Emily (she/her)

Ok rather than responding in kind with some snarky comment, I’m going to make a good faith effort explain what I mean.

My statement that “beauty standards are based in white supremacy” is talking about what we, as a whole society, consider attractive. I am not talking about your personal taste, I am talking about the kinds of bodies, faces, and styles that are elevated in society and pointing our their basis in white supremacy.

Firstly, we need to understand that beauty standards are not some platonic ideal of beauty, they are socially constructed and therefore informed by the society in which they exist. This also necessarily means that current standards are an evolution of historical standards, reciprocally changing as people both influence the standards and are influenced by them.

That means that if we want to understand today’s beauty standards, we also need to consider them in a historical context. I hope it is not a controversial point to say that most white countries (i.e. Australia where I live, and the US where much of the discussion often centres) were historically white supremacist (if not presently, but that is a different can of worms). Like they openly stated it (i.e. “White Australia” being official policy) and legally elevated whites, this isn’t up for discussion. I would hope it is not difficult to imagine that such a society would also base its definitions of beauty around white features: white skin, white facial features, blonde hair, etc. A cliche example of this would be the historical masculinization of African-American people and their bodies. Pernicious stereotypes like “Jezebel”, “Sapphire”, and more modern incarnations like “Angry Black Woman” are prime examples of this, where black women are given qualities or cast into roles considered, in a societal context, incompatible with femininity or even outright masculine.

Therefore, to evaluate my claim that beauty standards are “based in white supremacy”, we need to determine whether our standards have substantially deviated from that history. I would argue it has not, that our beauty standards are clearly descendant. To look at the modelling industry as a prominent signifier, even with notional improvements in the diversity of models, the presence of eurocentric features is largely maintained (see 1, 2, 3). That is not to say there isn’t work, particularly from passionate activists, to move on from this history - but we are not there yet.

Finally, in regards to this entire thread, I want to point out that, due to the global hegemonic nature of whiteness - historically and presently - to some uneducated eyes the premise of my argument here - that beauty standards are not objective but subjective and socially constructed - may be dismissed out of hand. A naive look at other prominent non-white cultures that attempt to recreate the aesthetics of white beauty standards (i.e. skin lightening products in south-east asia) could appear to suggest that they may be formed from an objective standpoint. This is patently and obviously untrue. Other cultures and periods of time had extremely varied beauty standards to those we have today, and it is a blatant case of presentism and ignorance to assume that our particular version is “correct”. We should be skeptical of claims that, unlike so many other aspects of society, beauty standards alone are not impacted by the global history of colonialism and the dominance of white countries globally.

• Beauty is not objective
• Beauty standards are based in white supremacy
• This post is really fucking weird.

I briefly worked for a company who worked on household power technology. Their product would attempt to predict energy prices, weather patterns, and usage to sell your excess energy at peak prices. Like discussed in the article, this company collected usage data and controlled the sale of energy back to the grid centrally. They did this because it meant they could better train their prediction models and run them on more powerful hardware. The controllers would have needed internet connectivity anyway to query energy prices, and putting the prediction on device would have just made them more expensive and worse. Even when I worked there (back in 2015 I think), they were already very aware of the threat vectors discussed by this article and took some measures to prevent it.

In my opinion they were (/are, still exist) a responsible company run by competent people. They did not collect the data out of “greed”, and I strongly suspect that the people in these comments implying that the data is collected to be sold have never actually worked in the industry and have very little idea of the specific value of energy usage data. I can’t really speak authoritatively for other companies, but I would guess that, like the one I worked for, their products are internet connected simply because it improves the product. For example, people expect things to be controllable or viewable from an app from anywhere, and that requires internet connectivity.