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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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we should be willing to look critically at the preferences and beliefs we do have

Who is "we"? Because I have never once seen this phase used to mean anything other than "you".
We're always told that "White cisheteropatriarchal beauty standards" must be "critiqued", "deconstructed", "subverted", and "abolished", but only as a political project to harm the people who like those beauty standards. There is no effort made to explain why we can't equally critique the "brown queerhomomatriarchal" preference for wheelchair-bound lesbians with vitiligo, because the whole concept of "critique" privileges (even sacralizes) the identities and preferences of ally groups that work to oppose and undermine the majority. See the endless academic talk about the Powerful Holy Beauty of Black Trans Women. I have an entire folder full of papers on this theme.

"the process of changing that fact is much more a socio-cultural one" presupposes that it must be changed without justifying why, or why only that beauty standard must be abolished. "Because your beauty standards get in the way of the leftist political project" is at least a real answer, but one that's never made explicit outside of friendly territory.
When the argument is used around and against normal people, the justification is left out entirely in favor of a strong accusation to throw them on the defensive, leaving them struggling to justify their personal preferences to the satisfaction of an inquisitional critiquer.