Something that has been on my mind quite a bit over the last few years has been the shift in fashion trends, not just with clothing and the like but with body styles. If you were born in the 80s or earlier, you are old enough to remember when what was considered attractive now was not attractive then, especially if you're White. If you grew up in the 80s, 90s and very early 00s you might remember who the"hot" female stars of the day were.
Women who looked like
Feminine, slender, fit, lithe, tight, and tiny. We called them spinners and had phrases like "an ass so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it".
And yet, now the beauty standard among even White women is more like
Obviously something happened in the last few decades. Now we all know fashion trends and what is considered attractive culturally does shift naturally over time, though it's usually in spans of centuries. But it's suspicious to me that this transition took place at the same time black culture was deliberately starting to be pushed into the spotlight. The DEI push started gaining steam about 15-20 years ago, it's only become more overt and aggressive now that they've gained enough institutional power. But the push to make black sports stars, black actors, black music, etc all the most popular really started to get going in the mid/late 00s. Right around the collapse of the last punk/alternative music era where real genuine bands with real musicians and instruments got pushed into a more niche interest and rappers and autotune started taking over. I'm sure many of us who are old enough noticed the change and can think of more examples. But it's gotten bad enough that if you tell some people you still find the first group attractive and the second gross, you might be accused of being a pedo or liking girls who look like little boys.
My question is, do you think it was deliberately pushed on us by the malicious powers that be, or was it just a natural shift, like as Americans got fatter in general, fatter women who at least kind of wear it better than a blob became the new beauty standard? A bit of both? Any other reasons or factors you might think contributed to it? It just seems odd to me that as blacks and their standards were forced into everything else, even White women started to want to look like black women just with lighter skin. You'd never have heard of the latest "it girl" in a mid 90s summer teen comedy or slasher movie wanting to get ass implants, much less find a White high school boy in 1997 who wanted a girl who had them. We wanted volleyball players and the cheerleaders at the top of the pyramid, not twerkers and ghetto chicks. "Thick"(we still spelled it correctly back then) was a positive adjective for black chicks and the black dudes who liked them, and they were welcome to keep it to themselves. But that was then, and it's not that way now, even for a ton of White men. Why though?
Total side question since you're awake and here, in another thread we were talking about anime and I wanted to ask you in particular; do you watch anime, and if so, what race do you perceive the characters as being?
I’ve always seen them as either white or Japanese unless they were drawn to be black. Or darker brown skin could still be Asian.
Not the dude you're responding to, but it's always been obvious to me that most anime characters look most like white people. For as much as they can look like anyone with their humongous eyes and exaggerated features.
I'm implicitly aware that most of the time they're Japanese due to the setting and that this is just a choice made for stylistic purposes. I recall an episode of Log Horizon....in season 2 maybe(?) where the main character morphs himself to show what he looks like in real life. That is the closest attempt I've seen to portraying how actual Japanese people would look in anime form.
I asked, because that very topic was brought up in another thread, and you might be interested to know that white people seeing anime characters as white people is a known factor in the animation of the characters. Japanese people in fact, see them as Japanese. The reason for this is because they are drawn just different enough from actual humans, like how facial structures more closely resemble that of a cat than a person, that there is an uncanny valley effect in which the viewer can project their own internalized "ideal person" on to the character. Basically since they don't look too much like anything in particular, the viewer's brain superimposes what it thinks they should look like on what it does, and that's what they see it as. Japanese anime fans have been asked before, and they really do see tall, fair-skinned, large chested, blonde with straight hair and large round blue eyes characters as Japanese. It really doesn't occur to them to see them as white. Same thing for the characters with blue hair, pink hair, male characters with giant red and blonde spiky hair, and all the rest. Because it doesn't look real, your brain sort of skips over comparing what it looks like to what it "should" look like, and just decides it looks like what you would expect it would look like. If you're White, you would expect them to be White. If you're Japanese, you would expect them to be Japanese. And for the most part, that's exactly how it plays out in real life with the viewers. I asked smith, because dark skin is such an obvious trait, and so uncommonly portrayed in anime on purpose, to see if it had the same effect on him. And apparently it doesn't.
Thanks for the rundown. Yeah I've seen videos where Japanese people say they look Japanese but I've never really thought of the mechanism behind it.
I'd have loved if Smith trolled the fuck out of you and insisted they all look black to him.
lol. I don’t think to say that but it would be funny