Dr. Jordan Foster

Yes.

You know, it's okay.

I love this point.

It's a point of discussion among scholars and these sort of professionally intelligent people who have been debating, yeah, does this mean that men and women are now equal?

If these beauty pressures that women have long faced apply to men, does that mean the sexes are somehow equal?

You know, that's not necessarily the case.

Because while these pressures and their consequences are rising, they do actually look different in their scope and scale.

And men can still get away with a lot more than what women can get away with.

So men, for example, can avoid doing work on their appearance.

They can show up as a little bit frumpy.

We have the popularization of the dad bod.

So there's still a space for men to actually neglect appearance, to neglect the body, to neglect their investment, so to speak.

And that's not considered a bad thing in the same way that women neglecting their appearance is often criticized and very vocally, right?

So women still tend to be understood more narrowly in terms of their appearance, whereas this is now just a part of our consideration of men and masculinity.

So I would say this probably doesn't signal a shift in greater equality, not in whole, maybe in part.

Another thing that I think is worth considering is

is whether or not, and you sort of touched on this, David, it's even a good thing that beauty's force expand in general, right?

Because I would argue that its expansion into the lives of men actually is a signal of the fact that beauty's pressures are expanding across the board, right?

Right.

That women face more intensive pressures just as men are beginning to face some of these appearance focused pressure.