The European obsession with female breasts is also a relatively recent cultural development, universal neither across time nor across cultures. Most people in most cultures are capable of finding beauty and sexual attraction in breasts both male and female, but they were not always obsessed over in the way they are now.
So... three cultures portray women as having breasts? What on earth is that supposed to be proving? All those figures have shoulders as well, but I presume you aren't arguing this is proof of universal fetishization of shoulders.
YOU are the one claiming that a focus on breasts in females is a "relatively recent phenomenon". Clearly, it is not.
i guess you misunderstood my post. I wasn't claiming that breaats were only recently discovered, only that extreme erogenization of breasts is a cultural particular to some cultures and times, not a universal. I'm aware that women have always
had breasts, it's why we call ourselves mammals.
I think every person sees things they like and things they don't.
Some sculptors sculpt big breasts. Some sculptors sculpt feet. Some people are into dealing with their partner's gross body issues.
I can't say I particularly like looking at gross things. I'll absolutely stuff a brand new hole in my husband's ass full of medicated fabric, but I don't enjoy it. Some people enjoy doing that kind of stuff with/for a partner.
I think that the priests or whatever of a culture impose some creative vision on what is allowed to ultimately be built into what perseveres, the architecture and the artifacts, our public edifices of stone, and often that reflects some relationship between religion and wealthy people's tastes.
Often it depends on who gets to design the sculpture.
One of those idols is of a person with certain proportions that aren't in vogue in American media today! I daresay it was less about her breasts, and more a statement, a fetish relating to being large (hah, a fetish fetish!).
I find it so funny when people object vociferously and angrily at the proposition that even seeking a "normal" as a target is a fetish, because the size of a standard deviation is so fucking big already! And there are deviations in multiple dimensions, some mutually exclusive and some not, some as a percent normal A and a percent normal B, like if A and B as blood types came in extents occasionally, but usually as a spectrum.
Some people take more to appreciating the deviations, and some people really just want very much to bring up the deviations for other reasons.
Deviants get remembered. They have stories written about them. Joan of Ark is remembered because whatever Joan's reason, Joan decided completely and utterly to be Joan regardless of the consequences. Joan was a deviation from the norm and now people use Joan's story as a reason and example to try the idea of "be myself and fuck the haters" on for a spin.
As for a perspective informed by observation...
I think that Gender as an aspect of Sexual Reproduction of a Social Species is derived ultimately from three sorts of roles within the species, and that for one of these roles there are multiple traits which accomplish it.
One of these roles is going to organize roughly around pregnancy, "sex theoretic female", though there will be outliers and admixtures of traits.
One of these roles will arrange around sperm, all the strategies that all the animals that don't have to deal with eating/growing enough material to make a baby succeed have adopted. These will be distributed in some measure across those who can, amd again, outliers and admixtures.
One of these roles will involve doing a third thing, and I social species will see selection, especially in family organized groups: non-reproductive members.
Non-reproductive members in social and tool-using species don't have to deal with the time and effort of raising children and generally have other roles available to them, and other ways they can contribute to the success of both adults and children in their communities. This is a third way in which individuals can contribute, and especially to family.
There is a selective pressure on the other two, for their own sakes, to harbor processes or traits that can generate a non-reproductive individual at a fairly high rate, in such a society where tools are important or where tool use and creative intelligence as a trait may skip many offspring of some family group.
I do think primates have been evolving for long enough around tool use and technique and expertise that some archetype of individual who will not reproduce and who will contribute certain kinds of important behaviors from time to time would see trait selection over time. This would constitute the evolutionary pressure towards development of some set of archetypes and ways of contributing socially rather than reproductively, to include access to applying some pretty direct selection pressures based on which siblings or cousins we support (if any).
This set pf strategies available for operations that improve the group by their presence create a selection pressure to a role that will come to be expressed still occasionally even in typical folks, as much as typical traits see occasional crossover in such a way as individuals end up in the situation where they aren't reproducing.
I can't tell whether you're trying to deny the agency of individuals, the role of the rest of society, or both?
How about denying that a person can wish their preferred reality into being?
Of course we can't.
I can't wish my eyes perfect. The doctors can't make them perfect (even if I didn't consider the risks on surgery unacceptable my prescription isn't stable), but they can make things far better than they would otherwise be. Fundamentally, it comes down to wearing glasses is better than not wearing glasses.
The issue with the transgendered is like this. While one can dream of perfection the reality is far from it. It comes down to whether the patient has a better life with medical intervention or without. That's how basically all medical interventions should be evaluated--is the patient better off. And the low regret rate says they are. (Especially as most of the regrets stem from society, not from the individual.)
But she wants to use this as an excuse to socially exclude those who nonetheless express desire to be socially included by people who act and dress and think like them.
Moreover, she wants to exclude as much as possible anyone she can who was born without exactly the reality she approves of.
Sexes are imaginary in the way you treat them. They are not real. To quote a reddit post I made recently, with an added evaluation by an unbiased observer:
User
Please evaluate the following statement for lies, untruths, and biases, with respect to current scientific understandings.
Do not evaluate such as is discussed indirectly in the text; rather focus only on those of the speaker, not of those spoken of.
If something is general rather than specific, evaluate it on its face with the general text; simplification to general fact is to be considered acceptable.
ChatGPT
Please provide the statement you'd like evaluated.
The notion that ChatGPT is an unbiased observer is counterfactual. A large language model inherits the biases of whatever corpus it was trained on, plus whatever biases its developers deliberately introduced when they decided they didn't care for the outputs they were getting from their newly-trained model in its raw form. Every output from an LLM should be read as if it were prefixed with a Donald-Trump-style "People are saying...".
You haven't yet offered any actual critical analysis to support any sort of assertion that anything I said is in any way inaccurate.
YOU didn't say it. You went and asked a program to regurgitate something at you, and because it aligned with your own belief, you presented it as if it held some authority.
Well, there are two things then that you seem to have failed to critically analyze, both the original piece which I wrote and the critique offered.
Both are there, waiting for any kind of sensible or reasonable analysis.
Biology is, as it ever was, a study of some cases and the general flow of cases in the ready presence of all manner of exception and arbitraries declared arbitrarily.
Margie Profet some decades ago where she said that there is no good theory about breasts. She had come up with a theory of menstruation, that it was to periodically clear out the womb lining so that infections of it don't persist.
www.bbc.com
abc3340.com
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
