
Saved by Sam Blumenthal
How Beauty Became Monoculture

Saved by Sam Blumenthal
White women, especially white feminists, need me to lean in to pseudoreligious consumerist teachings that beauty is democratic and achievable. Beauty must be democratic. If it is not, then beauty becomes a commodity, distributed unequally and, even worse, at random.
Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.
“ I have watched beauty trends shift dramatically over the past decade, from the ultra-thin models of the early 2000s to the Instagram-influenced emphasis on curves and cosmetic enhancement. These changes do not happen in a vacuum. They reflect broader social conversations about feminism, body positivity, racial representation, and economic
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