Ideals and Stereotypes As An Outcome of Human Competition.

I've recently been reading Thorstein Veblen's "The Theory of The Leisure Class" for another class, which has provided me some inspiration on our discussions in this class. While the book mostly deals with social class consumerism, one of the main points of the book is that humans are naturally invidious creatures; that is, they want to designate themselves as superior to other persons. If we take this to be true, it may help explain why society feels the need to impose body ideals and stereotypes on certain groups of people.

With the growth in 20th century of consumer culture, and with it visual medium like television, movies, and advertisements, image has grown to be more and more important. This is even more important today with the growth of social media like twitter, facebook, and snapchat. In our impersonal world, our body image is in part how we make first impressions and communicate to others what we are about.  Today's ideal types and stereotypes came to be what they are because they naturally reward those who have them with greater benefits and status. Therefore, these people use this power to put down others because it gives them pleasure and a feeling of power. Again, in this media and image inclined society, this model is increasingly becoming the dominant way to communicate who is "better" or "worse" than others; or better put, who belongs in higher or lower social strata. To be clear I don't approve or disapprove of this, it's just a theory; nor am I saying the current ideals are justified. They could easily flip at some point in the future. The point is is that humans naturally seek ways to compete and prove themselves superior. So, to say the stereotypes and ideals we have today are nonsensical or have no use (good or bad), in my opinion, is rather short sighted.