i don’t know when people started saying conventionally attractive instead of just attractive
Just hedging against “actually, attraction is a subjective experience” by vaguely waving your arms at some “widely held” conventions no one can provide documentation for.
Societal beauty standards are a real thing… They aren’t completely organic, set in stone, or inherently good or valid or anything like that but they do exist
Right, I wouldn’t want to imply otherwise.
My point is about how years of “X is beauty” “actually beauty is subjective” discourse may have conditioned people to preemptively hedge their statements.
I don’t think documentation is really necessary when pretty much all media in the US portrays white, young, thin, slightly athletically toned, clear-skinned, white-toothed, symmetrical-faced people with societally-approved matching gender characteristics as “attractive”. Characters who exhibit those traits are portrayed/coded as attractive, and they are the people put in front of the camera on things like the news. Just saying “attractive” when talking about someone with those features is basically saying that anyone who does not have those features is inherently not attractive, when in reality many people have different opinions on what they find attractive.
