It's my feeling that this thread has gone on quite some time without any real progress, so I think it's time for a summary.
My main points in this thread have been:
1) That culture has a strong influence on people from an early age.
2) That our culture places a high value upon the attainment of unrealistic physical beauty, youthful appearence, and thinness for girls and women, and that women who meet these physical ideals are greatly rewarded (regardless of if they meet those ideals by unhealthy or extreme means) and those who do not are socially punished.
3) Playboy, along with other mass media and the fashion industry, all influence the culture (which includes everyone) regarding what people should find beautiful and sexy.
This is supported by the fact that the recent introduction of the very thin physical ideal presented in American television programs to other cultures resulted in a sharp increase in the prevalence of disordered eating in adolescent girls. We are also seeing more body dissatisfaction, body dismorphism, and steroid use among adolescent boys and young men in the US as they have had the extreme and unattainable male physical ideal presented to them by the media as something that they are expected to and should want to look like.
It is completely irrelevant if the members of the cultures affected by these media images and television are correct in their interpretation. What is important to the point is that
the influence of the culture on the individuals is real and strong.
The reason this influence is real and strong is not because entire cultures are stupid, but because it is natural for humans to respond strongly to cultural influences.
Certainly, Playboy is not solely responsible, and it has never been my point that it was.
(Coincidentally, I was watching TV last night and there was some program about of Hefner's 7 salaried "Girlfriends". They were interviewed and shown doing what they typically do during the day, and what their responsibilities were to Hefner, etc.
One of the girls recounted that she saw her first Playboy when she was about 4 years old, and she remembered thinking at that time that the women in the pictures were all so beautiful, and that she wanted to look just like them when she grew up.
And then she giggled and said it was so amazing that she ended up in Playboy and even became one of Hefners "Girlfriends", and that "It was like a dream come true." and that she couldn't imagine a better life.)
Arachnophilia seems to be mostly stuck in knee-jerk contrarian reactionary mode, even when it actually supports my position, which suggests that he isn't paying very close attention to what I have written.
Holmes set the stage for his own argument by stacking the deck against me when he chose a strawman, inaccurate, cartoon version of my argument to be the title of the thread.
Holmes, IIRC, has also claimed that he is incapable of being influenced by his own persoanl bias when evaluating any research study, and also that the entire field of Evolutionary Psychology is "crap" on the basis of his evaluation of a few studies, so I'm not sure it's even possible to get a fair hearing from him.
His argument (and Arach's as well) seems to rest largely on the idea that people are dumb and wrong for being influenced by the culture, the social environment, they live in.
I don't see much hope for progress at this point.
I will end with this quote from cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker's book,
How the Mind Works:
"Though the beauty industry is not a conspiracy against women, it is not innocuous either. We calibrate our eye for beauty against the people we see, including our illusory neighbors in the mass media. A daily diet of freakishly beautiful virtual people may recalibrate the scales and make the real ones, including ourselves, look ugly."
™ Version 4.2
