I think we should eliminate any discussion of attractiveness from professional spaces (as is the norm among professional spaces generally, I’d hope), but… not all EA spaces are professional spaces, and given especially that EAs often date within EA I think it’s reasonable to have a normal, respectful amount of discussion of physical appearance in social spaces (while at the same time agreeing with you that ranking every nearby woman by physical attractiveness is not respectful and I’m on board with calling that kind of thing out as inappropriate in any context).
I agree we should avoid fixating on it, overvaluing it, or letting our preferences for physical appearances leak into any other part of our opinion of a person, but I think suppressing it altogether is too much. It’s part of how people interact with the world and I think trying to deny that it exists isn’t ultimately healthy.
I agree that I’d rather we not completely censor jokes completely, but I find it very difficult to guess what people are comfortable with, in part because I think it’s very hard to say, “No I’m not comfortable with discussion of my appearance” as a public figure. I wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable speaking up if people were joking about me anyways.
I think we should eliminate any discussion of attractiveness from professional spaces (as is the norm among professional spaces generally, I’d hope), but… not all EA spaces are professional spaces, and given especially that EAs often date within EA I think it’s reasonable to have a normal, respectful amount of discussion of physical appearance in social spaces (while at the same time agreeing with you that ranking every nearby woman by physical attractiveness is not respectful and I’m on board with calling that kind of thing out as inappropriate in any context).
I agree we should avoid fixating on it, overvaluing it, or letting our preferences for physical appearances leak into any other part of our opinion of a person, but I think suppressing it altogether is too much. It’s part of how people interact with the world and I think trying to deny that it exists isn’t ultimately healthy.
I agree that I’d rather we not completely censor jokes completely, but I find it very difficult to guess what people are comfortable with, in part because I think it’s very hard to say, “No I’m not comfortable with discussion of my appearance” as a public figure. I wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable speaking up if people were joking about me anyways.