Fashion Is Not Infallible.

Ladies and Ladies, now I shall try to tackle the problem of wearing short clothes, that is, revealing clothes, while being a straight man, which is slightly funny because many of the other girls might be snatching their scalp of its strands of hair, but I have full faith that you, my friend, haven’t yet, which means there is room for discussion, girl.

I am here to tackle this socio-politico-ethico problem using logic grounded in our practical world of instincts, with our impure understanding of the abstract, for now.

Everything is left to your own discretion because I am not authoritarian or a person diagnosed with a lack of understanding of the human will.

My primary audience for this article is straight women, though it can be generalised and expanded to audiences with other gender identities with no issues, which will be clarified as we pave the article forward.

But first, let’s flatten the ground of its many pebbles. I don’t support unauthorised coercion or disregard for autonomy, but rather approach it as a philosophical problem at its utmost level, so we, as future parents or present ones, may not feel any confusion while nudging our kids to the right path while being confused ourselves. I have met countless fathers and mothers confused about whether this is right or wrong and end up saying nothing, but their instinct says something is at least not correct. But who can care to fight with modernity? Why will anyone risk their children?

This is my primary motive. We know cigarettes and alcohol are bad, tobacco and cigarettes being extremely bad, and mere consumption of alcohol has been proven to show negative effects in our human bodies, so when a parent says, “Alex, don’t do drugs!” or “Do you want to end up a hippie?” the following mechanism will achieve the same result. It should be quite clear to everybody after reading this article, whether they choose to, or even after reading, whether they choose to wear revealing clothes. This article is nothing but an effort to empower discretion and autonomy, along with resolving parental confusion for a better society.

There is no confusion, no if or but, about whether cigarettes or alcohol are bad. They are bad. We know they are bad for sure. More precisely, for a certainty, we know they are bad for health, for mental health, for everything long term, minus the survivorship bias.

Whether we choose to stay confused is our own discretion.

Thus, it is yours even after reading this article.

I am not arguing that revealing clothes are cigarettes. Obviously, that would be insane. I am saying that we should take a look at the methodology behind such a conclusion. Look at something, try to understand how it functions, see what consequences it produces, and then figure out whether there is a "should" or "should not" there.

The question of fashion

That is why I want to begin with asking a more fundamental question first. What is fashion, exactly? And how do we define things as fashionable in the first place?

We have plenty of strange historical examples which might be helpful here.

For instance, Mursi of southern Ethiopia. Mursi women are widely known for wearing large clay or wooden plates in their lips. Traditionally, the piercing and stretching of the lip was performed during adolescence by means of gradually larger plates and plugs. There is a popular version among tourists that the size of a plate is the indication of status or bride-price of the woman. But, in reality, anthropology gives a much deeper meaning. The issues of social adulthood, reproductive potential, pride, identity, self-esteem, and, sometimes, personal choice regarding the degree of stretching become the core of the problem. That makes the example more interesting, not less. Something that looks very unusual for an outsider is able to mean, to appeal, to impress and to become a norm within another culture. Mursi Online

Next, there are Maasai and other groups of East Africa where ear lobes have been traditionally pierced and stretched. Among Maasai, ear modification has been traditionally connected with age, ornamentation, and social identity. According to Smithsonian ethnographic material, boys and girls traditionally had their ears modified at particular ages, and the stretched ears were later used for carrying different ornaments. At least in several Kenyan traditions, stretching of ears was painful, but it was the part of the established language of beauty, adulthood, identity, and status. Smithsonian Institution

Now let us move to another geographical area – Victorian Britain. Women's bodies have been shaped by means of corsets, stays, crinolines, and then bustles. Corsets traditionally shaped the waist into the necessary silhouette of that time. Later on, tight-lacing and restricted clothes were seen as something that had to be changed in the process of the Dress Reform movement due to the criticism of the way fashion works against the natural movement and comfort of the body. Of course, some of the claims made by Victorians regarding the impact of corsets on health were exaggerated. Still, the general point remained – people were ready to shape their bodies after particular silhouettes because these silhouettes were considered to be beautiful. VAM

China gives an even more severe example. Footbinding was initially developed among elites and later it became connected with female beauty, refinement, marriageability and social status. Feet of girls were traditionally bound since childhood to produce the "lotus foot." Something that was able to bring life-long damage to the body of a woman was still perceived within a particular social environment as desirable. Smithsonian Magazine

Finally, there are extraordinary heights of Renaissance Venetian chopines. Chopines were traditional platform shoes that have been traditionally worn especially in Venice from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Most of them are much shorter, but there are surviving examples that exceed a foot and are described historically as impossible to use without help. They provided protection from the dirty streets of Venice and, at the same time, emphasized the physical presence of a woman and her status. The Metropolitan Museum notes historical examples of chopines reaching as much as twenty inches, including an example in the Museo Correr in Venice. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

It seems that we have a pattern emerging.

There will always be some uncertainty regarding the origin of particular fashion. But we can build a possible mechanism and see whether it is able to explain the phenomena we observe.

Some people – either high-status people, people seeking status, or simply the people in close proximity to each other – start to perceive something as attractive, respectable, sophisticated, rebellious, sexually appealing, powerful, difficult or, in any way, worthy to be imitated. Others imitate them. Copying itself makes it more normal. After that, it becomes even more normal to wear something, and more and more people start to wear it. Finally, people stop perceiving it as something invented and begin to perceive it as something simply looking good.

Here is where anthropology and research on cultural evolution give us several important notions that help us understand some parts of the process.

There is enculturation. You learn what is normal, beautiful, proper and improper just by growing up within a culture.

There is conformist transmission. People tend to adopt those things that they see done by many others.

There is prestige-biased transmission. People tend to learn from those whom they consider prestigious or socially important. There are vertical, horizontal, and oblique forms of cultural transmission: vertical transmission occurs from parents to offspring, horizontal transmission among members of the same generation, and oblique transmission from members of an older generation other than one's parents. Fashion can therefore move through multiple routes across generations and social groups, rather than only from elites to everyone else. Status might make fashion spread faster, but it is not a rule that every fashion should start from elites. PubMed Central (PMC)

There is signalling. Sometimes practices become popular precisely because of their difficulties, costliness, inconvenience, pain or because they are hard to fake. If anyone can do something fast and easily, it might say less than something requiring money, skills, endurance, commitment and sacrifice. Anthropologists and behavioral scientists call this costly signalling; related accounts describe some signals as hard to fake. Difficult practice gains status partly due to its difficulty. PubMed

And there is the notion of social skin suggested by the anthropologist Terence Turner. The body is not only a biological phenomenon. Human beings assign social meanings to it. Clothes, jewellery, hairstyle, scarification, makeup, body modifications, body position and countless other things can say about belonging, age, status, gender, wealth, commitment and identity. The body becomes a social surface.

Of course, this does not mean that all these mechanisms explain all kinds of fashion. But they provide us with something more useful than just saying "fashion is fashion."

And it is this first mechanism I need:

Fashion is not infallible.

So let’s mark this axiom here clearly.

So we can construct the arguments one by one.

Judging a fashion

What is trending in today’s world is not necessarily right because all the inherent incentives of survival to get things correct, at least as a rule of thumb, have largely vanished, and whatever medical advice floats on the internet, there is effort in most aspects to debunk that information, which eventually dissipates thoughts such as taking Viagra as a therapy for cancer slowly but generally surely out of public consciousness. But unlike these medical and scientifically tractable problems, problems like these which rest on discretion and cannot be outlawed or, by evidence, be proven forever to be one way or another like the laws of physics, remain an open problem to objectively prove on either side or in the centre.

So where was I! Most of what is trending today will not contribute to your direct survival, and most people don’t wish to thrive even if they think they wish to thrive, so everything moves on as if it were a use-and-throw object, and influencers and people who just want to wash their hands in the flowing river and eventually maybe find some gold join the ride, which eventually leads to the copying of copying, which makes copying easier, and thus any room for using the prefrontal cortex is then diminished severely at a societal level.

Aesthetics being subjective is another point in the arsenal of influencers. This idea escaped the coffers of philosophers before they were sure whether it was for the better or the worse.

Yes, of course subjective experience is there in aesthetics. In fact, that is one of the reasons why an artwork might be considered beautiful – because the artist has put some subjective experience into his work. But I do not see it as a matter of choosing to say whether aesthetics are objective or subjective.

Both extreme positions are most likely reductionist.

In fact, there are many things which may be observed in relation to the artistic product. Difficulty matters. Skill matters. Novelty matters. Creativity matters. The fact that the thing cannot be easily repeated by anyone else matters.

Not just anybody can paint The Starry Night. Not just anybody can paint Mona Lisa. Not just anybody can take a violin and play a piece by Paganini with exceptional technical control.

That is true but cannot be an absolute principle since sometimes something extremely simple may become beautiful because of its simplicity. One can create something extremely obvious which happens to be new. Sometimes the beauty may consist in the fact that anyone can understand it.

That means that it is a kind of a bell curve if to speak in the way I currently think about it. The majority of judgements of aesthetics may relate to those features which can be commonly recognized by humans, skills, structure, novelty, difficulty, coherence etc., while leaving the room for individual experience, context and taste. There may be a subjective personal element in the work without transforming everything into "anything someone likes is equally beautiful" and there can be objective aspects without claiming that someone discovered an equation of beauty.

What I wanted to say is that fashion can be evaluated.

A fashion can be beautiful, ugly, clever, boring, elegant, impractical, destructive, creative or ridiculous. Saying that something is fashion does not take away its ability to be evaluated.

Interestingly, people who are saying that revealing clothes are "only fashion" and therefore should not be looked at sexually are usually very ready to evaluate someone's fashion. They call something ugly, outdated, tasteless, poorly combined, unattractive, cringe, beautiful, fashionable or unfashionable. That means that the principle that fashion cannot be evaluated cannot really work. I will later also debunk the detachment of sexualisation from fashion, thus the claim it is just a dress.

This specific manner of speaking about clothes has gained quite a bit of cultural and sometimes political significance in mainstream media and even in specialized communities. Therefore, I have to deal with it. However, I should admit that what I am doing here is establishing only the context of my opposition to the idea of revealing clothes. I have not yet developed the logical mechanism of moving from "fashion is fallible" to "revealing clothes should not be worn." That cannot happen automatically and I am not making that claim.

What I have established so far is somewhat narrower.

Fashion is not infallible.

History gives us plenty of examples when human beings treated something as beautiful, respectable or desirable until the next generation came and asked, "Why on earth were people doing that?"

Not all the examples I gave are morally equivalent. Some body modifications are elective, meaningful and cannot be adequately described as just the people being coerced into them. Other body modifications are causing harm and damage to the person.

Where a fashion or tradition is imposed on children and involves bodily damage in order to be beautiful, respectable or socially accepted, then I think we are transitioning from aesthetics to morality. Chinese foot-binding is the obvious example. Social acceptability does not make the practice moral just because people living in that society found the result beautiful.

It becomes even more obvious in the case of practices like female genital mutilation. Just because something is traditional, socially expected or normalized does not mean that physical consequences go away. FGM has no health benefits and causes both immediate and long-term harm. And it is performed mainly on children and adolescents. World Health Organization.

If a society taught someone from childhood that he or she needs to harm or alter their body for beauty, respect, marriageability or social acceptability, then saying "but that is their fashion" or "that is their culture" cannot conclude the moral discussion.

So fashion is not infallible. That is the first mechanism.

Three distinctions

Now coming back to the question of revealing clothes specifically, I want to make roughly three distinctions among women who choose to wear them.

Obviously, there are roughly four billion women in the world. You cannot take all those human beings and fit them into three boxes. There is huge variety here.

And I will deliberately keep some things ambiguous while building it.

Knowledge has the experiential component. I can write down all the propositions, put the premises under them, build a mechanism so that it works as gears inside of gears, and yet somebody might fail to understand what I mean. Kant wrote volumes trying to build mechanisms with extreme precision, and yet people still discuss what exactly he meant.

I did not make you understand it. No teacher really does, even though teachers talk as if they inserted knowledge into the head of somebody. They can give you a mechanism, examples, questions and conditions. You understand it yourself.

So my intention here is to do both: build the mechanism, but also leave the room for you to think through it and experience the knowledge.

Having made that reservation, for our purpose there are roughly three distinctions among women who choose to wear revealing clothes.

The first are promiscuous women.
The Second fashion oriented and the third, for purposes of sexual signalling

These three distinctions are already mentioned above: the first are promiscuous women, the second are fashion-oriented women, and the third are women who wear revealing clothes in order to send a sexual message. These are distinctions of mechanism, not categories into which four billion women can be fitted. So let us start with the first kind.

This type requires some explanation, because when I use the term promiscuous women, I do not refer only to somebody whose libido is exceptionally high or somebody who has had more sex than somebody else. For some, sexual behaviour takes up a much larger place in the psychological profile. I mean cases where sexuality becomes a language through which other things are expressed: affection, power, insecurity, validation, rebellion, closeness, rejection, control, whatever. That is the first rough distinction I am making here, not a box into which every promiscuous woman on Earth will fall.

And psychoanalysis has an enormous vocabulary for these kinds of things. There is Freud's concept of repetition compulsion. Human beings sometimes repeat certain patterns even when the pattern does not seem, on the surface, to provide ordinary pleasure. His point in Beyond the Pleasure Principle was that some repetitions appear more primitive and instinctual than ordinary pleasure-seeking, and Freud was trying to understand why people keep returning to psychic situations which have already caused them suffering. Repetition itself can become an attempt at mastery, or a way in which something unresolved keeps arising in another form. Cambridge University Press

Jung gives us the concepts of the complex, persona, shadow, compensation and everything else lurking beneath the superficial conscious self-image. A complex is not just some random thought inside your head. It is a cluster of memories, emotions and perceptions sharing an affective centre which can colour experience without the conscious ego completely understanding what is happening. Persona is the image we present to society, while the shadow contains those elements which cannot easily be accommodated by the picture we consciously maintain of ourselves.

Adler gives us compensation. Something which appears to be confidence can sometimes be an answer to inferiority, insecurity or a striving for recognition. Horney discusses the neurotic need for affection and approval, sexuality inside that need, and the need for power, prestige and possession. Lacan goes into an even stranger territory because desire is not simply wanting an object. There is also the desire to become the object of the desire of the Other. The question can quietly move from "Do I want him?" to "Am I wanted?" or "What must I become in order to become desirable?" Routledge

So she may not simply be pursuing sex. She may be pursuing being wanted, reassurance, the feeling of having control over somebody else's attention, intimacy without commitment, conquest, rebellion, or the repetition of something she herself may not understand. Sex can become proof to herself that she is desirable, powerful, wanted, independent, lovable, whatever. Or none of these may apply and she may simply have a strong sexual temperament.

And if sexuality has been turned into that kind of psychological multi-tool by the unconscious forces of somebody's personality, what exactly am I going to argue with here? For the purpose of this article, not much. I will not spend half of this essay arguing with the unconscious. If somebody's entire psychological system regarding sexuality is very different from the audience to which I am mostly speaking, what exactly am I going to persuade her of? She may wear sexually revealing clothes because they fit perfectly with whatever she already seeks through sexuality. Telling her that "this fashion came from here" may not touch the actual mechanism at all.

That does not mean that every promiscuous woman has childhood trauma, father issues, a particular complex or some universal explanation of her behaviour. Of course not. I am using promiscuity here as an archetype of a certain psychological system, not trying to analyse somebody's psyche by calculating how much skin she is showing.

And I am certainly not withdrawing human respect from anybody. Human respect is not a reward somebody wins by obeying my preferences. Everyone deserves basic human respect because he or she is human, and that point does not become negotiable simply because I dislike or disagree with some behaviour. Even Kant's respect for persons is rather brutal in this regard: dignity belongs to persons as persons and does not disappear merely because I disapprove of the thing somebody is doing. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

So let us leave the first kind of woman alone for now. The second kind is much more interesting for my argument.

This is the fashion-oriented woman. She wants to look good. She wants to look fashionable. She wants the latest clothes. She sees something worn by enough attractive or prestigious women and eventually it starts looking good to her. If that fashionable thing were a lehenga, she would wear a lehenga. If some form of veil became fashionable in her social environment, she would wear the veil. If ripped jeans are fashionable, she buys jeans which have already been torn at the factory and pays money for that. Obviously, I am simplifying the person here, but you understand the mechanism.

And honestly, imagine somebody digging through our civilization five hundred years from now and discovering thousands of commercially produced trousers which had been artificially damaged exactly where normal trousers tend to become torn. They may very reasonably wonder what the hell we were doing. Even distressed clothing has its own genealogy. Punk fashion in the 1970s used fraying, torn fabric, safety pins and other damaged aesthetics as forms of rebellion and anti-establishment communication, and designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren helped transform that aesthetic into fashion. Victoria and Albert Museum

So again:

How a fashion travels

But now we need to dig deeper. Where did this particular fashion of revealing clothes come from?

The history is more complicated than saying "men invented short dresses." Western women did not wake up one morning in 1965 and collectively decide that skirts objectively look better above the knee. Hemlines changed gradually. In the late 1950s and early 1960s they were moving upwards. André Courrèges showed shorter skirts in Paris couture, Mary Quant shortened hemlines in London, youth culture and dancing mattered, girls altered clothes themselves, and street fashion fed back into designers. By roughly 1966 the very short mini had become established fashion. According to the V&A, young women themselves were active participants in that process and Quant connected the miniskirt with emancipation, the pill, rock and roll and women's liberation. Victoria and Albert Museum

This is my point precisely. Something can go from "what the fuck are you wearing?" to "this simply looks good" within one generation.

And the direction is not always top-down either. The street can influence the designer; the designer can influence the street; both can influence each other at the same time. This is why we discussed vertical, horizontal and oblique cultural transmission. Fashion is a cycle, not a king sitting on a hill ordering everybody what to wear.

The fashion show is another interesting piece of the history. Charles Frederick Worth, an English-born male dressmaker working in Paris, is commonly associated with an early form of the modern fashion-show system, presenting finished designs on live models to clients rather than simply waiting for a customer to specify what she wanted. This became part of the commercial machinery of haute couture. Long before Instagram, therefore, an institution already existed which could put an aesthetic on prestigious human bodies and make other people want it. Victoria and Albert Museum

But I certainly do not have to create the illusion that men invented every short dress and women obediently put them on. That would ruin the mechanism completely. Mary Quant was a woman. Young women shortened skirts themselves. Female consumers were definitely not brainless automatons. Quant's business itself was responsive to young female customers, and her designs were deliberately made relatively accessible and easy to mass-produce for the youth market.

The attention economy

A commercial system does not always have to invent a desire. It can capture a desire, amplify it, sexualize it, attach meanings to it, put famous faces into it, photograph it, market it, and repeat it until something which was once shocking becomes ordinary and something which was once ordinary begins looking strange.

To understand why that matters, a different mechanism is needed. Human beings are not floating rational minds. They are living creatures whose instincts roam alongside their pretences of not having any. We have instincts, symbols, status desires, sexual desires, anxieties; we want to belong and we want to be admired. If you can link a commodity to one of these things, then you are not merely selling the commodity. You are selling the meaning.

A heterosexual man can see an attractive female body and experience sexual arousal before writing a philosophical essay explaining why it happened. Of course the other direction exists too. But a woman may also experience what I will call modest reserve, that internal boundary-feeling around sexual exposure, intimacy and being sexually seen.

I do not mean "shame" in the sense of believing that one's own body is dirty, sinful or shameful. No, I do not. I mean something closer to lajja, although "shame" is too crude an English word for what I am talking about: embarrassment mixed with privacy, shyness, restraint, dignity and a reluctance to make something intimate completely public. So I will call it modest reserve.

Sexual modesty is not some remote Victorian invention. Different societies place psychological, interpersonal and cultural boundaries between private and public sexual expression, even though they put those boundaries in radically different places. What one society considers sexually private may carry almost no sexual meaning in another. Hair, breasts, ankles, thighs, the face, the stomach and countless other things have carried different meanings in different times and places.

So I am not saying that nature equips every woman with an internal ruler telling her exactly how many centimetres of thigh may be exposed. I am saying something narrower. The very idea of an intimate boundary seems much deeper than any one fashion. Human sexuality has appetitive and inhibitory tendencies. Desire can pull one way while modesty, reserve, privacy and selectivity pull another, and culture teaches us where those feelings attach themselves.

And once this is understood, commercialization becomes extremely interesting.

Edward Bernays gives us an almost laboratory-quality historical example without us having to manufacture one. Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew.

In 1929 George Washington Hill of the American Tobacco Company wanted access to an enormous market, women, and wanted to weaken the taboo against women smoking publicly. Bernays consulted psychoanalyst A. A. Brill and arranged the famous "Torches of Freedom" episode in which women smoked during the Easter Parade in New York and the cigarette was publicly attached to the language of women's freedom and equality. The commercial purpose was not hidden somewhere in metaphysics. The client was a tobacco company and the goal was to sell more cigarettes. The Museum of Public Relations

That is extremely important because it gives us the mechanism:

The cigarette remained the cigarette. It did not become healthier because somebody branded it as liberation. The corporation did not become a feminist movement because its advertising started using the vocabulary of emancipation. It wanted customers.

A commercial interest recognized a genuine social feeling, attached its product to that feeling and made consumption itself capable of functioning as political self-expression. That is why Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self becomes relevant to the mechanism I am trying to describe. The broader Bernaysian method was not merely "tell somebody this product is good." It was to attach commodities to identity, desire, status and the unconscious.

Then "buy this" becomes "I am free", "I am modern", "I am equal", "I refuse your restriction", "I am rebellious", "I am desirable", "I am sophisticated", "I am empowered."

That is fantastic marketing. And also terrifying.

Because once the symbolic link is culturally established, the next generation can encounter the symbol without ever encountering the advertiser who originally manufactured the link. They simply inherit the meaning.

This is precisely what I am asking women to think about before saying, "But I chose it myself."

Of course you chose it yourself.

That is not the interesting question.

And this is also where the historical position of women matters. Industrialization did not produce one magical moment where suddenly one man's salary supported the family and women ceased to matter economically. History is much messier than that. Women continued to work, often extremely hard. But in nineteenth-century Britain and elsewhere there was an expansion of the male-breadwinner arrangement in which the man's wage increasingly came to be regarded as the principal family wage and women were increasingly associated with economic dependency and unpaid domestic work. Historians themselves discuss this transition from family economic units supported by multiple people toward the male-breadwinner family. Cambridge University Press

So there was real restriction, real dependency, real reason for women to want greater control over their lives. That does not mean women's liberation was invented by advertisers. Obviously not. It means that once a genuine desire for liberation exists, somebody can sell commodities through it. The symbol of liberation can become a market.

And that distinction is enormous. Smoking can be sold as freedom. An object can be sold as rebellion. A dress can be sold as empowerment. A beauty product can be sold as self-love. The industry can remain completely indifferent to whether you actually become free, provided you keep buying the symbol.

Now bring male sexual instinct into the machine.

The capitalist system does not need to invent male sexual appetite. It merely needs to learn that male sexual appetite draws attention. Sexual attention is a resource. Eyeballs are economically valuable, and female sexuality has repeatedly been converted into those eyeballs.

Once attention is money, the loop becomes almost embarrassingly simple. Show something. People look. The thing which gets more attention is reproduced. More producers reproduce it. The reproduced thing becomes ordinary. The ordinary thing creates a new standard. Somebody then needs to move slightly ahead to obtain the same amount of attention, so the boundary shifts again, and again, and again.

This does not require everybody involved to meet secretly in one room. The system can behave this way simply because each individual inside it reacts to immediate incentives. It is exactly the copying-and-copying mechanism we discussed earlier, but now there is money sitting on each copy.

This is where magazines, cinema, advertising, celebrity and eventually social media enter.

There were already explicitly male-oriented industries which monetized the sexualized image of women: pin-ups, men's magazines, erotic photography and later things such as Playboy. Fashion media and women's magazines are another mechanism. The point is not that every magazine was bought by men. The point is that a market for the sexual image existed.

Film theory has its own language for this. Laura Mulvey famously described the male gaze: camera, spectator and character can be arranged so that the woman becomes the object being looked at while the viewing position is coded as male. Whether every element of Mulvey's political theory is accepted is another question. For my purposes the mechanism is more interesting than the flag attached to it. Human visual attention can be organized, stylized and sold. BFI

India gives us an almost comically obvious example through the item song. The item song may have very little to do with the plot, and in many cases that is practically the point. Put a famous actress in an erotic costume, make her body the spectacle through the camera, surround her with male admirers, make the song catchy, advertise the film using the number and use sexual spectacle as mass attraction. Scholars discussing Bollywood item numbers themselves analyse them through the male gaze, commodification, sexual display and commercial attraction. PubMed Central (PMC)

We do not need to solve the morality of male lust here. That would be another bloody article. I am interested only in the mechanism:

And women see those representations too.

This is how it returns to fashion. The actress gets attention. The model gets attention. The celebrity becomes famous, desirable, prestigious and imitated. The outfit becomes associated with beauty, fame, desirability, modernity, confidence and status. So a girl looking at her may think, quite naturally, "She is beautiful. She is confident. She is famous. She is fashionable. I want to look like her."

And here the mechanism becomes almost invisible. The commercial system does not have to enter somebody's bedroom and order her to dress a particular way. It presents the prestigious model. Prestige-biased transmission, which we already discussed, does much of the remaining work.

Then social media accelerates it. A designer, celebrity or influencer posts something. The image gets attention, part of which may be sexual attention. Another image pushes the boundary slightly further. If that image receives even more attention, there is an incentive to reproduce the pattern. Ordinary users then copy the commercial image.

And at that point the woman may tell you completely sincerely:

I believe her.

That is exactly my point.

A culturally generated aesthetic does not require the person wearing it to consciously understand the causal chain which generated that aesthetic. Nobody wakes up every morning and reconstructs the complete economic genealogy of blue jeans before putting them on.

Take ripped jeans again. You buy trousers which have already been damaged. Five hundred years later somebody may look at photographs of us and wonder why people paid money for clothes which appeared to have been damaged before purchase.

The answer will probably be: because it looked good.

But why did it look good?

There we are again.

Fashion.

The same thing happens with bodies themselves. There have been societies and historical periods in which a fuller or plumper body suggested abundance, prosperity, health, fertility, prestige or simply the ability to obtain enough food. Under conditions of scarcity, visible body mass can signify something very different from what it signifies in a society where food is plentiful and thinness itself can become difficult, expensive or status-coded. Historical research shows exactly these shifts between plumpness as health or wealth and later ideals of slimming. PubMed Central (PMC)

India gives versions of the same movement. Older artistic canons often celebrated fuller female bodies associated with sensuality and fertility while modern urban ideals have shifted considerably toward Western thin-body standards.

So when somebody says, "But I just find it beautiful," that statement can be psychologically real and philosophically incomplete.

Yes.

You find it beautiful.

The next question is: why?

Fashion is not floating above material reality. It is created within it.

And sexualizing media does not exist independently from the psychology of the person consuming it. Objectification theory has the concept of self-objectification, the adoption of an observer's perspective toward one's own body, so that how one's body appears from outside becomes increasingly important to one's own self-conception. A meta-analysis of 50 studies reported a positive relationship between exposure to sexualizing media and self-objectification, with online media among the contexts studied. PubMed Central (PMC)

That is a much more interesting meaning of objectification than merely saying, "Some man found me attractive."

Sport gives us another wonderfully strange example. Female athletes have sometimes been subjected to clothing requirements different from those applied to male athletes, including requirements which athletes themselves regarded as unnecessarily revealing. International beach-handball regulations previously specified bikini-style bottoms for women while male players could wear shorts. In 2021 the Norwegian women's beach-handball team wore shorts instead and was fined €150 per player. IHF Archive

German gymnasts have similarly chosen full-body unitards partly because they did not want to be unnecessarily sexualized and wanted greater comfort. I do not need to claim that every person who ever drafted a women's sports uniform sat there calculating television ratings. That fairy tale is unnecessary. The smaller point is enough: a substantially more revealing presentation of female athletes can become institutionalized even when the practical purpose of the activity is athletic performance.

And commercial motivations around the attractiveness of female athletes are not imaginary either. Research has found that physical attractiveness can provide a visibility or popularity premium to female athletes in ways which do not operate identically for male athletes, thereby creating incentives inside the surrounding media economy for a more sexualized sports culture. Taylor & Francis Online

And now we have another mechanism:

And before somebody says I am claiming that men somehow stand outside fashion, obviously not. Men are manipulated by markets too. Completely. Present a man with a sufficiently charismatic movie star, car, watch, body, weapon, hairstyle or lifestyle and he can begin imitating it while quite sincerely experiencing the imitation as his natural preference.

That is human beings.

So let us put the structure down clearly.

Bernays is our neat historical illustration of (iii). The male gaze and the item-song economy provide another variation. Social media provides another. Fashion becomes one of the means through which the resulting symbolic commodity is physically carried around by the consumer.

That is why I become suspicious when somebody tells me that the whole thing ends with:

"It's just fashion."

Objectification and agency

And this is where self-respect becomes especially important for the second and third types, although obviously self-respect can matter for the first type as well.

Objectification.

We are quite willing to condemn another person for reducing a woman to her sexual body.

Right.

So what is objectification?

At its most basic, it involves treating a person, her body or her sexual functions as though that part were the whole person, or as an instrument existing primarily for somebody else's use, consumption or pleasure. Objectification theory uses very similar language when discussing reduction of women to their bodies and the internal adoption of an observer's perspective toward one's own body.

There is something peculiar here.

If another person objectifies me, we say:

Wrong.

But if I begin managing myself as an object specifically designed for the gaze, the word "agency" appears and somehow seems capable of dissolving the philosophical issue.

Why?

Agency solves one question:

Who chose?

It does not solve the next question:

Was the choice a good one?

This is the cigarette example again, and I repeat that the two things are not equivalent. The fact that I choose to smoke does not make smoking good. The fact that I choose to gamble does not make gambling good. If I voluntarily put something harmful into my mouth with my own hand, its properties do not change merely because my hand performed the action.

Freedom is enormously valuable because I want the human being to possess the choice.

"What should I choose?"

is an entirely different question from:

"Who should be allowed to choose?"

And there is something almost perfectly Kantian sitting here. The Humanity Formula does not merely require us to respect humanity in other people. It explicitly refers to humanity in our own person as well. One must not reduce one's humanity merely to an instrument.

So self-respect enters the issue.

If I objectify another person, I may wrong that person. If I objectify myself, the presence of consent removes the element of another person imposing the choice upon me, but it does not automatically answer the question of how I am relating to myself through that choice.

This becomes especially important for the second and third kinds of women. The first kind, in the archetype I am using, may not experience sexual attention as objectification in quite the same way. She may positively desire that sexual gaze because sexual attention itself performs some psychological function for her. Again, I am talking about an archetype and tendency, not issuing psychological passports to four billion women.

But the second woman often says something different. She does not want to be reduced to a sex object. She does not want to be perceived as though her body exists merely to serve the appetite of a stranger. She may feel offended if somebody's perception of her entire personality collapses into her breasts, legs, waist or sexuality.

And yet she may simultaneously have learned to present herself through an aesthetic structured around precisely that gaze, and call the act self-expression.

That contradiction is worth exploring.

Self-objectification is the term used for part of this process, when the observer's perspective toward the body becomes internalized and somebody starts monitoring herself partly through how she appears from outside. Research on sexualized clothing and sexualizing media likewise discusses pressures to dress sexually, appearance monitoring and self-objectification. PubMed Central (PMC)

Thus the commercial system gets an opportunity to perform a rather neat trick.

And if that happens, the destruction of patriarchy has not necessarily happened.

It may simply mean that patriarchy learned how to market its business.

When I use "patriarchy" here, I mean systems historically dominated by male economic and institutional power which discovered that female sexual display could attract attention and transform attention into profit. I am not claiming that every designer was male, that every woman was manipulated, or that every revealing piece of clothing came out of some male boardroom. The history is too complicated for that. The narrower point is that female sexual display has repeatedly been commercially profitable inside industries whose visual markets could benefit enormously from male attention.

Bernays is precisely why I do not regard the presence of liberation-language as proof that the commodity itself is liberating.

And it becomes even stranger when liberation and objectification are put together. A woman absolutely has the agency to present herself sexually. That is her freedom. But if the presentation turns her body into an attention-generating commodity, then saying "agency" tells me who controlled the decision.

It does not tell me whether she respected herself in making it.

That is a completely different question.

The third question

Now the third kind becomes somewhat easier because at least the mechanism is more explicit.

This is sexual signalling.

You know that the presentation is sexual and sexiness is part of its purpose.

Human beings communicate sexually through appearance all the time. Clothes, behaviour and countless other things can become signals. Sexual signalling can even be extremely private. A woman in a committed relationship may wear intimate clothing specifically because she wants to feel sexy, desired and sexually receptive toward her partner. That distinction is useful because it demonstrates that "sexual expression" and "public sexual display to everybody" are not identical ideas.

The audience matters.

And now instinct returns.

A man who wants a long-term exclusive relationship does not suddenly stop possessing mating instincts because he read philosophy. Sexual jealousy, exclusivity, mate guarding, attraction and concern about rivals do not disappear merely because we have sophisticated words with which to describe them. Men and women can distinguish between short-term and long-term mating situations, and the things they value can change depending upon what kind of relationship they are imagining.

So if the objective of sexually suggestive signalling is attention from the opposite sex, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask:

The man whose attention is captured most powerfully by a signal which immediately telegraphs sexuality is not necessarily the same man who will value you most strongly as a partner over time.

Those are different selection problems.

And many men who seek exclusivity will naturally place value on signs of sexual selectivity rather than promiscuity. Not every man. But if a man values sexual exclusivity, it should surprise nobody that sexual reserve can become something he values as well.

That is where modest reserve becomes important again.

Not repression. Not fear of one's body. Not believing one's body is dirty.

It is a recognition that not every intimate thing has to be displayed before every available eye merely because doing so is legally permissible. Privacy can itself be a value. Selectivity can itself be a value. Self-respect can include choosing not to convert every part of oneself into something available for public consumption merely because the market rewards it.

That is what the issue eventually boils down to.

I am not arguing against autonomy. I am arguing that autonomy is not a synonym for wisdom. I am not arguing that another human being gains ownership over your body. I am almost arguing the opposite.

And if objectification is a moral problem because a human being is more than the sexual utility of her body, then self-objectification does not cease to raise the same question merely because the object and the objectifier happen to occupy the same skin.