Dr. Jordan Foster

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.

So you can think of investments in plastic surgery, in cosmetics, in injections, which we know are all on the rise.

Right.

That would be a signal that actually beauty's pressures are weighing more on everybody.

Oh, yes.

And I think that's important for a couple of reasons.

But the one that I'd really like people to think about is that when you fail to name it beauty, you're actually obscuring a lot of the weightiness of that subject matter.

You're kind of trivializing your engagement with what's become this really high