weeks and can result in permanent numbness or death.”
...
The campaign began when young Korean women — calling themselves “beauty resisters” — began posting before-and-after selfies showing the results of throwing off beauty practices and images of destroyed beauty, cosmetic, and dieting products online. Others women joined in, discontinuing regimes of beauty in their personal lives as a strategy of political liberation for women as a whole.
Men tend to prize superficiality in their partners even when their partners are male. Lesbian culture, to the extent that it exists autonomously from that of gay men, tends in the other direction, toward prizing naturalism more. It just goes to show how differently women often think when the parasites aren't in the equation.
The authors marvel at the Korean women's ability to resist such overwhelming cultural force, but it strikes me that the particular severity of the problem in South Korea is precisely why such a movement took root there and not elsewhere! Or at least one of the reasons. But anyway, the point is that queer politics seemed to be largely held at bay by the ascendancy of this movement. Women in South Korea are still broadly understood as a biological sex, not just a state of mind corresponding to male domination fantasies, and as much tells me that beauty culture lies at the very heart of the female identity crisis. The female identity crisis has taken root in response to the increasing severity of socially obligatory beauty regimens and demands for cosmetic surgeries in recent decades and can be most effectively combated by feminist movements of beauty resistance.
Concluding Note: I've broad-brushed somewhat in this commentary, leaving some subjects less central to the issue (such as butch lesbians and their relationship to gender ID) unaddressed. Sorry about that. Just wanted to get directly to the heart and soul of the female identity crisis here such as to clarify the basic solution.
Edited 8 hours ago by Impress Polly.
When she was around, YesYourNigel would often call not for acceptance of different gender expressions (masculine, feminine, and the various compromises thereof), but for the abolition of femininity. This post is essentially me agreeing with that position and offering a bit of my thinking on why. (My thinking is obviously not entirely hers.)
Let's start off by pointing out trans-women are roughly three times as common as trans-men. In fact, what we today call the gender identity issue used to be almost entirely a male problem. It's only truly become otherwise in this century. And when girls and women do seek to disavow womanhood, they rarely go so far as to aspire to maleness. On the contrary, girls and young women living under the trans umbrella usually choose the more neutral gender identity called "non-binary". Why the disparity? Why do many boys and men wish to belong to the other sex while girls and women almost never do? Because Valerie Solanas was right, not an hysterical loon: deep down, we all know that men are inferior to women and the contours of transgenderism are simply one especially stark expression of this reality among countless others. There are a thousand different proofs of female superiority, but I'll take just a moment here to hook you up with just a few more of them, courtesy of Womad:
Quote:Some data on the parasites
I'll keep updating this post with more
Daughters increase longevity of fathers
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16634019/
Daughters spend more time caring for aging parents
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/08/20/daughters-spend-more-time-caring-for-aging-parents-than-sons/
Wives increase husband's lifespans while husbands decrease wive's lifespan (correlation is even greater when age gap increases)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512062631.htm
Men with sisters are happier and more optimistic
https://www.tlc.com/life---relationships/study-says-having-a-sister-makes-you-more-optimistic-kinder-and-happier
Women with brothers earn less money
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/women-brother-gender-pay-gap-earn-less-study-research-cornell-university-a7959166.html
Women with brothers are forced to conform more strongly to gender expectations
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-021-00830-9
Mother's lives are reduced by giving birth to sons
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/having-sons-can-shorten-a-woman-life/
No shit: Women are happier without parasites and children
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert
The Kinsey Reports found out (in 1948) that at least half of m*les have cheated on their female partners. 24 percent of these subhumans 80 years or older report cheating while only 6 percent of women say the same.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02693241
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/11/dr-kinseys-revolution/303649/
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/age-married-men-most-likely-044145609.html
In short, moids are far more emotionally dependent on us than we are on them. Physically we may not be the stronger sex, but emotionally we definitely are. The further away girls and women are from their male counterparts, the happier and healthier we tend to be. Moids get their health and happiness by attaching themselves to us and draining ours. They extend their lives by reducing ours. They are literally emotional parasites. This simple fact proves the misogyny inherent in leftists' frequent arguments in favor of narrowing the sex gap in life expectancy. A gap only narrowly favoring women suggests male privilege. The freer women are, the longer we live, the shorter men are going to tend to live because they can't mentally-emotionally make it without us. They lose it and die younger. A world in which girls and women were as well off as possible would be one with a wider life expectancy gap, not a smaller one.
The way I see it, male nature encompasses both dominance and submission while female nature trends in a more collaborative direction overall. It corresponds to these realities that men prefer starker expressions while women tend to prefer more neutral ones. It also reflects the different ways that our brains work. The female brain is more neurally interconnected than the male brain, so it follows that we would tend to view the elements of life as being more interconnected, more related to each other, while a man will see things more in isolation, in poles and separations.
Anyway, I bring up the sex difference in the way transgenderism finds expression because it's key to understanding what's happening at the moment. There have been a few studies of late (example), along with a mounting volume of circumstantial evidence in the culture (example) that queer identities have begun receding in commonality here in the U.S. in the last few years, but with a clear subgroup skew:
Quote:Specifically, there has been a decline of between 3 to 6 percent in the number of students identifying as non-binary in 2025, compared to 2023.
Additionally, the researchers found that there has been a "return to heterosexuality," even though students identifying as lesbian or gay have remained "stable" in recent years. That said, the number of students identifying as heterosexual still remains 7 percentage points below its level in 2020.
Those identifying as bisexual have varied the most, increasing from 10 to 17 percent of students between 2020 and 2023, and decreasing to 12 percent by 2025.
This brings me to the question of sexuality because when we're talking about "bi" people, that too is a very female-skewing group. In keeping with our theme of girls and women tending to favor more neutral expressions, this applies to sexual identities as well. Girls and women have been significantly more likely than their male counterparts to consider themselves "bi", while men have been more a bit more apt to identify as gay than women have been to call themselves lesbians. My point is that we're talking about the same demographic here in both cases: girls and young women are the ones who in the last 15 years or so became far more likely to call themselves bi than in the past and likewise have been the driving force in the uptick in gender-queer identification, led heavily by newfound "non-binary" self-classifications. Let me suggest to you that these are the same girls and women. Basically "non-binary" is a subset of the bi trend that is now receding in the culture. As bi identification declines, so too does non-binary ID. The two things go hand-in-hand because they are closely related and very, very heavily overlapping in truth to the point of being close to synonymous.
The study linked above suggests that the aforementioned receding began after the pandemic lifted and people started being able to access therapy again and whatnot and the public's mental health in general began to notch discernible, statistically-measurable improvements. In other words, there is evidence of an perhaps causative connection between poor mental health and bi and non-binary identification in that, as mental health improves, these sexual and gender IDs become less common. Causation isn't firmly established here, but the correlation has to be taken as significant for sure. It certainly would help validate feminist arguments that gender identity is a social contagion, not a naturally occurring phenomenon unrelated to mental health or illness. But this would suggest the bisexual identification to some considerable extent may also be part of the same social contagion, which would be new territory for the consideration of modern feminists.
I specify "modern feminists" above because there was a time when women's liberationists may have been less surprised. In the 1970s and '80s, political lesbians would sometime argue against social acceptance of bisexual lifestyles on the grounds that they compromised the integrity of female separatism in a way that would lead to the dilution of our class consciousness. We know which side won that debate in the end, but the dissenters have well-documented the subsequent ascendancy of queer theory in academia, with its attendant normalization of trans politics. In other words, ideologically speaking, this can be considered a beast of multiculturalism; of the individualist ethos sweeping the women's movement as various legal reforms and victories were won and a certain bourgeoisification was achieved.
None of this is to suggest that there's no such thing as a genuine bi woman or that all bisexuality is false or fabricated in every case, but it does kinda dovetail with the well-known reality that very few so-called bi women bother to date other women (especially more than once). It does kinda seem like the immense majority of them are basically mentally-emotionally deeply pained and struggling heterosexual women with some very broad identity issues going on. The bulk today seem to be young, recent "converts" who really just latched onto the marriage equality movement strongly enough that they wanted to be gay or wanted the attention and public sympathy that seemed to be there for gay people in and around the height of the marriage equality movement, something like that, and so essentially found a way appropriate a gay identity without actually being, you know, gay. Now that they're in a better place in terms of mental health and it's no longer cool to be gay, they're increasingly straight again. The same is true of "trans" folks, but the non-binary group in particular. Same principal demos. It's noteworthy that, by contrast, the number of lesbians and gay men "has remained stable", i.e. seems unaffected by changes in the public's general mental well-being. Perhaps because that is a naturally occurring phenomenon.
The crisis of female identity I'm discussing that swept much of the globe, from the United States to Pakistan and all manner of places in-between, had exceptions though, and no they weren't all heavily agrarian societies with comparatively minimal internet access. The case of South Korea has long struck me as especially significant in this connection. Where here in the U.S., and much of the Western world, the 2010s were significantly defined by a marriage equality movement, in South Korea the young women experiencing this same crisis responded by instead engaging in beauty resistance. It looked like this:
The first image above is a before-and-after picture of a young Korean woman meant to promote her transformation from decorative male appendage to autonomous human being that she posted to social media. The second depicts a Korean woman's destroyed beauty products, also posted to social media. This was, in other words, not meant to promote the value of personal choice per se, but rather as prescriptive. These radical women concluded that the problem wasn't within them, but with society; that femininity was the problem, not their natural lack of it. The women of Womad, who led the charge, describe the sort of gender expression they promote as "androgyny" and believe it is the natural social expression of the psychologically liberated woman. A solution for all of us rather than distinct solutions for each of us.
The next question is why. Why did this happen in South Korea and not elsewhere? What circumstances caused so many young women there to respond differently to the modern female identity crisis? To highlight some of the backdrop pointed out by Hyejung Park, Jihye Kuk, and Caroline Norma in their article on the "take off the corset" movement linked above:
Quote:...In April [2018], The Telegraph reported on a growing movement against “cultural violence against women” in South Korea, which rose up in response to the fact that women in the nation were undergoing more plastic surgery than anywhere else in the world. Emanuel Pastreich, head of the Asia Institute, told Julian Ryall:
“Korean society has become completely distorted by this rush to undergo surgery and, speaking personally, I believe it is very sad that it has shifted to the point that women are seen merely as sex objects that have to undergo the scalpel to be perfect.”
This movement had success in November 2017 when Seoul Metro, which runs trains and buses in the world’s most populous city, banned cosmetic surgery ads in its stations.
Beauty practices are enforced more strictly for South Korean women than perhaps any female population on earth. Women’s ability to flourish and live autonomously, in a political, economic, and social context, is kept in check through intense pressure to get plastic surgery, to diet after graduation in order to compete in the job market, and to spend money on skin treatments, hair styling, and body hair removal treatments. Even for underage Korean girls the regime is fundamentalist: it’s hard to find a girl not wearing makeup by sixth grade, and some middle school uniforms for girls come with inner pockets for lip gloss. Female students in secondary schools are told not wearing makeup is socially impolite.
Under this regime, the beauty and personal care industries are extremely profitable, and whole sectors of the economy are dominated by cosmetics, dieting, and fashion. One extreme plastic surgery procedure popularized by K-pop stars is called “V-line surgery,” and involves shaving the jawline to create a V-shaped face. The Verge reports, “Technically called ‘corrective jaw surgery,’ it’s a procedure that requires the jaw to be wired shut for six weeks and can result in permanent numbness or death.”
...
The campaign began when young Korean women — calling themselves “beauty resisters” — began posting before-and-after selfies showing the results of throwing off beauty practices and images of destroyed beauty, cosmetic, and dieting products online. Others women joined in, discontinuing regimes of beauty in their personal lives as a strategy of political liberation for women as a whole.
Men tend to prize superficiality in their partners even when their partners are male. Lesbian culture, to the extent that it exists autonomously from that of gay men, tends in the other direction, toward prizing naturalism more. It just goes to show how differently women often think when the parasites aren't in the equation.
The authors marvel at the Korean women's ability to resist such overwhelming cultural force, but it strikes me that the particular severity of the problem in South Korea is precisely why such a movement took root there and not elsewhere! Or at least one of the reasons. But anyway, the point is that queer politics seemed to be largely held at bay by the ascendancy of this movement. Women in South Korea are still broadly understood as a biological sex, not just a state of mind corresponding to male domination fantasies, and as much tells me that beauty culture lies at the very heart of the female identity crisis. The female identity crisis has taken root in response to the increasing severity of socially obligatory beauty regimens and demands for cosmetic surgeries in recent decades and can be most effectively combated by feminist movements of beauty resistance.
Concluding Note: I've broad-brushed somewhat in this commentary, leaving some subjects less central to the issue (such as butch lesbians and their relationship to gender ID) unaddressed. Sorry about that. Just wanted to get directly to the heart and soul of the female identity crisis here such as to clarify the basic solution.
