Personally, for me it’s the idea that just because you don’t experience something (dysphoria, or being a gender other than what society expects of you) that doesn’t mean those experiences aren’t valid.
I get sooo tired of the response “I just don’t understand! I love being my AGAB! Why can’t you just get over it?”
Well beauty standards and the whole 2 genders concept is a European concept that was forced on people outside of Europe which would be colonialism and also the standards are forced upon the people with in Europe.
Thing is as much as you have been benefiting from colonialism you have also been hurt by it. As an analogy take men who uphold toxic masculinity, they are hurting others and themselves.
It’s different IMO.
White skinned Western Europeans being seen as more beautiful/superior/whatever (ew) only benefits me.
Toxic masculinity thrusts unrealistic and/or harmful behavior onto me (“real men don’t do X”), but I’m pretty sure the only things my ethnicity holds me back from doing is blackface and going outside without sunscreen. I also don’t think there is a higher expectation for me to succeed than if I was a foreigner, quite the contrary.
Yes western gender roles originated in Europe, but when we do that to ourselves “colonialism” is hardly the right word for once. If anything, Gender Theory/Third Wave feminism is a very North American concept that gets imported here (which is part of the reason why it’s taking longer to take root here than it should, because it is shot down by conservatives as American Wokist Imperialism. Not a joke.).
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying somehow you or me are not benefiting highly from colonialism but even with that standards while highly beneficial to us it’s not without it’s very harmful ideals. Going back to the beauty thing, taking my experience for example, I’m white, skinny and have light colored eyes and that benefits me highly but I don’t fit the beauty standard that we’ll bc I’m trans, have broad shoulders relatively tall for my area and visible Adam’s apple. Not really the peak “white beauty” for a femm. At the end of the day “colonialism” in this context sets very unrealistic standards for everyone but especially for racial and or gender minorities.
In general I very much agree with you but seems like you are missing a bit more nuance in this particular aspect
I just don’t think colonialism is the cause of unrealistic beauty standard in European white people. If European nations never built a single ship capable of crossing the Mediterranean, we’d still have unrealistic beauty standards. Just look at any Ancient Greek statue (my fave, mostly linking it because it’s an amazing statue in its own right); surely those beauty standards are unrealistic as well, if anything it’s even worse because Ancient Greeks truly believed that intelligence and beauty were one. Yet those standards predate our modern definition of colonialism by a couple millennia and even predate whatever you want to call Ancient Roman-Greek cultural relations.
I could see an argument that the way white people have been setting the canonical beauty standards in entertainment/fashion/etc. puts more pressure on white people, but I don’t buy it. I know that society would make it much harder for me if I was ugly-black than ugly-white (which is racist, and in some ways colonialist) but if we lived in a parallel universe where Europe is the only continent on Earth and everyone is white I don’t believe that the beauty standards would be any better because the patriarchy would still shove people into narrow gender-normative boxes.