Is BE sexist?

[Very_Good_Karma]

Originally Posted by Prophet Tenebrae

I'm not really see how I can relate to your point about gender bias, Very Good Karma... You're essentially throwing up your hands and saying that because we live in a society that is still patriarchal in its underlying leanings and the relative weakness of the female gender construct, we can't help but objectify? If you were making a general point, I might agree but really we're all free thinking individuals.

Uh... no, that wasn't what I was trying to say at all. Sorry if it came across that way; I wasn't trying to say anything specifically about gender bias at all- which maybe I should have, seeing as this is about sexism.

What I was trying to say is that, even within a society whose sexism is taken for granted for the purposes of the argument, breast expansion fantasy still isn't sexist because the female characters depicted within are able to achieve society's unreasonable standards of beauty proactively, in the same way that a real woman might go to school to get a better job. Being valued by the appearance they have been born with isn't something that they must merely submit to; instead they have the power to determine their appearance on their own, and thus take advantage of sexist bias. This isn't saying anything about the rightness or wrongness of such standards and biases for the purposes of this argument; the point is that women's relationships with those standards are changed.

I don't know if this is an airtight refutation; but I hadn't seen many good arguments for why BE would be sexist in the thread yet, so I was just trying to make an exercise of coming up with an argument and then refuting it.

Again, the actual unreasonable standards of beauty are bad, although not necessarily sexist in situations in which similar unreasonable standards are applied to men. But without assuming such standards are in place, I don't think a breast expansion fetish could be any more sexist than a clothes-turning-green fetish. Sexism is dependent on there being a perception of what a person of a given gender should be like.