Debates in Aesthetics, Vol. 20, No. 2

Editors’ Introduction

Christopher Earley and Ben Campion

Our bodies are often the object of aesthetic appreciation and evaluation. However, our assessment of bodies is often guided by many conventions and rules that govern what constitutes a beautiful body. The dominance of beauty practices opens up a range of pressing questions in aesthetics. How should we aesthetically engage with features of our bodies that are deemed to fall short of these standards? Should beauty always be the main target of aesthetic appreciation, or might there be more to our aesthetic lives than this? If there are many options for aesthetically engaging with bodies beyond conventional beauty practices, why should we choose to pursue them? Can changing the fundamental philosophical underpinnings of body aesthetics alter the way we interact with each other and organise our societies?

This Special Issue of Debates in Aesthetics responds directly to these urgent questions. The issue centres on Professor Sherri Irvin’s commissioned target article ‘Choosing Our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice.’ In this article, Irvin builds on their groundbreaking work on body aesthetics to propose a new way to aesthetically engage with bodies, which they name ‘aesthetic exploration’ and which stands in opposition to the notion of bodily beauty. This is followed by six articles which respond to Irvin’s arguments, authored by Joshua Brecka, Ann J. Cahill, Idil Çakmur, Kazi A S M Nurul Huda, C. R. Muller, and Ian Heckham. Through their critical engagement with and imaginative expansion of Irvin’s proposals, these responses show that the notion of aesthetic exploration catalyses a wide range of debates about aesthetic value, the aesthetics of bodies, and the relationship between aesthetics, gender, race, disability, ethics, and political philosophy.

We would like to thank Sherri Irvin for accepting our invitation to write a target article on this urgent topic. We also thank all the respondents for their thoughtful and creative responses. We thank our referees, our proofreader Olivia Odoffin and the British Society of Aesthetics for their continued support. Finally, we thank Harry Drummond, who completed his tenure as co-editor in 2025 and helped to get the ball rolling on the conception and production of this special issue.

Choosing Our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice

Sherri Irvin

University of Oklahoma

Aesthetic responses to human embodiment play important roles in our individual and social flourishing. Our ability to feel comfortable with and even take pleasure in our own embodiment contributes to our well-being, and our capacity to appreciate the embodiment of others contributes to our full recognition of them as persons and to their feeling of being valued and at home in the world. We are socialized into practices of appreciating bodily beauty: the facial and bodily qualities that a culture picks out for special valuing. But these practices are deeply intertwined with objectionable social hierarchies. I argue that we should can and should opt out of practices of appreciating bodily beauty, despite the pleasures they afford, and choose instead to participate in other practices. Practices of appreciating the variety of aesthetic affordances of human bodies in all their diversity are both aesthetically rewarding and more compatible with our duties to ourselves and each other.

During an exercise class recently, I saw my thighs from an unusual angle while their flesh was drawn down by gravity in an unusual direction. I had not been in a position like this for years, and age- and menopause-related changes in fat distribution, musculature, and skin texture had transformed my thighs from a lightly rippled expanse of beach to a choppy dune. As the oldest person in the class by well over a decade, I knew my view was different from everyone else’s and revealed features many of my classmates were probably trying to avoid: for my cultural context prizes the smooth, taut textures of youthful flesh on thin bodies. But I was engrossed. There was so much to see, so many unique contours, such a richness of texture and shadow. Layered over the ugliness I have been taught to assign to such a disruption of flesh was the direct experience of something fresh and fascinating.

As I age, the catalog of bodily features I can readily identify as defects, large and small, is continually expanding. There are chin whiskers, a knot of rough thickened skin over an ankle bone, perpetual furrowing between the eyebrows, a belly that pooches out over the top of waistbands. As my body changes, I experience ever more vividly the availability of two aesthetic aspects, corresponding to two practices of aesthetic appreciation I have the option of engaging in. On the one hand, I can view it through a practice defined by conventional beauty standards, from which it is falling ever further from compliance. On this option, I watch it descend into ugliness, perhaps slowed if I choose to engage in surgery or other interventions. I know women, caught in this option, who experience profound bodily self-loathing as they age.

On the other hand, I can explore what’s here. Why, look at this! Those varicose veins have gotten more elaborate since the last time I looked carefully at them. Such an interesting cluster, with a juicy dark vein giving way to a tangle of pink and purple vessels so thin and delicate it’s hard to believe they could be transporting something as viscous as blood. If I run my thumbnail over the veins, they vanish and gradually reappear. Who needs a tattoo when I get to wear this fascinating bit of evolving functional artwork?

So: I have open to me more than one way of approaching my body aesthetically. I can approach it through the lens of a conventional beauty practice, which reveals its ever-increasing deficiencies. Or I can approach it through the lens of a practice I call aesthetic exploration: exploring what is before us with interest and curiosity, with the specific aim of seeking out aesthetic qualities that afford positive aesthetic experiences. (Irvin, 2017) Aesthetic exploration is like the approach we might take to a landscape with very different features than we’ve seen before: we roam around, looking for things and phenomena that are fascinating, intriguing, delightful, perplexing in a way that prompts further investigation. We are not surveyors taking a measure of the place but are instead here to have fun, to seek out aesthetic pleasures. This isn’t to say it’s an uncomplicated sort of fun. The practice may involve a fair measure of uncertainty and discomfort: what are we looking at? Ooh, that is … strange. We may feel taken aback, shocked, even at times disgusted: after all, we arrive at the experience with our full complement of natural and culturally trained aesthetic sensibilities, some of which involve disgust responses. We may also experience easy pleasures as some elements trigger our established responses to conventional beauty, prettiness, loveliness. We may decide to rest there for a while. But sooner or later we’ll move on from that pretty vista and dive back into a close exploration of the gnarly, craggy bits, where the surprises are. The pleasures of this domain have a different tenor: they include prickles of curiosity, fascination with complexity, and wonder at the strange and unfamiliar.

To be clear, when I contrast the practice of celebrating bodily beauty from the practice of aesthetic exploration, I am using ‘beauty’ not as a generic term to indicate just any aesthetic value in which one might take pleasure, but to designate the facial and bodily qualities that a culture picks out for special valuing, those that lead to utterances like “She is beautiful” and to selection for roles in modeling and acting for which facial and bodily attractiveness are held to be of paramount importance. Beauty in this sense is a substantive aesthetic quality opposed to ugliness or unattractiveness. Empirical studies demonstrate the social reality of beauty and ugliness; people seen as ugly or unattractive are subject to penalties in many domains of life, while people seen as attractive enjoy a wide variety of benefits, as we will see below.

There has been an uptick in theorizing about aesthetic practices: niches of aesthetic activity within which distinctive values, norms, and approaches to aesthetic objects may emerge (e.g., Kubala 2021, Lopes 2018, Riggle 2024). While some aesthetic objects emerge out of a specific aesthetic practice and may be best approached through the lens of that practice, other objects, like natural landscapes and human bodies, emerge partly or wholly independently of aesthetic practices and may thus support more than one mode of aesthetic engagement. Thus we sometimes see disputes over the proper way to approach them: for instance, the disagreement between Allen Carlson (1979) and Noël Carroll (1993) over whether natural landscapes are best approached through a lens informed by scientific knowledge or may be appropriately appreciated through a practice privileging naïve awe and wonder.

If an aesthetic object may support multiple practices, how should we choose among them? Might there be reasons to relinquish one aesthetic practice—even if it yields exquisite and perhaps irreplaceable pleasures—and shift to another? Might there be reasons to adopt an aesthetic practice even if we foresee that it will require effort and discomfort, and even if we are skeptical or uncertain about the aesthetic rewards it will offer and suspect it may overturn some of the aesthetic pleasures we currently enjoy?^[1]

My answer is that aesthetic practices deserve critical scrutiny, and there are sometimes good reasons to actively cultivate alternatives to aesthetic practices that we already know yield profound rewards. This may be true even when our aesthetic experiences feel like things that are simply happening to us rather than the product of practices we are engaging in—as, perhaps, when we are struck by an experience of someone’s bodily beauty. When we savor some aesthetic properties and abhor or withdraw from others, we are not just passively receiving an experience but also deepening a channel within our own minds—and ultimately within our communities, since the standards associated with established aesthetic practices are communally developed and maintained. What are the effects, both aesthetic and otherwise, of maintaining this channel, this pathway, rather than shifting to or blazing some other?

This question is worth asking because aesthetic practices fit into and inflect a life in ways that go far beyond particular experiences of aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic experience is not simply a private, internal phenomenon we can or should keep veiled from the world. We are in constant aesthetic communication: our aesthetic responses to things are embodied, readable off our faces and postures. We teach each other what to seek out, what to embrace, what to despise, what to avoid.^[2] And our aesthetic responses to other people’s embodiment communicate to them whether their embodied presence is welcome and appreciated, tolerated with some difficulty, or outright unwanted.

This other-directed element was my original focus in advocating the practice of aesthetic exploration. Conventional practices of appreciating bodily beauty, which are also practices of negatively assessing ugliness, provide undue benefits to people seen as attractive while causing tremendous harm to those found unattractive: both the direct harm of experiencing others’ disapproving gaze and a wide variety of social, political and economic penalties are systematically imposed on the ugly. (Irvin, 2017) Aesthetic judgment is not cordoned off from other forms of judgment: aesthetic value is an aspect of desirability and worth, so it is not surprising that beauty and ugliness are wrapped up in the allocation of all sorts of goods. Nonetheless, it is (I hope) easy to see that someone whose embodiment is judged ugly should not for that reason receive lower quality health care, less recognition for their professional achievements, or a harsher prison sentence. Nor should they receive less of our fundamental esteem. People deserve a full measure of respect regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of bodily beauty. Our recognition of this should be all the more acute when we note that conventions of beauty have regularly been deployed to support violent regimes of white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, antifatness, and ableism.

Recognizing that our aesthetic responses to others’ bodies corrupt our treatment of them, we could try to cordon off the aesthetic realm from our behavior. As I have discussed elsewhere, this is not my approach, since I see this separation as both unrealistic and undesirable: having our bodily presence appreciated by others is part of enjoying the esteem of our community and full recognition of our humanity. (Irvin, 2017) This motivated my argument for aesthetic exploration as a kind of aesthetic practice with the explicit aim of taking delight in the wide variety of embodiments in the world, learning to experience more pleasures in response to more configurations of being. Aesthetic exploration can be practiced in relation to one’s own body and the bodies of others, though the latter must be undertaken with great care to avoid creepiness.^[3] One can practice first on one’s own body and on publicly available representations or embodied performances to learn to find sources of aesthetic interest and pleasure in a wide variety of faces and bodies. Once this skill is secure and one can apply it with fluency and ease, one can use it to replace aesthetic responses to beauty or ugliness with responses of valuing the aesthetic affordances of any face or body, thereby reducing one’s participation in processes that reward the beautiful and penalize the ugly.

But if adopting aesthetic exploration as a practice may promote a more just relation to others, what of its effects on my own experiences? Matteo Ravasio worries that aesthetic exploration, framed as an exclusive alternative to the practice of appreciating bodily beauty, requires that we give up too much: for beauty is inherently good, and if we shift to the practice of aesthetic exploration, “[a] valuable aspect of human life is sacrificed to a more just and equitable society.” (Ravasio, 2023: 1003) We don’t need to give up on beauty, Ravasio suggests, because we could instead adopt redistributive practices to “selectively [improve] the condition of the disadvantaged.” (2023: 1007) One of the measures he considers is a direct intervention on the bodies of the ugly: we could, for instance, make it easier for them to comply with aesthetic norms by making plastic surgery widely available at low cost.^[4]

It is intriguing to me that the specific pleasures of appreciating bodily beauty are thought to be so irreplaceably valuable that the notion of carving up our bodies to distribute beauty more equitably is seriously floated as a proposal. I could go this route: I’m sure there is a liposuction clinic around to take care of these lumpy thighs, and maybe I could have some flesh removed from these knobby knees (or perhaps they need a smoothing implant?), and I’m not sure what they do for varicose veins but there is probably something. In five or ten years I’ll no doubt require a next round of interventions. Disabled people whose unusually configured limbs are found ugly could have them amputated and replaced with ones that are more visually appealing: for, as a matter of justice, shouldn’t disabled people have as much access to bodily beauty as everyone else? Lizzie Velásquez, whose body can’t store fat and who as a teen discovered a YouTube video describing her as the “World’s Ugliest Woman,” could, perhaps, have her whole body packaged in a more appealing envelope. (Barness, 2014)

I believe Ravasio may be taking the pleasures he associates with the beauty practice more seriously than the harms it engenders, and he may be overly optimistic about the prospects of inscribing beauty on more bodies without inflicting further harm (not least pain, infection, and other medical complications).^[5] This is perhaps because in his thinking, the perceiver who enjoys the pleasures of beauty is separated from the body that must be carved up to facilitate those pleasures.

Ravasio might protest that I have overextended the proposal: it is meant only for the most irredeemably ugly, not for the garden variety ugliness of aging bodies like mine. This should comfort us only if we are content with the othering of people whose bodies fall furthest out of line with beauty standards, such that if they want to be acceptable to society they had better accept extreme interventions to rectify the hideousness of their flesh. In addition, as Ravasio emphasizes, beauty is comparative: the point of the beauty practice is to pick out and admire the finest exemplars. Beauty standards and the practice in which they are embedded invite constant bodily self-surveillance and body management by those whose bodies are disproportionately subject to aesthetic regulation.^[6] When turned on the body of the perceiver, the practice invites self-alienation, with the body framed as a perpetual disappointment and site for intervention. (Leboeuf, 2019) We see, accordingly, that demand for cosmetic surgery is not limited to the ugliest; even people who are attractive by societal standards seek it out to alleviate defects in their appearance.

Ravasio also entertains interventions in the perceiver’s aesthetic psychology. We could develop technologies to “expand the number of people whom we find attractive,” as discussed by Tena Thau (2020), or adopt practices designed to eradicate biases such as anti-fatness from our beauty judgments, as proposed by A.W. Eaton (2016).^[7] But these proposals have their limits: they leave in place the comparative element which is the source of the trouble. Cheryl Frazier argues “that we have reason to worry about approaches that encourage us to see certain bodies as likeable and attractive, given the reality that many fat people’s bodies deviate so heavily from the kinds of bodies we are collectively willing to see as beautiful.” (Frazier, 2022: 116) These ameliorative proposals risk “exclud[ing] those fat people whose bodies we find too deviant—often those who we deem unhealthy, who are larger, who diverge from gender expectations, or who are disabled.” (Frazier, 2023: 292) A comparative approach that values more bodies while continuing to identify some bodies—both fat and non-fat—as ugly and unsightly does not go far enough in eliminating harm, and it leaves in place the imperatives of self-surveillance and bodily self-alienation in relation to beauty standards.

So: I believe Ravasio doesn’t take seriously enough the harms associated with the beauty practice, and he overestimates the ability of interventions like surgery and expansion of beauty standards to alleviate these harms. But just as importantly, he underestimates the pleasures associated with alternative aesthetic practices. Aesthetic exploration is not a joyless asceticism. It is a playful, rambunctious practice, full of surprises, demanding perceptual, cognitive and affective engagement along with nimbleness, the ability to avoid getting stuck in displeasure or disgust—or, for that matter, in easy pleasures. Cultivating our ability to experience a wide variety of aesthetic pleasures in response to a wide array of bodily arrangements is its very point.

In addition to enhancing our ability to appreciate other people’s embodiment in all its diverse forms, aesthetic exploration invites us to take aesthetic pleasure in our own bodies, regardless of where those bodies fall on the spectrum of beauty and ugliness. It expressly eschews the comparative dimension of beauty practices. My responses to bodies and their parts are, of course, conditioned by my past experiences, by the classificatory schemes available to me, and so forth. But at the same time, aesthetic exploration emphasizes attentiveness to what is here before me right now: the affordances of this very encounter with this very body.^[8] It invites us to release comparisons and standards and immerse ourselves intimately within this moment of experience.

Sara Protasi objects to aesthetic exploration as a practice on the grounds that it gives up on the “aspirational” element we prize in beauty practice: because it “does no work of weeding the non-beautiful from the beautiful[…,] it is epistemically and practically inert.” (Protasi, 2017: 95-96; emphasis in original) Relatedly, it “fails to be empowering”: “we care about being beautiful because it sets us apart from others,” but aesthetic exploration undermines the comparisons that allow for this setting apart. (Protasi, 2017: 96) Protasi is correct in diagnosing that aesthetic exploration abandons the bodily aspirations of beauty practices: aesthetic exploration directs me to appreciate my body’s current affordances rather than to aspire for it to manifest a certain form or set of aesthetic qualities.^[9] My aspirations are directed, instead, to the cultivation of my powers as an experiencer: to learn to notice new and different qualities, to shift perspectives, to tolerate discomfort, to seek pleasure, to be open to the possibility that the valence of my responses to particular features may change. Aesthetic exploration involves being finely attuned to visible and tactile qualities, movements, and relationships, and also sensitive to our own aesthetic responses of interest and fascination that might deepen into pleasures. Aesthetic exploration directs my aspirations away from wanting my body to look a certain way and toward the cultivation of rich experiential engagement with it as it is. Recognizing and enjoying the aesthetic affordances of my body is, in my view, plenty empowering; besting others in a comparison is not required.

For many people, adopting aesthetic exploration as a practice may yield novel and positive aesthetic experiences of both other bodies and their own body, helping to dislodge the attitude of disciplinary self-surveillance that beauty practices, especially in their aspirational mode, tend to evoke. But as Frazier discusses, the aspiration of cultivating positive aesthetic experiences of one’s own body may not be a good fit for some who have continually received social signals that their body is ugly and unacceptable, in part because “it requires unlearning a lifetime of internalized shame and hate (often while still embedded in a society that continues to encourage those negative responses).” (2022: 147) Some people in this situation may prefer a practice of body neutrality, which “aims to bring people peace with their bodies by encouraging them to recognize what their bodies can do, to accept their body’s limitations without shame, and to challenge harmful messages that one’s worth is tied to their beauty.” (2022: 145-146)

Another sort of aesthetic practice, varieties of which are discussed by Céline Leboeuf and Madeline Martin-Seaver, has to do with the aesthetic appreciation of felt bodily experiences rather than a focus on the body as a perceptual object accessible to an outside observer. Leboeuf proposes that “an unalienated relation to one’s body would consist in the capacity to enjoy one’s body,” experiencing it not as a set of fragments to be brought into line or defects to be corrected but instead as a functioning whole that affords felt pleasures. (Leboeuf, 2019: 15) Her proposal, sensualism, involves “developing an inner appreciation of the body through physical practices” that are “pursued for the sake of enjoyment, and not for the sake of producing a certain appearance…: breathing exercises, yoga, sports, sex, and so on.” (Leboeuf, 2019: 16)

Martin-Seaver argues for a practice of aesthetically appreciating felt bodily experiences on the grounds that “decentering the outward appearance of bodies and instead attending to the specificities of felt experience” allows us to resist oppressive forms of objectification, reaffirm our status as subjects, and reaffirm the value our bodies have for us regardless of how they appear to others. (Martin-Seaver, 2019: n.p.) This is particularly true of the felt bodily experiences we have while being objectified: when I aesthetically appreciate the felt sensations of my face warming, my pulse quickening, and my upper lip curling in an expression of contempt for someone who has catcalled me, I value these bodily experiences as expressions of my subjectivity, and this valuing helps me attend to their epistemic affordances as indicators of injustice. “Calling attention to something’s sensuous qualities and fully attending to the specifics of sensuous experience, rather than screening them out, is a way of giving that experience value and weight.” (Martin-Seaver, 2019: n.p.) Attending closely to my sensuous experience, then, gives me different opportunities to know and aesthetically value myself and my embodiment, independently of the standards associated with an outward gaze.

Leboeuf’s and Martin-Seaver’s compelling proposals seem compatible with both aesthetic exploration and body neutrality: one might cultivate aesthetic attention to felt bodily experience while also seeking out positive aesthetic experiences of one’s bodily appearance as apprehended through the senses, or while seeking bodily acceptance without an aspiration to experience one’s appearance positively. Insofar as all of these aesthetic practices are compatible with just responses to others’ embodiment and some may fit better with an individual’s needs and goals at a given time, a person can reasonably choose among them. Aesthetic practices are not one-size-fits-all: like other practices and projects, they must fit into the overall framework of our lives, and we may have good reasons to select one practice and modify or abandon another. Moreover, we may adopt different aesthetic practices directed toward different objects or contexts: a decision to give up on bodily beauty need not mean that we stop seeking out beauty in, say, architecture or music.

The possibility of combining aesthetic practices might lead us to ask: if we aim to establish more just relations with others’ embodiment and a more satisfying relationship with our own, must we give up on bodily beauty entirely? Might I adopt a beauty practice in some contexts but shift to an alternate practice like aesthetic exploration in others? Perhaps I can bask in the appreciation of bodily beauty while reading fashion magazines or watching movies, but also adopt aesthetic exploration as an approach to experiencing my own body and the bodies of those I directly encounter, and cultivate aesthetic appreciation of my felt bodily experiences as Leboeuf and Martin-Seaver propose. Why not welcome an abundance of aesthetic practices, including the beauty practice in some contexts, and enjoy the pleasures they yield?

Some aesthetic practices are more cross-compatible than others: they involve cultivating perceptual, cognitive, and affective habits and skills that translate across domains or that interfere with alternative tendencies one might aim to cultivate.^[10] Examining the unique affordances of the very body that is before me now seems highly compatible with cultivating the appreciation of felt bodily experiences in all their particularity. But these activities may tend to dislodge or loosen the grip of beauty practices: for they open us up to more ways of looking, to multisensory responses, to a focus on objects—this veiny wrist, this hot flash—that are not as readily assimilated within beauty practices or measured against beauty standards. Likewise, a focus on beauty—especially its comparative nature and its grounding in a set of standards applied to bodily features looked at in a particular way—may undermine our ability to fully apprehend and enjoy what’s there. If we see something that we have no perceptual or conceptual vocabulary for, beauty practices may condition us to ignore it or reject it as ugly. These two kinds of aesthetic practices, then, may tend to compete rather than comfortably coincide.^[11]

Moreover, participation in the practice of appreciating bodily beauty, even if we intend to limit it to certain bodies and contexts, keeps beauty standards salient in our minds as a lens to apply to bodies we encounter. We might consider the harmful effects of this lens sufficient reason to abandon it rather than maintain it in our aesthetic repertoire.

Ravasio suggests that “the burden of proof is on” those who advocate giving up on the beauty practice “to show that human beauty isn’t inherently or intrinsically valuable.” (2023: 1004; emphasis in original) But one need not deny this value to think it is an open question whether and how to participate in the beauty practice. Many properties and kinds of experience are inherently or intrinsically valuable. The finiteness of a human life means I can’t pursue them all, and the fact that my aesthetic practices have profound, ethically inflected implications for my relationships with myself and others means that I have good reasons to reflect carefully and critically in choosing which practices to adopt and maintain, and which to modify or give up on.

We don’t all have the same reasons to prefer one aesthetic practice to another. Some things speak to me more than others; some fit better with my style or personality, or with competencies I’ve previously cultivated. (cf. Martínez Marín, 2024; Lopes, 2018: 206) But I suggest that there are both moral and aesthetic reasons for preferring aesthetic exploration to the beauty practice: it is better from the standpoint of justice and individual well-being, and also rich in aesthetic rewards. It is, admittedly, somewhat unruly: it is open-ended and experimental, restless, characterized by seeking. It involves cultivating the attentional acuity to grasp the non-aesthetic qualities of things in all their richness, to notice things from different angles, at different scales, and through different sensory modalities, while suspending attachment to the valence of our experiences of those qualities. Something found to disturb or trouble might later be found to thrill, or to please, or perhaps to excite only a sense of homey familiarity. Something pleasing might come to seem less notable in light of subsequent discoveries. Aesthetic exploration celebrates a wide array of aesthetic qualities and affordances, with little sense that there is a right or wrong way to experience things. Pleasure is its guide, but it does not aim to calibrate its pleasures with anyone else’s. For these reasons, it may not qualify fully as a practice for those like Lopes (2018) who see aesthetic practices as constituted by specific values and norms that practitioners are to follow in their aesthetic activity. And aesthetic exploration does not seem to exist as a robust, widespread, and well-established social practice in the way that the beauty practice does: I’m advancing a proposal, not offering an empirical description of some existing community’s activity. But as Robbie Kubala (2021) observes, following Nicholas Wolterstorff (2015), an aesthetic practice has to start somewhere, and this point of origination may just be someone noticing something aesthetically rewarding and getting others involved in noticing and liking it, too. So: that’s what I’m up to here.

On Nick Riggle’s account,

[t]wo or more people form an aesthetic community when their ways of engaging in the practice of aesthetic valuing are mutually supportive: their practices might overlap in significant ways, they might value similar things in similar ways, their valuing might cohere or be complementary, or their valuing might be rather different but nonetheless mutually enlivening. (2024: 127)

Aesthetic exploration is ripe for the formation of a community with practices of aesthetic valuing that are “rather different but mutually enlivening.” We each have a unique profile of aesthetic interests and preferences, as well as a unique history of aesthetic experience of our own embodiment and of being subjected to aesthetic scrutiny by others. We may have different levels of interest in and tolerance for new ways of encountering bodily features that have been condemned as ugly. But there is room for many approaches here. For bodies, like natural environments, afford ugliness and disgust, but they are also—and sometimes by virtue of the very same qualities—fascinating, thrilling, and wondrous.^[12]

References

Barness, S. (2014) ‘Labeled “World’s Ugliest Woman,” Motivational Speaker Turns Hate into Love’. Huffington Post, Jan. 7. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/07/lizzievelasquez_n_4550829.html (Accessed: 18 July 2024).

Carlson, A. (1979) ‘Appreciation and the Natural Environment’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37(3), pp. 267-275.

Carroll, N., (1993) ‘On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History’, in S. Kemal and I. Gaskell (eds.), Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 244-266.

Doran, R.P. (2022) ‘Ugliness Is in the Gut of the Beholder’, Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 9(5), pp. 88-146.

Eaton, A.W. (2016) ‘Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression’, in Sherri Irvin (ed.), Body Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 37-59.

Frazier, C. (2022) Fat Justice: Mitigating Anti-Fat Bias Through Responsible Aesthetic Agency. PhD thesis. University of Oklahoma. Available at: https://shareok.org/handle/11244/335574 (Accessed: 18 July 2024).

Frazier, C. (2023) ‘Imperfection as a Vehicle for Fat Visibility in Popular Media’, in P. Cheyne (ed.), Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, pp. 284–295.

Irvin, S. (2017) ‘Resisting Body Oppression: An Aesthetic Approach’, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 3(4).

Kubala, R. (2021) ‘Aesthetic Practices and Normativity’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 103(2), pp. 408–425.

Kwan, S. (2010) ‘Navigating Public Spaces: Gender, Race, and Body Privilege in Everyday Life’, Feminist Formations, 22(2), pp. 144–166.

Leboeuf, C. (2019) ‘Anatomy of the Thigh Gap’, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 5(1).

Lopes, D.M. (2018) Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value. New York: Oxford University Press.

Martin-Seaver, M. (2019) ‘First-Personal Body Aesthetics as Affirmations of Subjectivity’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 17(1).

Martínez Marín, I. (2024) ‘Conflicted Aesthetic Aspirants’, unpublished manuscript.

Minerva, F. (2017) ‘The Invisible Discrimination Before Our Eyes: A Bioethical Analysis’, Bioethics, 31(3), pp. 180–189.

Protasi, S. (2017) ‘The Perfect Bikini Body: Can We All Really Have It? Loving Gaze as an Antioppressive Beauty Ideal’, Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 6(2), pp. 93–101.

Ravasio, M. (2023) ‘Engineering Human Beauty’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 101(4), pp. 998–1011.

Riggle, N. (2024) ‘Aesthetic Value and the Practice of Aesthetic Valuing’, The Philosophical Review, 133(2), pp. 113–149.

Thau, T. (2020) ‘Expanding the Romantic Circle’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 23(5), pp. 915–929.

Wolterstorff, N. (2015). Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art. New York: Oxford University Press.

Zhao, X. (2024) ‘Engineering Human Beauty with More Caution’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 102(3), pp. 777-782.

^[1]  Irene Martínez Marín (2024) offers a perceptive account of the discomfort and attitudinal clashes that may attend efforts to change one’s practices and dispositions related to aesthetic appreciation.

^[2]  For example, Ryan Doran (2022: 104) cites research on the social transmission of disgust through facial expressions: we use expressions of disgust in response to particular objects to teach others to feel disgust, and this nonverbal pedagogy makes it possible to repurpose the disgust response toward objects that are socially defined as ugly or disgusting.

^[3]  Creepiness in aesthetic exploration of others’ bodies is a legitimate concern. I argue that unreflective assessments of bodily beauty, though they may feel automatic or natural, are in fact far creepier, associated as they are with unjust distribution of social rewards and penalties. Aesthetic exploration is a strategy for dislodging these assessments and their unjust effects and can be done respectfully. (Irvin, 2017: 18-9)

^[4]  Ravasio, 2023: 1001. Ravasio cites Francesca Minerva (2017) on this proposal, though notably Minerva offers a nuanced discussion tentatively endorsing cosmetic surgery for a narrow range of situations and acknowledging the drawbacks and limitations of the proposal.

^[5]  See related discussion by Xinkan Zhao (2023).

^[6]  Samantha Kwan discusses the fact that fat people in different demographic groups report different levels of body consciousness and felt need to engage in body management, which includes both “physical management” such as “manipulating one’s body or available props … or changing one’s actual behavior” and “psychological management” such as “a self-directed pep talk that reassures one of self-worth.” (Kwan, 2010: 151)

^[7]  Ravasio, 2023: 1001. Though Ravasio references Thau (2020) in relation to the proposal of an “attraction-expanding technology,” Thau’s proposal appears quite different from Ravasio’s. Thau draws on Ted Chiang’s short story “Liking What You See,” in which Chiang “imagines a neurological device that renders users unable to discern differences in physical attractiveness. In Chiang’s world, people can still feel sexual attraction, it is just a response to qualities deeper than looks.” (Thau, 2020: 916; emphasis added) The effect of the technology is thus to “to reduce, or eliminate, the influence of physical appearance on one’s romantic desires.” (Thau, 2020: 916) Thau thus does not seem to be discussing a technology that makes its users experience more people as beautiful or physically attractive, but instead one that makes them unable to apprehend bodily beauty.

^[8]  By ‘affordances,’ I mean qualities that are ripe for aesthetic contemplation and appreciation. These include colors, forms, smells, textures, and tastes; movement, relations of elements, and functioning; and the observer’s own affective and somatic experiences as an encounter unfolds.

^[9]  Protasi, too, advocates a shift in our aspirations away from the cultivation of bodily appearance. She recommends that individuals focus on cultivating their moral character, which will make them more lovable; and perceivers should focus on cultivating a loving gaze according to which “the most beautiful people are the most lovable ones, independently of what they look like from the outside.” (Protasi, 2017: 99) Protasi notes that this is an aesthetic proposal, for “[w]hen we love a person we come to appreciate features of their body.” (2017: 99; emphasis in original) While I am sympathetic to this proposal of having our responses to others’ embodiment shaped by a prosocial attitude like love, my target is the direct aesthetic appreciation of the body itself, unmediated by an assessment of character.

^[10]  Dominic McIver Lopes (2018) discusses the fact that, having cultivated the competencies and interests associated with one aesthetic practice, a person may then be well prepared to pursue related practices (206); he also notes that some aesthetic interests or competencies may interfere with others. (118)

^[11]  Of course, this is ultimately an empirical matter, not to be settled from the armchair; and some people may be more adept at switching between practices that involve competing values and aims. Some professions even require such switching: a hairstylist or makeup artist may need the ability to switch between beauty-related practices and practices designed to enhance other values, depending on the interests of the client or the parameters of the project they are working on. I am grateful to Cheryl Frazier and Jeremy Fried for this example.

^[12]  I’m grateful to Harry Drummond, Christopher Earley, Cheryl Frazier, Jeremy Fried, and Zachary Jurgensen for helpful discussion and feedback.

Sexualized Street Harassment, Aesthetic Exploration, and the Anti-Oppressive Effects of Aesthetic Humility

Ann J. Cahill

Elon University

Irvin’s concept of aesthetic exploration allows for a disambiguation between finding a body aesthetically beautiful and being sexually attracted to that body. This article utilizes that disambiguation to argue that the social legibility of sexualized street harassment relies on and fortifies two related, but distinct, forms of social authority: the authority to judge the attractiveness of certain bodies and to sexualize a public interaction. In addition, I argue that the aesthetic practice that Irvin recommends, if widely adopted, could render sexualized street harassment less common. This anti-oppressive potential of the notion of aesthetic exploration relies on its articulation and championing of aesthetic humility over aesthetic expertise.

Street harassment often takes the form of sexually charged language, expressed in a public setting, that ostensibly positively evaluates the target’s body and frequently includes an apparent sexual invitation. Yet it’s not immediately obvious how or why it can be experienced as hostile and criticized as oppressive. What is so bad about being the object of a positive aesthetic evaluation and/or on the receiving end of a sexual invitation? How and why have we come to term such acts as harassment? Decades of feminist scholarship (Kissling, 1991; Bowman, 1993; Tuerkheimer, 1997; Crouch, 2009; Vera-Grey, 2016; for a good overview, see Fairchild, 2022) has addressed these questions, most often by emphasizing the role of asymmetrical, gendered power relations, sometimes to the extent of reducing the meaning of the sexual nature of the harassment to the unjust subordination of the targets of such harassment (almost always women or queer people).

None of these analyses of sexualized street harassment, however, distinguish between aesthetic evaluation and sexual attraction; the two are almost always conflated. Although it doesn’t address sexualized street harassment at length, Sherri Irvin’s (2026) analysis gives us the tools to disambiguate those two phenomena.^[1] In the following discussion, I will revisit the phenomenon of sexualized street harassment in light of that disambiguation, showing that the two different elements of that phenomenon raise different questions. Regarding the question of the ethical or political meanings of the evaluation of a body, I will argue that the wrongness of sexualized street harassment lies in its derivatizing (Cahill, 2011) rather than objectifying effects (thus correcting for what I view as some flaws in standard feminist analysis of the phenomenon). Regarding the question of the wrongness of the sexual invitation, I will argue that, in fact, no sexual invitation is issued via street harassment, and that what makes the latter wrong is its invocation and perpetuation of unjust social inequality of a particular sort. Both analyses produce important insights regarding aesthetic authority and structural injustices centred on sex, race, gender identity, and others. I will then argue that the aesthetic practice that Irvin recommends, if widely adopted, could render sexualized street harassment less common. Regardless of the likelihood of such an effect, it reveals something important about Irvin’s theory that could otherwise be missed: its articulation and championing of aesthetic humility over aesthetic expertise.

Irvin’s Disambiguation and Aesthetic Humility

In this article, Irvin defends her notion of “aesthetic exploration,” explicitly contrasting it with a culturally dominant (at least in contemporary Western contexts) practice of evaluating bodies “through a practice defined by conventional beauty standards” (Irvin, 2026: 10). Where the latter consists of comparing both one’s own body and the bodies of others to conventional standards of attractiveness (resulting in a nearly complete overlap between the categories of “beautiful” and “sexually attractive”), the former is driven by a desire to both reveal and revel in the particularities of a given body. Conventional beauty standards have no role to play in the practice of aesthetic exploration, which aims to

[take] delight in the wide variety of embodiments in the world, learn[ing] to experience more pleasures in response to more configurations of being. Aesthetic exploration can be practiced in relation to one’s own body and the bodies of others, though the latter must be undertaken with great care to avoid creepiness. One can practice first on one’s own body and on publicly available representations or embodied performances to learn to find sources of aesthetic interest and pleasure in a wide variety of faces and bodies. Once this skill is secure and one can apply it with fluency and ease, one can use it to replace aesthetic responses to beauty or ugliness with responses of valuing the aesthetic affordances of any face or body, thereby reducing one’s participation in processes that reward the beautiful and penalize the ugly. (14-15)

Irvin argues that aesthetic exploration could serve to counter the unjust and substantive effects of conventional beauty standards by replacing judgment with curiosity and attention to particularity.

The stance of aesthetic exploration not only brackets conventional beauty standards; it also removes the role of attraction (or repulsion) as a means by which certain bodies are identified as candidates for aesthetic attention. Aesthetic exploration is not motivated by attraction, because the aesthetic explorer doesn’t know what they will find; they turn to the body in question without any expectation or knowledge of what they will find. This is not to say that the exploration is without a hope for pleasure: “The pleasures of this domain have a different tenor: they include prickles of curiosity, fascination with complexity, and wonder at the strange and unfamiliar” (11). One of the advantages of Irvin’s notion of aesthetic exploration, then, is that it allows for the experience of aesthetically revelling in the particularities of human bodies (including those bodies that fall short of dominant beauty standards, which is to say, most of them) without the involvement of sexual attraction.^[2]

The practice of aesthetic exploration, then, entails the disambiguation of aesthetic evaluation and sexual attraction, whereas (in Irvin’s analysis) the dominant stance toward bodily beauty conflates the two. Yet I want to argue that even in the most paradigmatically problematic example of evaluating a body’s attractiveness—sexualized street harassment—it is conceptually useful to separate the two elements. Analyzing the two elements separately results in insights that also help to illuminate an anti-oppressive aspect of Irvin’s analysis that might otherwise be missed: its valorization of aesthetic humility.

Sexualized Street Harassment

As mentioned above, sexualized street harassment frequently includes both an evaluation of the target’s body and a reference to a potential sexual interaction, which could plausibly be described as an invitation. Rather than conflate these two elements of the harassment, I will analyze each in turn, demonstrating that they raise distinct issues related to the harms and wrongs of the harassment.

Let’s start with the first element: the positive aesthetic evaluation of a body. Again, how and why such a positive evaluation can be harmful or degrading is puzzling. If the social value and worth of femininely presenting bodies are significantly determined by their aesthetic appeal, why isn’t being informed that one has met such a salient standard accompanied by a sense of relief, or achievement, or pride? The most common feminist response to this conundrum has to do with the ostensibly negative and necessarily degrading reduction of one’s self to their materiality. Street harassment, so this story goes, turns women into things, “a piece of meat,” objects (McDonald, 2022: 211). I’m unconvinced by that line of thought, because I don’t think that being treated as a thing is always degrading, unpleasant, and/or unjust, and because assuming that objectification is always dehumanizing necessarily entails a model of personhood that traffics in a problematic mind/body hierarchy (here I agree with Ann Cahill’s analysis [2011]).

The ethical problem with phenomena such as street harassment is not that women are being treated like things, but that their embodied selves are being treated and therefore constituted as mere derivatives of the desires and preferences of their social superiors, rather than being treated as having ethical worth in and of themselves. The problematic nature of the standard of beauty used in the evaluation of their bodies is not to be found in, say, a requirement for thinness or facial symmetry. The problem is more structural, having to do with the assumption that what counts as feminine beauty is that which is valued by (certain) masculine bodies. That structural element is elided when we focus on the fact that the evaluation is, on the face of it, positive, and thus wonder why the objects of those evaluations don’t themselves respond positively.

Although I am arguing here that feminist approaches to the evaluation of bodies that street harassment often includes often miss the mark, there’s little doubt that that evaluation is in fact occurring: the body in question is being judged. In contrast, I want to argue that the seeming inclusion of sexual invitations in sexual harassment is illusory, and that, upon closer inspection, such harassment does not actually include such an invitation. In their analysis of sexual speech acts, Quill Kukla notes that:

If you invite me to your birthday dinner, I am free not to go, but it is incumbent on me to express both my gratitude for the invitation and my regret for turning it down. However, it feels odd to say that I owe someone gratitude for inviting me to have sex. I get ‘invited’ to have sex every time I walk down a major street in workout clothes, and while I sometimes get called a bitch for not showing gratitude, I don’t think I owe gratitude in any sense, no matter how minimal. (Kukla, 2018: 83)^[3]

Kukla’s analysis of sexual speech acts is persuasive, but there seems to be something amiss in their description of sexualized street harassment as a sexual invitation (even given the ambivalence indicated by the scare quotes). I would hold that most harassers do not, in fact, wish to have a sexual interaction with their target, and are not inviting her to do so. A quick thought experiment provides evidence for this intuition. Imagine that a target of sexualized street harassment were to reply to her cat-caller by saying, “Hey, you’re in luck! I happen to be desperate to have sex with someone, so I would love to take you up on your offer.” At the very least, the harasser is going to be surprised and taken aback; in many cases, he would not be interested in immediately going with her to do whatever act he was just describing. For his response to take the form of “Finally! It worked!” seems entirely unthinkable. Just as importantly, the target’s response would register as out of line and very nearly nonsensical. The illegibility of these imagined exchanges reveals that the harasser didn’t think he was extending an invitation in the first place; to put it more bluntly, the cat-caller is not doing what a person who is continually asking other people out for dates is doing.

Sexual harassment, then, despite its linguistic content, does not constitute an actual sexual invitation. The question then becomes: what is the explicit reference to a possible sexual interaction doing, if not inviting that interaction? We can consider two common responses to this question. The dominant feminist analysis is that it is an act of domination and degradation, a way of putting a woman or a queer person “in their place” (Cousens, 2025). Like the feminist analysis of aesthetic evaluation, his analysis also makes use of the concept of objectification, but in a slightly different way: the subject, who is not (merely) a material entity, is degraded insofar as she is being treated as if she were a particular kind of object: a thing with which to have sex. By contrast, the dominant anti-feminist analysis takes the invocation of a sexual interaction as merely complimentary, an instinctive, irrepressible response to women’s beauty for which the harasser can hardly be held responsible. Feminists who view it as unpleasant or offensive are overly sensitive, according to this view, and should, in fact, feel gratified when their bodies garner such a response. But note that even this anti-feminist take doesn’t consider the speech act an actual sexual invitation, even if it can be plausibly taken as an expression of sexual attraction. Both the references to body parts and the invocation of a sexual interaction show up, from this view, primarily as aesthetic judgments that men are entitled to make, and precisely because men are entitled to make them, women are not entitled to respond to them with justified anger.

As I have already mentioned, I find the objectification analysis ultimately unpersuasive. Why or how is the antifeminist analysis also unpersuasive? When anti-feminists try to describe street harassment as mere compliments, they wilfully ignore–or endorse–the role of entitlement and arrogance that is central to the phenomenon. What is in play in both the aesthetic evaluation and the ostensible sexual invitation are (slightly different, but related) forms of social authority. Those social beings with certain forms of social status, particular social statuses that are established by virtue of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and race, enjoy the widely recognized privilege of commenting publicly on the bodies of those who are viewed as lacking in those social statuses, as well as instigating a sexually charged discourse with their ostensible subordinates.

This analysis of street harassment treads familiar feminist ground; it seems to be emphasizing that the ethical wrong of street harassment has to do with power and not, say, bodily beauty or attractiveness. Yet I think it would be a mistake to draw too strong a distinction (as much of the feminist literature does; see Cousens, 2025, who also notes that street harassment is unlikely to lead to a sexual encounter) between power and sexuality here. It’s not just any authority that the harasser draws upon: it’s the authority to judge the attractiveness of certain bodies and to sexualize a public interaction, and to do so in a context that does not endow the target of the harassment with the tools to undermine or prevent those acts. There is no social script by which the target can demote and therefore de-authorize the harasser (as an employee might do in the act of quitting). Targets of street harassment are sometimes encouraged to either ignore the harasser or to respond with defiance or even similarly vulgar language, but none of these responses effectively defang the harassment: to ignore loud harassment is to paradoxically recognize it, as there is no plausible reason to believe it has not been heard. Responding with defiance or anger may give the harasser even more satisfaction, and responding in kind—telling the harasser to fuck off, say, or to suck the target’s dick—rarely if ever effectively turns the tables, and may well instigate a more violent response from the harasser.

These hypothetical examples highlight the centrality of the role of authority in the speech act of street harassment. Because the targets of sexualized street harassment do not enjoy the specific privileges that their harasser invokes, any attempt at a reversal misfires. The social legibility of harassment—the fact that it does not register as strange or nonsensical, even if it is sometimes seen as untoward or uncouth—relies on, reifies, and strengthens that authority. Moreover, it matters that those very acts of judging and sexualizing, in the context of contemporary norms, successfully establish dominance. It could be otherwise! Evaluating a beautiful body could place one in a subordinate position, awed by some magnificence that one does not embody; sexualizing an interaction could imaginably do the same, by admitting that one is subject to the other’s allure. But that is not how these acts function in a social world structured by racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.

Distinguishing between these two elements of sexualized street harassment (aesthetic evaluation and sexual invitation) has enabled us to see that the latter is importantly illusory; it has also allowed for the development of a more fine-grained understanding of the forms of social authority in play in that harassment. With that understanding in mind, we can now raise a different question regarding the anti-oppressive potential of Irvin’s notion of aesthetic exploration as an aesthetic practice, namely: could it undermine the particular forms of social authority that sexualized street harassment entails, and thus make that harassment less common, or at least less legible?

Aesthetic Humility and the Anti-Oppressive Potential of Aesthetic Exploration

As described by Irvin, aesthetic exploration entails the rejection of a pre-existing aesthetic standard that would determine the aesthetic value of the body being explored. Rather than approaching the body to establish the degree to which it did or did not meet such a standard, the person undertaking the aesthetic exploration approaches the body with the aim of discovering, and delighting in, its particularity. While such a person may improve their ability to undertake this aesthetic exploration (for example, the person may be able to adopt the stance with an ever-growing set of bodies, or may become able to better notice bodily aspects that usually would go ignored), they are not positioning themselves with any kind of authority with respect to the viewed body. They certainly don’t have the authority of an expert, as their lack of knowledge of the body being viewed is central to their exploration. This is true even if the body is one of, say, a familiar lover, because the aesthetic explorer is actively seeking to experience new aspects of the body. They are leaning in to what they do not know and what they have missed, and in so doing, they are taking the stance of one-who-has-not-yet-seen and one-who-does-not-yet-know. This is an aesthetically and epistemically humble stance, one that is contrary to the arrogance, entitlement, and license associated with higher social status and deployed in the phenomenon of sexualized street harassment.

It is also important that Irvin’s stated goal of aesthetic exploration is to have a first-hand, subjective aesthetic experience, to feel that sense of wonder and delight that an aesthetic object can inspire. While there may well be contexts where this first-person experience contributes to a shared experience—sharing one’s aesthetic appreciation of a lover’s body can enhance a sexual experience, for example—a public expression of that first-person experience seems, at the very least, unnecessary, and is likely to be inappropriate. Here, it is useful to remember that street harassment often occurs in a group context, where the harasser is eager to have his harassing witnessed by other members of his social group; in fact, the target may be a mere means by which the harasser proves their social status to their peers. But the aesthetic explorer is not seeking social status, nor do they need their first-hand experience to be broadcast for it to have value. Therefore, the goals that are primary to the street harasser—to both call upon and strengthen their authority to aesthetically judge bodies and to instigate a sexual interaction, to improve their social status with their in-group by performing a well-worn social script—are contrary to the goals of the aesthetic explorer.

Is the person who has become enormously proficient at aesthetically appreciating a wide scope of bodies, including those that are deemed unattractive by the dominant discourse, more or less likely to commit acts of street harassment? According to the anti-feminist take on street harassment, it is possible that some with such an increased proficiency might actually harass more people; after all, if street harassment is essentially a vehicle for aesthetic compliments, such a person would have more occasion to make such compliments. Yet this result is strongly counter-intuitive. Sexualized street harassment relies on and perpetuates forms of aesthetic and sexualized power that aesthetic exploration explicitly rejects. In fact, the aesthetic humility at the heart of aesthetic exploration would render cat-calling an awfully strange thing to do.

I am not, ultimately, arguing that Irvin’s notion of aesthetic exploration ought to be repackaged as some sort of anti-oppressive curriculum designed to rid the streets of the scourge of sexualized harassment. The phenomenon is too complex and ingrained into contemporary social norms to be susceptible to such an earnest initiative. My aim in this piece has been more modest: first, to utilize the conceptual tools offered in Irvin’s analysis to revisit some aspects of sexualized street harassment that previous scholarship did not sufficiently address; and second, to bring into clearer focus how Irvin’s concept of aesthetic exploration relies on a notion of aesthetic humility that is counter to structural elements of sexualized street harassment and thus holds even more anti-oppressive potential than Irvin’s article identified.

References

Bowman, C.B. (1993). ‘Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women’, Harvard Law Review, 106:3, 517-580. doi:10.2307/1341656.

Brunning, L. and N. McKeever. (2020). ‘Asexuality’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 38:3, 497-517.

Cahill, A.J. (2011). Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (New York: Routledge).

Cousens, C. (2025). ‘Catcalls and Unwanted Conversations’, Hypatia, 40:2, 238-254.

Crouch, M. (2009). ‘Sexual Harassment in Public Places’, Social Philosophy Today, 25, 137-48. doi:10.5840/socphiltoday20092511.

Fairchild, K. (2022). ‘Understanding Street Harassment as Gendered Violence: Past, Present, and Future’, Sexuality & Culture, 27:3, 1140-59. doi:10.1007/s12119-022-09998-y.

Irvin, Sherri. (2026). ‘Choosing Our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice’, Debates in Aesthetics,  20:2, 9-26.

Kissling, E. A. (1991). ‘Street Harassment: The Language of Sexual Terrorism’, Discourse & Society, 2:4, 451-60. doi:10.1177/0957926591002004006

Kukla, R. (2018). ‘That’s What She Said: The Language of Sexual Negotiation’, Ethics, 129, 70-97. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/698733.

McDonald, L. (2022). ‘Cat-Calls, Compliments and Coercion’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 103:1, 208-30. doi:10.1111/papq.12385.

Przybylo, E. (2019). Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press).

Tuerkheimer, D. (1997). ‘Street Harassment as Sexual Subordination: The Phenomenology of Gender-specific Harm’, Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal, 12, 167-206.

Vera-Gray, F. (2016). ‘Men’s Stranger Intrusions: Rethinking Street Harassment’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 58:September, 9-17. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2016.04.001

^[1]  Although not directly related to this discussion, there are other important reasons to disambiguate these two phenomena, particularly in relation to asexuality. Asexual people, some of whom do not find other persons sexually attractive, nevertheless can find bodies aesthetically beautiful, and so distinguishing between the two phenomena is an important way of recognizing and rendering legible their experiences (Przybylo, 2019; Brunning and McKeever, 2020). I thank Daniel Haley for bringing the philosophical literature on asexuality to my attention.

^[2]  Sexual attraction may, of course, follow from aesthetic exploration, but it need not, and it certainly does not need to precede the exploration itself.

^[3]  Kukla published the article cited here under a former name, but now publishes under Quill Kukla.

Standards of “Beauty”

Idil Çakmur

University of Pennsylvania

Most objections to current body aesthetic practices target their moral consequences. This paper proposes a new critique: these practices are also bad as aesthetic practices. The “beauty” standards they enforce are detached from beauty itself, in ways that partly explain what makes them morally problematic. Taking this aesthetic critique seriously can both strengthen the case against current practices and inform how we move forward.

As the literature moves away from the problems with beauty standards, we’ve been watching pop culture return to it with more vengeance than before. In the classical form of a Carrie-like revenge fantasy, the audience is showered with blood for their “innocent” aesthetic amusements in The Substance. They are mocked for their fixation on strict physical criteria in their search for romantic partners in Materialists. Even if the harm caused by beauty standards is apparent to everyone, it is ultimately shrugged off as something that cannot be helped because beauty standards are too deep-seated to just be walked away from. If we are going to make room for new aesthetic practices, we need a decisive case against beauty standards—an execution in the public eye.

Sherri Irvin’s discussion urges us to relinquish our old practices by showing us there are other aesthetic practices available that wouldn’t be similarly harmful. She is not alone in the literature in wanting to be forward-looking, and it is helpful that more alternatives are being put on the table, so we can realize that giving up on our current practices doesn’t mean giving up on body beauty entirely. But the mistake, as I see it, is in conceding that the way we currently engage in body aesthetics can amount to an aesthetic practice in the first place. Our current practices are not simply an option to be nudged away from because of moral consequences. They are not an option at all, because “beauty” standards have never been about beauty.

I begin by looking at the nature of beauty standards to show that they are incompatible with genuine aesthetic appreciation. This means two things: the moral promise we associate with the appreciation of beauty simply does not translate to the case of body “beauty,” and the rigidness of these standards is what makes them objectifying, unlike true aesthetic appreciation. Beauty inspires openness, but body “beauty” does not, and what stands in the way are morally problematic ideas that have shaped our practices. The hope is that seeing the moral and aesthetic failures internal to our current practices can demonstrate that the need to walk away is, if anything, overdetermined.

*

What is a beauty standard? It should be telling in the first place that even though “beauty” and “standard” are two very familiar terms, the combination only brings to mind human bodies. We don’t talk about the beauty standards for paintings, poems, or nature—there are beautiful instances of each, but we would never think that the beauty is produced by its conformity to a set standard. A “standard”, after all, implies rigidity: we have standards for building constructions and citation practices, not for art. We have theories of what makes something beautiful in art, sometimes we call them “principles”, like harmony and balance, but those are always ambiguous enough to allow for room, and sometimes it is the very breaking of the principle that can make something beautiful.

Consider what it would mean, for example, if we had analogous beauty standards for paintings. If we all agreed to like square frames most of all, some thick lines with curvature, whites and reds dominating the scene, or if we all had types, where I could reliably tell you that I’d like a painting with a tall skinny frame with monochromatic colours and minimal blemishes—in what sense would that be an aesthetic practice at all?

The difficulty is that we want to be inclusive about what beauty is and what constitutes an aesthetic practice or experience (in fact, this is another thing we are hesitant to impose standards upon), which makes it difficult to exclude something like a conventional beauty standard from the aesthetic domain. My suggestion is to look at what beauty is and how we expect it to act upon us, to see that our current aesthetic practices with bodies don’t even get us close. I focus on three features in particular: mystery, the need for acquaintance, and disinterestedness.

While it is not easy to agree on what exactly beauty is, there are some characteristics commonly attributed to beauty across the literature. As Richard Moran explains, “beauty is commonly associated with mystery, as something that beckons but also withdraws and withholds, something whose nature belongs with appearing but that also presents itself as containing in itself more than is apparent” (Moran, 2012: 300).

The mystery of beauty can manifest in different ways. Mary Mothersill notes, for example, that we might be inspired to question why we have the reactions that we do—what about the work moves, pleases, or affects us? (Mothersill, 1984: 72, 172). We might also be curious about the thing itself, wondering how we should interpret certain facts about it. Standing in front of the Mona Lisa, for example, we might wonder why she has that particular expression or grips her wrist in that way. We might also be so astonished as to feel disbelief, as Nick Riggle notes, asking how it is possible for something to be so remarkable (Riggle, 2022: 17).

In any case, what is central to beauty is the felt presence of the unknown. To find something beautiful is to be drawn in towards a kind of discovery. Without that sense of deficiency in our apprehension of the object, we couldn’t come to see the mystery in it, and we wouldn’t find it beautiful.

Alexander Nehamas also emphasizes this aspect when he writes that “to find anything beautiful—a person, a work of art, even a landscape—is to have a sense that it holds more within it than we have been able to see so far, and that what it holds is worth coming to see. Its still unknown attractions draw us closer to it. In the presence of a beautiful person, I am not happy merely to look (although I will do so, gladly): I also want to approach that person, to get to know and spend time with them” (Nehamas, 2008: 104).

We only find something beautiful if there is some part of it that escapes our grasp. The emphasis is again on the unknown: a thing that could never be listed as part of a set of “standards”. Beauty standards rely on the assumption that what makes something beautiful is what is apparent, the determinate characteristics that are on the surface, when beauty in all other spheres rests in the things to be discovered, which pose the mystery central to beauty.

The mystery of beauty is not the only thing that could never be accommodated by a practice that sets predetermined standards. Take the acquaintance principle: it is broadly agreed that we should arrive at an aesthetic judgment only after interacting with the object ourselves, or “on the basis of one’s own direct experience” (Nguyen, 2020: 516). This is equally untenable under conventional beauty standards, which assume we can write out a list of characteristics that make someone beautiful as if we were writing a recipe for a meal, or at least look to Hollywood as a determiner of who should be beautiful for us all. Acquaintance is not central to what we make of body beauty—even if we look at the particular person, we look much more to confirm that Hollywood was right or that our criteria are met, like confirming that they are our type, than to see with genuine openness what kind of reaction we have.

Take, finally, the more general demand for disinterestedness in aesthetic appreciation. Again, this is a concept that can be cashed out in many ways, but minimally we can say that when we are struck by beauty, our response is not due to the way the object satisfies our “desires, needs, or worldly projects” (Riggle, 2016: 3). But appreciations of female beauty hinge heavily on sexual desire,^[1] which is clear from the prevalence of pornographic depictions in media. As Catherine MacKinnon writes, “pornography participates in its audience’s eroticism through creating an accessible sexual object, the possession and consumption of which is male sexuality, as socially constructed; to be consumed and possessed as which, is female sexuality, as constructed” (MacKinnon, 1987: 173). That is, female sexuality has often been tied to what makes a woman beautiful in the male gaze, which is at the root of the classical feminist critique and motivates the very turn away from depictions of female nudes in the literature on body aesthetics (Eaton, 2012). As long as simple desires for possession factor centrally into the standards of appreciation for bodies, then what we have cannot be a pure appreciation of beauty, since it cannot meet even the minimal requirement of disinterest.

*

Here is where we stand: whatever our current practices of assessing the “beauty” of bodies are, just the fact that they rely on standards is enough to see that they are importantly detached from beauty. This means two things. First, the moral promise we typically associate with beauty is inaccessible to our practices; second, the moral status of these practices is itself dubious.

Let’s start with the first. That beauty could play an important role in our moral lives is a common, and in fact ancient, thought. It has its beginnings in Diotima’s ladder of love in the Symposium and extends to modern thinking through Kant, finding contemporary expressions in thinkers like Iris Murdoch (1998), Alexander Nehamas (2007), and Elaine Scarry (2013). One intuition is that beauty can open us up to the recognition of something we had not before seen: it is the radiance of the beautiful that forces us to attend more closely, and together with the curiosity it inspires, beauty can open us up to new realities. But this is only possible for the beauty we approach with openness. Checking off standards from a list cannot teach us anything of this kind, because it only deals with what is already apparent. It is the disinterestedness, or at least the distance from desire and possession, as well as the appreciation of mystery that can hint to us what is not yet seen. There is a moral potential to interactions with beauty, but it rests beyond what can be described by beauty standards.

This is the space where Sherri Irvin’s suggestions for a new aesthetic practice can be instructive, as well as the shift towards sensuality communicated by Céline Leboeuf (2019) and Madeline Martin-Seaver (2019). If there is space for genuine aesthetic appreciations of bodily beauty, it rests in attending to the particular without searching for a standard, in being open to what is beyond appearance. What might then happen, as Paul Taylor explains, is that “we find ourselves to some degree opened to the personhood of the other. […] We might see the other not just as sarx but also as soma, as an embodied presence; not just a bearer and object of aesthetic value but also a creator and subject of that value” (Taylor, 2016: 125). While we might have individual experiences of seeing another’s humanity through attending to their beauty, this is still an aspirational domain for our social practices.

This brings us to the second question: what is the moral status of our current practices? As might not be surprising from the previous discussion, I take most of our current practices of body aesthetics to be objectifying. But what is surprising is to see that they are objectifying precisely due to the deficient qualities that also exclude them from being an aesthetic practice.

The openness we have when we approach beauty, which is what motivates us to see the mystery, to truly get acquainted and not rush to possess it, is what saves beauty from being objectifying. But beauty standards eliminate this openness. They instead reduce a person to beautiful or ugly bodily features to be assessed in light of our standards.^[2]

This is the crucial point: attention to body beauty is not necessarily objectifying. But when it narrows into the superficial attention of our current practices, which look only to appearance, it inevitably is.

As Nehamas explains, “to be attracted simply to the appearance of something is to set in advance a limit to the features of something that are relevant to me. A person’s appearance is exhausted by what lies already before me, and therefore the desires it provokes are for ends I can specify in advance—sexual pleasure, social advantage, or another well-defined benefit” (Nehamas, 2008: 104). In other words, when we are attracted to the appearance of someone, we’ve already determined what it is we want from them. This is what makes attraction to appearance morally problematic: it approaches the other only to satisfy those predetermined desires.

A true aesthetic practice could not be problematic in the same way. Attraction to beauty entails a radical openness to what the other might show you, since it entails an admission of ignorance in the face of mystery. “If what I want from you depends just on your good looks,” Nehamas writes, “I already know what it is, and I know (or I think I know) exactly who I shall be as a result. But when I am attracted to your beauty, however certain I am that what you will give me will make my life better in some way, I am also aware that I do not know either what it is or what will become of me as a result” (Nehamas, 2008: 104). Attraction to beauty, in short, does not objectify, and therein lies the potential for an ethical body aesthetics.

The problem with our conventional beauty standards, to bring it all together, is that they force us to fixate on appearances at the cost of appreciating the beauty of a person. Beauty can allow us to attend to particulars without reducing them to physical features, but the superficial “beauty” of our current practices cannot, and so we are right to feel wronged by the kind of attention it encourages. The space for a genuine and ethical body aesthetics depends on seeing this distance between these two kinds of beauty. We don’t have to turn away from our bodily presences, as Irvin also warns us against. We just have to turn towards them more fully, seeing that they can be sources of the kind of beauty that has been valorized since the beginning of philosophy. There are already thoughtful suggestions of new aesthetic practices we can adopt that would get us closer, including Irvin’s “aesthetic exploration” (Irvin, 2017), so instead I conclude by considering what seems to stand in the way of us moving toward a genuine appreciation of beauty.

*

Let’s return to Plato’s Symposium. The person who wishes to be initiated into the rites of love, Diotima explains, must begin by devoting himself to beautiful bodies in his youth. He should first love one body and eventually, if he “is to pursue beauty of form”, Diotima continues, “he’d be very foolish not to think that the beauty of all bodies is one and the same. When he grasps this, he must become a lover of all beautiful bodies” (Plato, 1989: 209E-210E).

The language of “force”, of shoulds and musts, repeats throughout the description of the ladder. The lover is not forced literally, as if someone is dragging him up the steps, but it is not a mere option either. Diotima accuses the lover who gets stuck of being “very foolish”—a foolishness that is partly intellectual, since the lover who stands still would be failing to grasp the truth. But there is another part too: the foolishness of resisting a current that will push you toward important discoveries. Beauty is a kind of force that compels us to go forward, to look beyond what we can readily see, and the person who doesn’t let beauty act on them is the fool who misses out on everything beauty can reveal.

Most of us are, I take it, foolishly stuck precisely because of this reason. Our appreciation of the few beautiful bodies approved by our standards is already deficient. And even if we did have a natural inclination to follow beauty, it has been heavily counteracted by our acceptance of the standards and exclusivity of “beauty”. If we consider what has closed us off from true beauty, which I’ll now turn to, we might finally come to agree with Diotima “that this wild gaping after just one body is a small thing and despise it” (Plato, 1989: 210B).

While it is true that beauty can open us up to the personhood of others, it is also true that an appreciation of the personhood of others can open us up to their beauty. If the personhood attributed to women is limited in a patriarchal society, then so will be the depth of “beauty” that people in that society are capable of appreciating. As Simone de Beauvoir writes, “the ideal of feminine beauty is variable; but some requirements remain constant; [. . . ] Her body is grasped not as the emanation of a subjectivity but as a thing weighted in its immanence; this body must not radiate to the rest of the world, it must not promise anything but itself: its desire has to be stopped” (De Beauvoir, 2015: 176-7).

It makes sense that some openness is a prerequisite since beauty does not just rest on the surface, and so it doesn’t always immediately strike us. Sometimes we discover it after an initial suspicion that there is something worth attending to. This is why the idea of a ladder is so accurate to our experience: small appreciations^[3] lead to bigger ones as we see that there is more beauty to be discovered at each stage. This means that, initially, we might only have the testimonies of others to figure out what is worth attending to, and if conventional beauty standards exclude some people from the start, we might never look in their direction.

The problem deepens once we recognize that our attention was not allocated in a morally neutral way. Irvin writes that “people deserve a full measure of respect regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of bodily beauty,” which is a recognition that can be made more acute “when we note that conventions of beauty have regularly been deployed to support violent regimes of white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, antifatness, and ableism” (Irvin, 2026: 14). But it is important to note that beauty standards have not only been deployed in support of these discriminatory practices, they have also been shaped by them, especially by their failure to extend humanity to others.

Recent research suggests, for example, that anti-fat sentiments like disgust are motivated by seeing obesity as a moral failing (Ringel and Ditto, 2019) and a similar thing can be said historically about race. White gazing is a historical achievement, George Yancy explains, that contains the lie that “the Black body is night, doom, darkness, and danger; it is deceptive and devious; it is a site of vice and moral depravity”, while instituting whiteness as un-raced and universal, fungible with daylight, truth, and virtue (Yancy, 2016: 245). These are not simply moral evaluations, but can feature in perceptual experience through mental images (Clavel-Vázquez, 2023), influencing the aesthetic qualities we attribute to black bodies.

If someone finds it easier to see elegance, grace, purity, or beauty more generally in white bodies, that is not a morally neutral coincidence or a mere preference. We need an openness to what is beyond the surface to appreciate beauty. It is therefore not surprising that a failure to extend humanity to another also excludes the ability to find them beautiful, which gets embedded in our practices when the same institutions determine the beauty standards we adopt moving forward.

Beauty is central to our lives, both in informing how we see others and in determining how we are seen. Irvin already emphasizes that a negative judgment of beauty shouldn’t be a “reason receive lower quality health care, less recognition for their professional achievements, or a harsher prison sentence” (Irvin, 2026: 14). But we need to also understand that these negative consequences are not tangential to our current beauty practices. They are the manifestations of an already fraught cultural practice. Turning to beauty again and seeing how the “beauty” of beauty standards falls short can be a starting point to understanding the deficiencies of the latter. Afterwards, it will be much easier to see the space and need to cultivate new aesthetic practices.

References

Clavel-Vázquez, A. (2023). ‘Controlling (Mental) Images and the Aesthetic Perception of Racialized Bodies.’ Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (0), pp. 706-725.

De Beauvoir, S. (2015). The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. London: Vintage Classics.

Eaton, A. W. (2012). ‘What’s wrong with the (female) nude?’ in H. Maes and J. Levinson (eds.), Art and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 277-308.

Irvin, S. (2017). ‘Resisting body oppression: An aesthetic approach’. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 3 (4).

———. (2026). ‘Choosing our aesthetic practices wisely: embodiment, pleasure, and justice’. Debates in Aesthetics, 22:2, 9-26.

Leboeuf, C. (2019). ‘What is body positivity?: The path from shame to pride’. Philosophical Topics, 47 (2), pp. 113–127.

MacKinnon, C. (1987). Feminism unmodified. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Martin-Seaver, M. (2019) ‘First-Personal Body Aesthetics as Affirmations of Subjectivity’. Contemporary Aesthetics, 17(1).

Moran, R. (2012). ‘Kant, Proust, and the appeal of beauty’. Critical Inquiry, 38 (2), pp. 298–329.

Mothersill, M. (1984). Beauty restored. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Murdoch, I. (1998). Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by Peter J. Conradi. New York: Allen Lane.

Nehamas, A. (2007). Only a promise of happiness: The place of beauty in a world of art. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. (2008). ‘Beauty of body, nobility of soul: The pursuit of love in Plato’s Symposium’, in D. Scott (ed.), Maieusis: Essays in ancient philosophy in honour of Myles Burnyeat (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 97-136.

Nguyen, C. T. (2020). ‘Autonomy and aesthetic engagement’. Mind, 129 (516), pp. 1127–1156.

Plato (1989). Symposium, translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Ringel, M. M., & Ditto, P. H. (2019). ‘The moralization of obesity’. Social Science & Medicine, 237, 112399.

Riggle, N. (2016). ‘On the Interest in Beauty and Disinterest’. Philosophers’ Imprint 16, pp. 1-14.

———. (2022). ‘Toward a communitarian theory of aesthetic value’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 80 (1), pp. 16–30.

Scarry, E. (2013). On beauty and being just. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Taylor, P.C. (2016). Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.

Yancy, G. (2016). ‘White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Un-Suturing’, in Sherri Irvin (ed.), Body Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 243-60.

Zheng, R. (2016). ‘Why yellow fever isn’t flattering: A case against racial fetishes’. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2 (3), pp. 400–419.

^[1]  More specifically, they hinge on sexual desire that is objectifying. It could be possible to have sexual appreciation of bodies that is compatible with a genuine aesthetic appreciation, like the case of the erotic (See footnote 4).

^[2]  These problems become especially salient in discussions of fetishes, where Asian women, for example, are made to question whether they are liked only for fitting a certain phenotype, generating the fear of being homogenized and, therefore, replaceable (Zheng, 2016: 407).

^[3]  The Platonic picture extends this possibility to sexual appreciation too, and there is no reason to think this couldn’t be the case. If we think it’s possible to have sexual relations that don’t objectify the other, we can also think there is aesthetic appreciation that is mixed with sexual appreciation that doesn’t objectify. The openness, however, would still be a necessary part.

Aesthetic Exploration, Just Relations, and the Value of Bodily Beauty

Joshua Brecka

University of Toronto

Sherri Irvin (2026, 2017) argues that, in light of various relational aesthetic injustices, the practice of celebrating human bodily beauty should be replaced with a practice she calls aesthetic exploration. This new practice is an aesthetic one—it involves open-mindedly seeking out positive aesthetic experiences afforded by the qualities of human bodies in the here and now. But the practice of aesthetic exploration is also, I argue, a political one—or at least, it has political goals. This short response assesses how aesthetic exploration fares at achieving its political aims. I argue that adopting the practice of aesthetic exploration will not necessarily address looks-based discrimination or unjust aesthetic relations. I also consider whether the practice of aesthetic exploration risks dehumanizing its subjects. Finally, I gesture towards another way of addressing aesthetic injustice that would allow us to continue celebrating a distinctively human form of bodily beauty.

Introduction

Some values and properties deserve esteem. Intelligence, courage, and lovingness all seem like candidates. All else being equal, it is appropriate to praise the intelligent, reward the courageous, and to aspire to be loving. However, some practices of esteeming have harmful effects. The wealthy are esteemed in ways unconnected to their wealth, while the poor often face stigma and material harm. So, while we should esteem some things, certain ways of esteeming are harmful and unjust.

Unfortunately, human bodily beauty—beauty of the human body conforming to socially recognized standards often expressed through comparative judgements—falls into both categories. Bodily beauty seems valuable. We praise the beautiful, derive pleasure from experiences of bodily beauty, and often aspire to be beautiful ourselves. But the practice of celebrating bodily beauty has harmful consequences. Beautiful people often receive undeserved preferential treatment, and those deemed ugly are discriminated against in a myriad of ways.[1] Lookism, as this phenomenon is often called, is an unfortunate reality that must be addressed by any project seeking to develop more just aesthetic relations.

Sherri Irvin (2026, 2017) argues that, to combat lookism and establish more just aesthetic relations, we should replace our current aesthetic practice of celebrating human bodily beauty with a practice she calls aesthetic exploration. While there is much to admire about the seriousness with which Irvin treats the problem of lookism, this short response piece critically reflects on Irvin’s proposal. After outlining Irvin’s view in more detail, I argue that aesthetic exploration will not necessarily eliminate lookism or unjust aesthetic relations. Then, I consider whether adopting the practice of aesthetic exploration is morally impermissible because it involves a kind of dehumanization. Finally, I argue that we can address the harms of lookism and establish more egalitarian aesthetic relations without abandoning or radically revising the concept of human bodily beauty. Charting this course, I suggest, requires understanding the value of bodily beauty and clarifying what just aesthetic relations would look like.

Aesthetic Exploration

Irvin (2026) writes that engaging in aesthetic exploration requires attending to “what is before us with interest and curiosity, with the specific aim of seeking out aesthetic qualities that afford positive aesthetic experiences” (11). As a practice, aesthetic exploration does seek pleasure. However, in contrast with more traditional aesthetic practices, aesthetic exploration is not particularly interested in beauty or ugliness. Rather, the practice seeks aesthetic pleasure in things that are interesting, unfamiliar, captivating, and perplexing (2017: 10-11; 2026: 11-12). When we engage in aesthetic exploration, we are meant to approach an object with openness and a sense of adventure such that we will persevere through uncomfortable experiences. So, according to Irvin, the practice of aesthetic exploration is one that involves a high degree of attention to the object of investigation, a spirit of curiosity or adventure, and the aim of finding aesthetic pleasure and positive aesthetic value in the affordances of that very object during that particular encounter (2026: 18).

Irvin offers a variety of examples of what engaging in the practice of exploration might look like.[2] For instance, Irvin suggests that aesthetic exploration is similar to how we might approach an unfamiliar landscape. While we may spend some time fixating on and enjoying familiarly beautiful vistas, we inevitably move on to the “gnarly, craggy bits, where the surprises are” (2026: 11). For it is those ‘craggy bits’ that often ignite our fascination and help us derive new, exciting, and sometimes strange kinds of aesthetic pleasure.

While any object can be aesthetically explored in this way, Irvin argues we should adopt this practice when experiencing human bodies, both our own and the bodies of others. Indeed, Irvin argues that we ought to replace comparative practices of celebrating human bodily beauty with this new practice. For the practice of celebrating bodily beauty is one that rewards the beautiful in ways separate from their beauty and punishes, harms, and wrongs those deemed ugly. When encountering another’s body that is ugly according to the beauty standard, aesthetic explorers are to move past the ways in which that body violates our normative expectations (2017: 12-13). Instead, aesthetic explorers are to focus on how that body presents in that moment. There is aesthetic pleasure to be enjoyed in the unique lines of facial scars and the interesting textures of wrinkly skin. However, aesthetic explorers are to approach conventionally beautiful bodies in the same way.

Ultimately, the goal of engaging in the practice of aesthetic exploration as applied to human bodies is to become adept at “appreciating the specific aesthetic affordances of bodies we encounter— all bodies, whether they seem typical to us or not” (13). Not only does the aesthetic explorer seek out positive aesthetic experiences not triggered by conformity to conventional beauty standards, they do so as a way of rejecting such standards (13). Aesthetic exploration and the practice of attending to and celebrating human bodily beauty are, at least to some extent, in tension.

Does Aesthetic Exploration Meet Its Goals?

Aesthetic exploration is, clearly, an aesthetic practice. However, the project of adopting this practice at the expense of conventional beauty practices is a political one. Moreover, the goals of this political project seem wider than addressing the harms associated with lookism. For instance, Irvin suggests that one aim of her new practice is to “establish more just relations with others’ embodiment” (2026: 22). So, I think it is fair to consider whether aesthetic exploration would eliminate lookism and whether it addresses these wider issues of relational justice. I suggest that the answer here is not obviously ‘yes’. For it seems to me that harmful aesthetic social hierarchies can arise even in a society of aesthetic explorers.

To see the worry, notice that while the practice of aesthetic exploration actively eschews comparative judgements, the practice does not, as far as I can tell, prohibit esteeming others for the aesthetic properties of their bodies (c.f. Irvin, 2026: 18).[3] For instance, after carefully (and consensually) attending to the shape and line of another’s body, and finding some positive aesthetic value therein, an aesthetic explorer may permissibly praise the other for these properties. This praise might be expressed by a statement like “I really appreciate the shape of your body”.

Now, notice another fact: human bodies admit of a wide degree of difference. Each body will have different features that one might experience as intriguing, interesting, or aesthetically pleasing. These features will elicit pleasurable aesthetic experiences to varying degrees. But surely our praising and esteeming of bodies will be connected in some regular way to the properties of the body being praised. Plausibly, the magnitude of esteem one offers will correspond in some regular way to the magnitude of the (positive) aesthetic experience afforded by that body. For example, we might more highly esteem bodies that are more intriguing or that offer more unique aesthetic experiences.

I worry that adopting the practice of aesthetic exploration may leave open the door for a kind of lookism. Just as current beauty practices favor the beautiful, aesthetic explorers may favor people with bodies that produce the kinds of positive aesthetic experiences each explorer happens to prefer. A society of aesthetic explorers could still be one in which some people receive far greater esteem for the aesthetic affordances of their bodies than others. So, adopting this new practice also does not necessarily rule out unjust and inegalitarian aesthetic relations. Aesthetic exploration tells us how we should view or approach human bodies. But the view does not explicitly tell us how we should treat other people given how we might feel about them aesthetically. It also does not specifically rule out harmful and unjust aesthetic hierarchy.[4] This is why the two potential problems mentioned above are possible.

Pointing out that aesthetic exploration is a non-comparative practice does not necessarily help here. Statements that express aesthetic praise or esteem need not be even implicitly comparative. Reflecting on the differing aesthetic experiences that different bodies afford need not take on a comparative form. We might simply explore a body and appreciate the (positive) aesthetic experience it affords in a way that differs from the way we appreciate the affordances of other bodies. Aesthetic hierarchy may emerge even in a society of aesthetic explorers so long as (i) bodies are aesthetically esteemed, (ii) there is variation among human forms, and (iii) there are noticeable differences in the kind and magnitude of aesthetic experiences these variations produce. We need not compare bodies or the kinds of aesthetic experiences they afford. We need only prefer certain experiences over others (even if all such experiences are positive). Across a society of aesthetic explorations, it may still be that certain people receive damaging deficits of aesthetic esteem while others accrue large surpluses of aesthetic esteem. This may be enough for inegalitarian, and thus unjust, aesthetic relations to emerge.[5]

Perhaps aesthetic exploration can avoid this outcome because it is a positive practice (Irvin, 2017: 7-9). I am not so sure. A positive aesthetics of nature (e.g., Carlson, 1984, 2000: ch. 6) holds that all natural objects have some positive aesthetic value. However, this claim is compatible with large disparities of (positive) aesthetic value between objects (trees, sunsets, and human bodies). So, to avoid the unwelcome possibility of a new kind of lookism and pernicious aesthetic hierarchy outlined above, aesthetic exploration would need to be a positive aesthetic practice according to which all human bodies have exactly the same positive aesthetic value. This strongly positive version of the view may eliminate lookism and meet its political goals. However, it would also be highly controversial.[6] Indeed, a society in which citizens assess or experience all human bodies as equally aesthetically valuable might strike us as infeasibly utopian (Brecka, 2024: 6). The problem, I worry, is that anything short of this maximalist approach will not necessarily address lookism or guarantee just aesthetic relations.

Aesthetic Exploration and Attending to Human Bodies

So, it is not clear that adopting the practice of aesthetic exploration will necessarily address lookism or establish just aesthetic relations. Still, one might think that we ought to adopt the practice as part of an overall strategy. However, I will now argue that we may actually have a moral reason not to adopt the practice of aesthetic exploration.

To see the problem, first notice that aesthetic exploration will involve a lot of careful attending to human bodies. This is not so problematic when that human body is one’s own.[7] Still, we might worry that adopting the new practice may involve unsolicited and prolonged ‘explorations’ of others’ bodies. In short, aesthetic exploration might be creepy. Irvin (2026: 14-15; 2017: 18-19) addresses this concern by arguing that unconscious judgments of bodily beauty are at least as creepy and that we can develop a respectful expression of the exploratory practice by starting with our own bodies.

The problem of creepiness arises because of the amount, or intensity, of attention aesthetic exploration calls us to direct towards other bodies. A deeper moral concern arises, I think, from the kind of attention aesthetic exploration calls us to direct. I worry that aesthetic exploration fails to appreciate, or at least does not particularly care about, the distinct humanness of other bodies and their aesthetic features. Thus, I worry that the practice of aesthetic exploration risks being dehumanizing. Let me explain.

When considering a strategy for addressing lookism that involves attending less to the bodies of others, Irvin (2017) writes that:

Withdrawal of attention to another’s embodiment, then, is often dehumanizing. A strategy that involves taking care not to attend to the embodiment of people consistently judged unattractive risks communicating a denial of their personhood. (7)

This seems right to me—we are embodied creatures and our relations with others should reflect, or at least take note of, this fact. However, merely attending to others’ embodiment does not suffice to avoid dehumanizing them. For it also matters how we attend to their embodiment.[8]

The problem is that aesthetic exploration is a practice that seems to treat human bodies as aesthetic objects like any other. We are to explore human bodies as we would a strange landscape, or an artwork, or even ordinary objects. However, to properly attend to the embodiment of others, we must recognize and appreciate that what we are perceiving is a human body, not simply a source of aesthetic experience. Indeed, attending to another’s body in the right sort of way may require attending to their bodily beauty (at least: to a certain degree, in appropriate moments, etc.).

Attending to the body of another in the same way we might attend to a landscape replete with “gnarly, craggy bits, where the surprises are” seems insufficient for recognizing their humanity. Moreover, to only attend to their body in this way risks insulting them. Imagine: upon meeting a stranger and finding the texture of their unkempt hair fascinating, you say, “I appreciate your hair like I would appreciate a wild Chokecherry thicket”. Or suppose you tell a lover that you attend to their body in the same way you attend to a strange yet interesting scene of a muddy bog. In both cases, it seems appropriate for the other to rebuff your comment by saying something like “my hair is not a Chokecherry thicket” or “my body is not a muddy bog”.

Thus, I worry that the practice of aesthetic exploration also risks being dehumanizing. This is because aesthetic exploration seems to essentially involve viewing human bodies as aesthetic objects.[9] That is, it seems to me that one could engage in practice properly, at least to the letter, and the dehumanization I allege could still arise. Now, perhaps the concern I outline here is not, as I suggest, intrinsic to the practice of aesthetic exploration. Perhaps one who attempts to aesthetically explore another’s body and ends up dehumanizing them has failed to properly engage in the practice. However, if this is right, it suggests that the letter and the spirit of aesthetic exploration may not be totally aligned.

This concern about dehumanization importantly leads us to think more deeply about the importance of bodily beauty and its role in our lives as social creatures. Indeed, to strip away appreciation of human beauty is to ignore one aspect of another’s humanity. We are not embodied landscapes or human canvases. If available, we should prefer the solution to lookism and aesthetic injustice that preserves the parts of our practice celebrating bodily beauty worth keeping.

Just Aesthetic Relations and the Value of Bodily Beauty

Where does this leave us? Well, we wanted to address lookism and establish more just aesthetic relations. These are political goals. So, I suggest we look to political philosophy, rather than aesthetics, for a solution.

We noted at the outset that human bodily beauty is a valued and esteemed trait. In some ways, this is where the problem begins. If beauty were not so esteemed or not particularly valuable, then inequalities of beauty would not be a problem. Aesthetic exploration seeks to disrupt these patterns of esteem by cutting off the practice of celebrating bodily beauty at the root. However, bodily beauty is not alone in being valued and esteemed. We esteem many different things; sometimes this leads to imbalances of esteem that impede just and equal relations between people. For example, we value and esteem wealth, and this leads to a variety of injustices.[10] But addressing economic injustice does not require that everyone have exactly the same amount of wealth (Scanlon, 2018: Ch. 9).[11]

Or consider an analogy with intelligence. Human intelligence—a comparative good that, let’s say, aims at knowing the truth and solving practical problems—is valued and esteemed in our society. But we are not all equally intelligent. So, some people receive surpluses of esteem for their intelligence, yet the intellectually disadvantaged may be discriminated against or penalized in ways distinct from their intelligence. Perhaps the practice of celebrating human intelligence harms the less intelligent. Must we replace it with a new, non-comparative practice of ‘epistemic exploration’? I do not think so—such a practice may not even be desirable.

Irvin (2026: 22) writes that “a focus on beauty…may undermine our ability to fully apprehend and enjoy what’s there.” This is true, but our analogy to intelligence is instructive. A focus on human intelligence may lead us to miss what is there in terms of the particular epistemic affordances offered by another. By focussing on human intelligence, I might miss the subtly creative thinking of the QAnon conspiracy theorist, or the open-mindedness of the new-age crystal therapy patient. Still, relational justice does not demand that we replace our practice of celebrating human intelligence with an exploratory one that seeks to find (perhaps equally) positive intellectual value in all humans. We do not need epistemic exploration to establish egalitarian epistemic relations or to address intellectual discrimination.

Instead, we address these injustices in other ways. For instance, universal public education is a means by which we might help the intellectually disadvantaged. Importantly, we might revise, rather than replace, our practices such that we recognize multiple forms and dimensions of intelligence. The kind of everyday wisdom that comes from adapting to a life of hardship is a form of intelligence worth celebrating. Widening our concept of intelligence to recognize this fact is a good thing. But doing so does not amount to adopting a practice like epistemic exploration.

This is because doing things like recognizing other forms of intelligence or widening our concept of human intelligence does not necessarily involve rejecting, ignoring, or supplanting our concept of human intelligence. One may have an overly narrow conception of human intelligence that only recognizes IQ. That concept may widen when one comes to recognize verbal-linguistic ability and interpersonal skills as equally legitimate forms of intelligence (Gardner, 2011). This widening need not involve adopting a different practice that prioritizes some value other than human intelligence. However, it seems to me that adopting an epistemic practice analogous to aesthetic exploration would require doing just that. For aesthetic exploration does not tell us to recognize a variety of types of human bodily beauty. Instead, it tells us to focus on a wider property: aesthetic value (Irvin 2026: 11).[12] So, the analogous epistemic practice would be something like appreciating the positive epistemic value of thinkers, regardless of whether, or to what extent, they possess any form of intelligence. As such, the hypothetical practice of epistemic exploration would represent a significant departure from noticing and appreciating forms of intelligence other than IQ. Likewise, the practice of aesthetic exploration substantively differs from the more common tendency of, for instance, lovers making an effort to notice the beautiful features of their loved ones that are less obvious or underappreciated.[13]

One might think that my analogy between bodily beauty and intelligence is inapt because beauty is not as valuable as intelligence. Perhaps the value of bodily beauty is not enough to warrant the retention of our harmful practices. This might be correct if bodily beauty were only valuable as a source of pleasure. Indeed, Irvin (2026: 15-18, 23) is right to criticize Matteo Ravasio (2023) for locating the value of bodily beauty in the pleasure it affords.

However, the value of bodily beauty goes beyond merely giving us pleasure. Bodily beauty is valuable, in part, because it is bound up with essential aspects of who we are—it is part of our human identity. For one thing, there are connections between bodily beauty, bodily perfection, health, and other things we value like survival and autonomy (Parsons, 2016: 122-24). Furthermore, as Stephen Davies (2012: Ch. 7) argues, the evolutionary origins of human bodily beauty are not just about mate selection and reproduction.[14] Davies notes that our judgements of human bodily beauty mix both physical and social attractiveness. He argues that “physical beauty cannot really be separated from character and performance” (2012: 113). Indeed, for Davies, our practice of noticing and celebrating bodily beauty is a deep part of how human social life is enacted. Davies writes that bodily beauty is:

much more about personal identity and the face that each of us presents to our community, about our daily manner of going about life…As regards our view of others, it is about how we assess their performance more generally as fellow participants in our culture, as potential friends or enemies. (113-14)

So, bodily beauty is in part about self-presentation—we groom and adorn ourselves to be more beautiful, but also to present ourselves as ourselves to others. Relatedly, bodily beauty can serve as a useful social signal of other desirable qualities.[15] Thus, bodily beauty can play a positive role in human interaction beyond providing aesthetic pleasure. Adopting aesthetic exploration as a replacement for the bodily beauty practice risks losing a deeply human, and socially valuable, practice.

So, how should we address lookism and establish egalitarian aesthetic relations? Well, there is no single answer here. We can make voluntary surgery widely available, as Ravasio (2023) advocates. We might develop technology to expand the circle of bodily beauty (Thau, 2020). We can also amend our aesthetic practices in ways not wholly different from Irvin’s proposal. However, we can do more. We can change how much we as a society esteem the value of beauty—both in absolute terms and relative to other values we hold—and we can ensure that there are many other accessible sources of esteem other than beauty within society. This will help ensure judgements of beauty do not have outsized effects on other aspects of people’s lives.[16] Now, changing a society such that it recognizes a plurality of values as meaningful sources of esteem is not an easy task. The details of the practical proposal here will need to be worked out elsewhere. However, to fill in the idea a little, enacting this kind of society-wide change will likely involve top-down, institutional changes aimed at increasing the salience of certain values other than bodily beauty. It will also require changes in individual behaviour and attitudes. To illustrate, note that ending the European practice of duelling—a practice which was centred around the cultural value of honour—required legal and institutional changes, and changes in attitude among the class of men who most regularly engaged in the practice (Appiah, 2010). Likewise, properly situating bodily beauty among a plurality of other, worthwhile sources of esteem will likely require both tactics. Bodily beauty is valuable, but we should not let it crowd out other human values.

Conclusion

Sherri Irvin (2026) invites us to take up the practice of aesthetic exploration when aesthetically engaging with human bodies. This new practice is exciting, and engaging in it may allow for interesting and positive aesthetic experiences we would not otherwise have if we solely engaged in more conventional practices of bodily beauty. Exploring can be rewarding. Indeed, developing the skills to find some aesthetic good in every human body may very well help some people overcome lookist behavior and damaging views of their self-worth. I do not deny that the practice might be valuable in some situations for some people.

However, I have argued that the practice of aesthetic exploration will not necessarily adequately address lookism. This is because the view does not explicitly quarantine our aesthetic judgements of other people’s bodies from our treatment of those people.[17] I also tentatively argued that the practice of aesthetic exploration may be morally impermissible because it involves a concerning kind of dehumanization. We should aesthetically view other bodies as human bodies, not as landscapes or other mere objects. Finally, I gestured at a different way of addressing aesthetic injustice that kept the value of human bodily beauty squarely in its sights.[18]

References

Anderson, E. (2012). ‘Equality’, in D. Estlund (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy. (New York: Oxford University Press), 40–57.

Appiah, K. A., (2010). The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. (New York: WW Norton & Company).

Brecka, J. (2024). ‘Relational Egalitarianism and Aesthetic Equality’, The Journal of Value Inquiry, 1-18.

Carlson, A. (2000). Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture. (London: Routledge).

Carlson, A. (1984). ‘Nature and Positive Aesthetics’, Environmental Ethics, 6 (1), 5-34.

D’Alessandro, W. (2023). ‘Is it bad to prefer attractive partners?’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9:2, 335-354.

Davies, S. (2016). ‘And Everything Nice’, in Sherri Irvin (ed.), Body Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 127–138.

Davies, S. (2012). The Artful Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Friedell, D., & Ransom, M. (2025). ‘The Morality and Aesthetics of Personal Beauty’, Acta Analytica 40:2, 195-207.

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: BasicBooks).

Godlovitch, S. (1998). ‘Evaluating nature aesthetically’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56:2, 113-125.

Irvin, S. (2026). ‘Choosing Our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice’, Debates in Aesthetics, 20:2 9-26.

Irvin, S.(2017). ‘Resisting Body Oppression: An Aesthetic Approach’, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 3:4, 1-25.

Parsons, G. (2016). ‘The Merrickites’, in Sherri Irvin (ed.), Body Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 110–126.

Ravasio, M. (2023). ‘Engineering Human Beauty’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 101:4, 998–1011.

Rhode, D. (2010). The Beauty Bias: The injustice of Appearance in Life and Law. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Scanlon, T. M. (2018). Why does Inequality Matter? (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Scanlon, T. M. (2002). ‘The diversity of objections to inequality’, in M. Clayton, and A. Williams (eds.), The Ideal of Equality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) 41–59.

Thau, T. (2020). ‘Expanding the Romantic Circle’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 23:5, 915–929.

^[1]  While there is a great deal of empirical support for the social reality of these claims, for the sake of space, I will not recount it here. For some surveys of the empirical literature, see Irvin (2017: 2–6), Parsons (2016: 112-14), Ravasio (2022: 999-1000), and Rhode (2010: Ch. 2).

^[2]  The examples are important for more than just exposition. As I will later make clear, I think Irvin’s go-to examples indicate that the practice of aesthetic exploration may not be a distinctly human aesthetic practice.

^[3]  Strictly speaking, aesthetic exploration may even be compatible with esteeming bodies for their beauty, so long as the esteem is not expressed through a comparative judgement, and so long as we are not primarily focused on bodily beauty. Though Irvin (2026: 22-23) does argue that the bodily beauty practice and the exploratory practice may compete with, rather than complement, one another.

^[4]  I here assume that certain kinds of hierarchy are incompatible with egalitarian social relations. See Anderson (2012: 42-3) for a taxonomy of hierarchies and an explanation of why they are thought to impede relations of equality.

^[5]  However, this does not guarantee that hierarchies will form in exploratory societies. I do not claim that a society of aesthetic explorers will necessarily be one with inegalitarian aesthetic social relations, just that such a society could be.

^[6]  For a forceful rejection of this strong kind of positive aesthetics in the case of nature, and for a similar strong/weak distinction, see Godlovitch (1998).

^[7]  Indeed, seeking out new positive aesthetic experiences afforded by one’s own body, regardless of how one might fare with respect to socially recognized beauty standards, strikes me as psychologically healthy and personally rewarding. This is a real strength of Irvin’s proposal. Aesthetically exploring one’s own body may, for some people, be one morally permissible way to help address some of the effects of lookism.

^[8]  No doubt Irvin agrees with this point—the main point of aesthetic exploration is to help us attend to human bodies in a particular way.

^[9]  Of course, contemporary beauty practices can also be objectifying and dehumanizing (e.g., see Friedell & Ransom (2025)). So, this criticism may cut both ways. However, I argue that one could break this tie by showing that bodily beauty, and not the general sort of aesthetic value sought by aesthetic exploration, is importantly human in some valuable way. The next section offers some defence of this claim, though, for reasons of space, a fuller defence will need to be left to future work.

^[10]  T.M. Scanlon (2002: 43) notes that the impoverished are both materially harmed by their poverty and relationally harmed by being made to feel “inferiority and shame at the way they must live”.

^[11]  Though it will likely require significant economic redistribution.

^[12]  Indeed, genuine aesthetic exploration may involve ignoring beauty altogether.

^[13]  I thank two anonymous reviewers for pushing me to say more here.

^[14]  Davies (2012: 112) argues that the lookism—what he calls “the halo effect”—actually supports his hypothesis that beauty is not merely about the body, it’s mixed up with ideas about meaningful personal traits. Davies (2016) argues for a similar conclusion about sexual attraction.

^[15]  See D’Alessandro (2023: 349), and references therein, for a helpful summary of empirical work outlining the ways in which desirable traits like conscientiousness and openness reliably correlate with bodily beauty and relate to aesthetic qualities like how one dresses. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for directing my attention to this work.

^[16]  See Brecka (2024: 11-13) for a proposal more along these lines, and for some brief discussion this ‘value pluralism’ approach to addressing lookism.

^[17]  Irvin (2017: 6-7) explicitly rejects the strategy of separating our aesthetic judgements of people’s bodies from other judgements about them. However, as I hope to have made clear, for aesthetic exploration to have enough social/political purchase, the practice must eventually do some quarantining. This is because to address lookism and establish more just aesthetic relations, we need an approach that makes at least some prescriptions about behaviour.

^[18]  Many thanks to Glenn Parsons for helpful discussions about earlier drafts of this paper and for constant encouragement. Thanks also to two anonymous referees at this journal for constructive comments that improved the paper.

How to Become an Aesthetic Explorer: Three Games

C. R. Muller

Marist University

While reading Sherri Irvin’s “Choosing our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice,” I found myself convinced that I should choose aesthetic exploration practice (AEP) in place of conventional beauty practice (CBP), yet it remained unclear to me how to choose it, given how entrenched CBP is in my psyche. In this paper, I suggest make-believe play as a means of disrupting CBP and creating a path toward AEP. I first discuss the work of Maria Lugones, Kendall Walton, and C. Thi Nguyen to explain what I mean by make-believe play and the advantages I see in it. I then describe three games of make-believe one might play to move toward AEP: Aesthetic Explorer, My Body is a Landscape, and My Body is an Artwork.

Introduction

While reading Sherri Irvin’s “Choosing our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice,” I found myself convinced that I should choose aesthetic exploration practice (AEP) in place of conventional beauty practice (CBP). That I reached this conclusion did not surprise me, as I have long believed that I should stop privileging conventional beauty standards. However, I had never envisioned an aesthetic practice in its place, opting instead for a rejection of aesthetic value altogether and focusing on internal virtues like kindness. Thus, Irvin’s suggestion of an alternative aesthetic practice is welcome, especially as it aligns with my innate desire to enjoy the delights and oddities of my own body.

However, a significant issue remains. Having established what I should choose, I find myself unsure of how to choose it. After so many years absorbing CBP and facing the “disapproving gaze” and some of the “penalties … imposed on the ugly,” it is difficult to shift gears (Irvin, 2026: 14). While I have made some inroads into broadening what I include under the label “beautiful” as suggested in A. W. Eaton (2016) among others, I have never succeeded in giving up the relevant value system altogether. Nor am I alone in this difficulty, as Irvin (2017: 3-5) makes clear: people frequently make judgments based on conventional beauty that outstrip what they would explicitly support, demonstrating the challenge of freeing oneself from CBP.

Irvin suggests that, to cultivate AEP, one can “practice first on one’s own body and on publicly available representations or embodied performances to learn to find sources of aesthetic interest and pleasure in a wide variety of faces and bodies” (2026: 15). What follows is my attempt to offer practical guidance for making the first step of practising AEP on our own bodies. I suggest make-believe play as a way to move in this direction, and I map out three games of make-believe one might play: Aesthetic Explorer, My Body is a Landscape, and My Body is an Artwork.

1. Make-Believe Play

First, a brief explanation of how I understand make-believe play and why it is useful here. Irvin describes AEP as “a playful, rambunctious practice, full of surprises, demanding perceptual, cognitive and affective engagement along with nimbleness, the ability to avoid getting stuck in displeasure or disgust—or, for that matter, in easy pleasures” (2026: 18) and as “open-ended and experimental, restless, characterized by seeking” (2026: 24), making make-believe play a natural fit. Both descriptions call to mind playfulness in Maria Lugones’s sense, i.e., to adopt a playful attitude is to be willing to make a fool of oneself, which she describes as “not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred…” (1987: 17). Thus, playfulness involves an acknowledgement of one’s limitations, openness to being corrected, not taking oneself too seriously, and moving away from norms, all of which are important for developing an exploratory practice.

Additionally, games of make-believe, in the style of Kendall Walton, are a useful tool to shift away from the rules of everyday life. As the foundation for his pretense theory, Walton uses children’s make-believe games, in which children use objects in the real world as props to help generate what is true according to the game (1990: 37). For instance, a particularly large stump is a large bear, a knobbly, old stick is an old horse, and so on. These games are governed by rules such as “stumps are bears,” which, although loose and revisable, offer a starting point so that everyone playing has a shared understanding of which utterances are acceptable within the game (1990: 38-43). These games often build on knowledge about reality, e.g. when kids play House and use their own home life as a model, but they remain open to revision and can shift to fit the available props.[1] (E.g., my “babies” subsisted on corn, toast, nuts, and oranges, because that was the play food I had as a child, although I didn’t think that was an appropriate diet for an infant in real life.) Both the basis in reality and the accommodation to the prop are relevant to the games I propose below. Although one might worry that the game’s basis in reality would entrench CBP within the game, I hope to suggest games that shake us free of CBP by prompting us to adopt the mindset of an aesthetic explorer and see our bodies from novel perspectives.

Lastly, games allow us to develop new forms of agency, as C. Thi Nguyen argues. As he puts it, “Games can help build our inventory of ways of being practical. And such an inventory, when well and appropriately managed, can support our freedom and autonomy” (2020: 83-84, emphasis in original). Although Nguyen is focused on “striving” play, in which one takes on obstacles for the sake of overcoming them (2019: 68), which he sees as “conceptually distinct” from make-believe play (2019: 54), I believe games of make-believe also involve taking on obstacles and restrictions and can thus accomplish the same ends.[2] For instance, even House involves obstacles (chores, babies to feed, etc.) and restrictions (rules like “change the baby’s diaper regularly”). Working through obstacles and restrictions allows us to develop new types of agency, Nguyen argues. In contrast, “too much freedom … may simply lead to a repetition of one’s own ruts and habits” (2020: 96), which is similar to my concern that simply setting out to become aesthetic explorers might result in a repetition of CBP. Thus, I suggest three structured games of make-believe to help us break free from our conventional “ruts and habits” and move toward AEP.

2. Aesthetic Explorer

The first make-believe game I propose is Aesthetic Explorer. This game involves taking on the “agential mode” (Nguyen 2020: 79) of an aesthetic explorer, which means taking on a point of view that sees everything in the world as open to aesthetic exploration and curiosity. In adopting this agential mode, it is helpful to keep Lugones in mind, with her emphasis on not taking norms as sacred: the aesthetic explorer is expressly not interested in conventional norms of beauty and design but in exploration, uncovering the interesting aesthetic aspects of the world around us. Adopting this mindset toward the world, within the game, can help us develop the non-judgmental, curious perspective needed for AEP toward our own bodies.[3]

To go into a bit more detail, this game involves an appreciation for the wide array of objects in the world, however mundane: a water bottle, lawnmower, clump of cat hair, and basket of laundry all have aesthetic properties one can explore, such as having a saturated hue, singing with a high-pitched whine when going uphill, being soft but off-putting, and displaying a chaotic jumble of patterns, textures, and colours, respectively.[4] Some rules I would propose for Aesthetic Explorer include: “don’t take anything for granted,” “explore objects from all angles,” and “look for aesthetic properties.” The game thus involves overcoming obstacles such as our natural tendency to ignore the details of things we are used to, yielding a more observant, detail-oriented agential mode.

While our societal norms involve deeming some things practical and others art or “designer” and thereby up for aesthetic evaluation, this game asks us not to take this norm as sacred. Rather, we should open up the range of things that can be explored aesthetically, with the hope that doing so will help us extend that exploration to our own bodies as among the objects in the world. Appreciation for the variety of material objects might also give us greater appreciation for our bodies as material and for the variety of shapes, textures, sounds, and colours they contain or produce.

If we can adopt the perspective of an aesthetic explorer within a game of make-believe, one might ask why we can’t just adopt it in our real life, rendering this game otiose. To this question, I have several replies. First, I think there is a potential ethical flaw in adopting an attitude of aesthetic exploration toward the world, outside of a game. As Irvin presents it, exploration is non-judgmental, and there are some aspects of the world, like exploitation and cruelty, that one should judge.[5] Second, I think it is less demanding to ask people to play Aesthetic Explorer than to adopt this perspective in real life. Having played many theatre games throughout high school and college, I can attest to there being a gestalt shift when asked to play that you are an explorer rather than being asked to explore. Although playing at exploring can lead to caricatures and silliness, it can also encourage boldness, new perspectives, and new ways of moving through the world that one might not think of when simply exploring in real life. Moreover, when we adopt perspectives in real life, we tend to bring our conventional beliefs with us, while in a game, we tend to leave them at the door, leaving us more open to new experiences. It is by cultivating this boldness, curiosity, and exploratory attitude within the game that we are able to shift our perspective outside the game. Lastly, exploring the aesthetics of the world first and then seeing one’s body as part of that world seems more achievable to me than diving directly into AEP, and it helps distance us from CBP by considering the aesthetics of things that are not bodies.

However, these points leave us on the other horn of the dilemma: why adopt AEP in real life, if we can adopt it within the safety of the game without commitment or consequences? The primary reason is that one of Irvin’s motivations for adopting AEP is precisely to bring about real-world consequences, i.e., to gain the practical effects of abandoning CBP in real life. If we were merely to adopt AEP within a game, we would miss out on these real-world effects. Nonetheless, we might wonder whether it is, in fact, possible to carry these powers of aesthetic exploration into real life after the game is over.[6] In response, I return to Nguyen, who argues that games provide “a library of agencies” that contribute to our “menu of possible actions,” which we can adopt in real life when we need to take up a specific “agential mode” (2020: 76-77, 82). Just as playing a game requiring empathy, patience, or quick decision-making can help us adopt those qualities in real life, so playing a game in which we engage in open-minded aesthetic exploration and shift away from CBP can help us do so in real life. One might worry that CBP will creep back into our psyche once we are outside the game, and I admit that the games described in this paper cannot ensure that we will always use AEP and avoid CBP. Instead, as Nguyen discusses, they are intended to help us cultivate the agential mode of aesthetic exploration, so that we have a better chance of adopting it outside the game.

3. My Body is a Landscape

Once one has fostered an aesthetic exploration mindset, I propose playing My Body is a Landscape, the game most directly indicated by Irvin’s own metaphors. She describes her thighs as “transformed … from a lightly rippled expanse of beach to a choppy dune” (2026: 10) and compares aesthetic exploration of the body to “the approach we might take to a landscape with very different features than we’ve seen before,” noting “we are not surveyors taking a measure of the place but are instead here to have fun, to seek out aesthetic pleasures” (2026: 11). She contrasts “that pretty vista” with “the gnarly, craggy bits, where the surprises are” and groups natural landscapes and human bodies together as objects that “emerge partly or wholly independently of aesthetic practices and may thus support more than one mode of aesthetic engagement” (2026: 12). She also emphasizes aesthetic exploration as a quest to “recogniz[e] and enjo[y] the aesthetic affordances of [one’s] body” much as we might hunt out aesthetic affordances in a landscape, and she closes the paper with a final comparison between bodies and natural environments, noting that both “afford ugliness and disgust, but they are also – and sometimes by virtue of the very same qualities – fascinating, thrilling, and wondrous” (2026: 25).

I propose that we use My Body is a Landscape as more than a metaphor, intentionally engaging in it as a game of make-believe to help develop an AEP mindset toward our bodies. Central to the game is the use of one’s imagination to transform aspects of one’s body into landscape features, drawing on specific similarities, as we do in the creation of metaphors. Playing this game, I notice that the veins on the back of my hand branch like rivers, and the wrinkles are like striated rock or ripples left in the sand. My uncultivated cuticles stretch and break like a rugged shore around the smooth bay of my fingernail. And that’s just one hand! While some might worry that they are not imaginative enough to play this game, I would respond that it doesn’t require much imagination, as the game is primarily playing with scale and picturing small details as large land features. Additionally, one can cultivate one’s imaginative powers by engaging with art and literature, such as Giuseppe Penone’s Svolgere la Propria Pelle (To Unravel One’s Own Skin), in which hundreds of images recording his anatomy are arranged in a map-like array, or Audre Lorde’s ‘Woman’ (1978: 82), “I dream of a place between your breasts/ to build my house like a haven/ where I plant crops/ in your body/ an endless harvest.”

As noted above, games involve loose and flexible rules. In My Body is a Landscape, the central rule is “body parts are no longer part of a body but part of a landscape.” The game thus dislodges CBP, with its idealized versions of body parts, and helps us explore the particularities of the body by imaginatively enlarging them. Another rule is “consider body parts in isolation from each other”: were they imagined to be connected, the resemblance to the body would be obvious and disrupt the game. Lastly, the game follows a general rule for prop-oriented make-believe: “accommodate the prop.” Just as a knobbly stick becomes an old, knobbly horse in the game Sticks are Horses, so a knobbly knee becomes a knobbly hill in My Body is a Landscape. To return to my original example, if I artificially smoothed the cuticles within my game to make a perfect moonlit bay, I would miss the chance to see their particularity and would be more likely to slide back into CBP. That said, one need not accommodate every aspect of the prop in one’s game: fingernails are pink underneath, not blue or green as one would expect from a moonlit pond, but one can still play that they are a moonlit pond. Where, then, is the line between respecting and ignoring the details of the prop? The answer will differ depending on the game, but I would say that the guiding principle is to attend to particularity but ignore aspects that are not particular. Fingernails in general are pink, so we can ignore that aspect, just as children playing Sticks are Horses ignore the fact that sticks don’t have manes, but the specifics of one’s cuticle (or stick) should be incorporated into the game.

Irvin urges us to see “what is here before me right now: the affordances of this very encounter with this very body” (2026: 18). Thus, including the ragged edges of my cuticles as I imagine my fingernail as a moonlit bay allows me to see this broken landscape as a windswept dune or broken heather, which in turn helps me appreciate the specific texture of this small part of my body. There is thus a virtuous cycle between using the prop to inform the game and using the game to notice further details about the prop. As Walton argues in the context of metaphor, “props are not always tools in the service of make-believe. Sometimes make-believe is a means for understanding props … to provide useful or illuminating ways of describing or thinking about them” (1993: 39). In this case, the game illuminates the particularities of our body and helps us explore them without judgment.

On that note, one might worry that we will import our problematic judgments about landscapes into judgments about our bodies. E.g., picturing one’s skin as a dry wheat field, one might feel critical of the farmer who neglected to water the field and, in turn, carry this over to criticism of one’s own hydration and skin care practices.[7] My initial reply to this worry is that one can explore a dry wheat field joyfully, with curiosity and open-mindedness, despite wishing the farmer had taken better care of it. Nonetheless, one might worry more generally that CBP about landscapes could lead us back to CBP about our bodies. In reply, I would first note that our conventional beauty practices regarding landscapes tend to value pristine, untouched wilderness, in contrast to CBP about bodies, which tends to value the shaved, enhanced, reduced, etc. Thus, even if CBP about landscapes trickles in, the effect could still be liberating. But more fundamentally, the focus of the game is seeing one’s body parts as something else, which can disrupt CBP about the body independently of any judgments we might make about the “landscape” we’re discovering.

4. My Body is an Artwork

Still, one might return to the worry from the end of section two and wonder how one can move from My Body is a Landscape to AEP, as the former requires a sort of double-seeing of one’s body as a landscape, which is not aesthetic exploration of one’s own body simpliciter. If I reflect on moments when I have explored the details of my body in an open-minded way, they have largely stemmed from having artist friends create portraits of me. Suddenly, I noticed details that had been obscured by habit and acquaintance, and I was able to explore them less judgmentally because of the artistic representation. These experiences inspire the final game I discuss: My Body is an Artwork.

Given my inspiration for this game, one might guess that it would involve making realistic art depicting one’s body or looking at realistic artworks depicting bodies similar to one’s own. In particular, one might think of work depicting bodies that fail to conform to CBP and look for depictions that most closely map onto one’s own body. For instance, one might look at Duane Hanson’s hyperreal sculptures of everyday Americans as their bodies “slump, lean, and sag” (Calcutt, 2003: n.p.), Aleah Chapin’s oils of naked, elderly women, Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, or Mary Duffy’s performance as the Venus de Milo (discussed in Siebers, 2008: 333-334).[8] However, there is a problem with using realistic art for this game, as even realistic artworks with subjects that do not conform to CBP often bring out the beauty in their subjects, which ultimately supports CBP, at least the extended CBP promoted by Eaton and others. For instance, Cameron Laux describes the subject of Freud’s painting as follows, “… she is majestic; she has curves on her curves, and they phosphoresce gently in shades of brown, pink, and white” (2015: n.p.). Thus, I turn to abstract and semi-abstract art depicting bodies to help us move toward AEP.

To play My Body is an Artwork, then, one should first experience a wide range of abstract and semi-abstract artwork representing people’s bodies, such as cubism, Fauvism, or postmodern art. For instance, one might look at Liubov Popova’s Cubist Nude, Firelei Báez’s To See beyond It …, Fernand Léger’s Three Women, Patricia Piccinini’s Bootflower, or Henri Matisse’s The Dance, abstracting the body into reduced forms and shapes and picturing one’s own body through these lenses. One could use the work of Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning’s Woman I, or Page Turner’s Tiny Toes and imagine one’s body as stretched and distorted, as a barely intelligible scribble, or as a box of curios, respectively. While abstraction means that some details will be left out, keeping these artworks in mind will help one develop a mindset of exploration: one can see one’s body in new and unexpected ways by considering the new and unexpected ways bodies have been seen. The abstraction thus helps shake one loose from CBP and also brings out a greater appreciation for specific details. For instance, Baez’s piece might help one pay more attention to the liquidity of one’s eyes or the greenish hues of one’s skin.

As one plays My Body is an Artwork, one should strive to maintain the mindset from Aesthetic Explorer, staying non-judgmental, curious, and attentive to detail. The rules of the game are quite general: (1) imagine one’s body using various non-realistic artistic styles, and (2) attend to specific details about one’s body. Additionally, one can play in more concrete ways, such as creating abstract self-portraits in different media. In playing this game, it is helpful to remember Lugones’ directive to not take oneself too seriously. These different framings and imaginings can help one see the details of one’s particular body in an open-minded, curious light, while the artistic lens helps us focus on the specific details of our bodies.

Even if we restrict ourselves to abstract and semi-abstract art, though, one might worry that My Body is an Artwork will ultimately rely on CBP, because art is essentially concerned with beauty. However, I think this worry stems from a reductive view of art. Rarely does an artist or critic focus simplistically on beauty in discussing an artwork. Instead, artists might focus on their artistic process or meaningful details in the work, while critics might describe the work as vibrant, discordant, muted, harmonious, cluttered, sketchy, joyful, lifeless, etc. using terms that are more specific than ‘beautiful’ (Boddy-Evans, 2025). As My Body is an Artwork aims at attending to the particularities of one’s body, one should try to use these more precise descriptors while playing it. One might still worry that these terms carry value judgments, e.g. valuing the symmetrical and harmonious over the asymmetrical and discordant. However, if we look at a wide range of artworks, as I have suggested, I believe we can find value on both sides of this dichotomy rather than favouring one over the other.

5. Conclusion

It is my hope that, if one plays these games—Aesthetic Explorer, My Body is a Landscape, and My Body is an Artwork—one will become better positioned to adopt Irvin’s suggested practice of aesthetic exploration. Some might not need the games, but I hope that they can help anyone having difficulty making the leap to AEP. They support playfulness as we imagine our body in different ways, foster the agential mode of aesthetic explorers, and supply ways to break away from our conventional beliefs. While it might not be possible to disrupt CBP completely, these games can help free us from its power and adopt Irvin’s AEP more deeply and whole-heartedly.

It can feel a little desperate sometimes, the project of unlearning the strict, taxing rules of CBP and developing a new practice. I am grateful to Irvin for suggesting a practice of experiencing my body that avoids CBP but maintains an aesthetic perspective, and I hope to have contributed some practical methods for moving toward this joyful and exuberant practice.

References

Boddy-Evans, M. (2025). ‘Words to Describe Art’, ThoughtCo (published online) <thoughtco.com/art-words-list-2577414> accessed 25 July 2025.

Calcutt, J. (2003). ‘Review of Duane Hanson, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh’, The Guardian (published online) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/jan/16/art.artsfeatures accessed 2 March 2025.

DuComb, C. (2012). ‘Staging Violence in Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Anodyne’, Theatre Journal, 64:2, 197-211. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2012.0032.

Eaton, A. W. (2016). ‘Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression’, in Sherri Irvin (ed.), Body Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 37-59.

Irvin, S. (2017). ‘Resisting Body Oppression: An Aesthetic Approach’, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 3:4, Article 3, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2017.4.3.

Irvin, S. (2026) ‘Choosing Our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice’, Debates in Aesthetics, 20:2, 9-26.

Laux, C. (2018). ‘Lucian Freud and Sue Tilley: The Story of an Unlikely Muse’, BBC (published online) https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180514-lucian-freud-and-big-sue-the-story-of-an-unlikely-muse accessed 2 March 2025.

Lorde, A. (1978). ‘Woman’, The Black Unicorn (New York: Norton), 82.

Lugones, M. (1987). ‘Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception’, Hypatia, 1:1, 3-19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1987.tb01062.x.

Nguyen, C. T. (2019). ‘The Forms and Fluidity of Game Play’, in Thomas Hurka (ed.), Games, Sports, and Play: Philosophical Essays (New York: Oxford University Press), 54-73.

Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Games: Agency as Art (New York: Oxford University Press).

Siebers, T. (2008). ‘Disability Aesthetics and the Body Beautiful: Signposts in the History of Art’, Alter: European Journal of Disability Research, 2, 329-336. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alter.2008.08.002.

Suits, B. (1978) 2014. The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia 3rd ed. (Peterborough: Broadview).

Walton, K. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Walton, K. (1993). ‘Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe’, European Journal of Philosophy, 1:1, 39-56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.1993.tb00023.x.

^[1]  Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point. Walton (1990: 144-150) calls the basis in reality the ‘Reality Principle’ when discussing games of make-believe we play with fictions, though a full exegesis of his interpretive principles would take us too far afield here.

^[2]  Here I follow Bernard Suits in seeing the voluntary overcoming of obstacles as essential to all games (Suits [1978] 2014, 43, as cited in Nguyen 2020: 5). Nguyen notes that his argument should be “palatable” to such a view, so for the remainder of the paper I take his points to apply to the games I describe (Nguyen 2020: 7, note 5).

^[3]  An anonymous reviewer raised the question of whether this game looks specifically for positive qualities, but in alignment with Irvin’s ultimate goal in AEP, I don’t think it needs to do so. Instead, it adopts an attitude of exploring both the good and the bad without getting stuck in “displeasure and disgust” or in “easy pleasures” (Irvin 2026: 18).

^[4]  Though I lack the space to discuss this point fully here, this shift in mindset seems similar to Heidegger’s idea of things becoming present-to-hand rather than ready-to-hand.

^[5]  A striking example of the aesthetic exploration of violence can be found in Pig Iron Theatre’s show Anodyne. See DuComb (2012) for a description and analysis of the show.

^[6]  Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for pushing me to make this point more explicit.

^[7]  Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this worry and the example.

^[8]  Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing Siebers’s work to my attention.

Aesthetically Conscientious Practice

Kazi A S M Nurul Huda

University of Dhaka & University of Richmond

This paper examines Sherri Irvin’s concept of aesthetic exploration, which seeks to resist exclusionary beauty norms through perceptual openness and individual empowerment. Although Irvin’s framework broadens the scope of aesthetic appreciation, I contend that when aesthetic exploration is insufficiently integrated with shared evaluative frameworks, it risks forms of abstraction, isolation, and loss of normative coherence. These risks do not arise from aesthetic detachment as such, which is intrinsic to aesthetic experience, but from a mode of exploration that lacks resources for reflective correction and social integration. In response, I develop a brief account of aesthetically conscientious practice (ACP), a reflective model that preserves perceptual openness while embedding aesthetic judgment within relational and normative processes. Guided by three principles of balance, inclusivity, and mutual correction, ACP aligns aesthetic freedom with social responsibility without reducing aesthetic judgment to ethical evaluation. The framework shows how aesthetic life, when practised conscientiously, can sustain both individual autonomy and shared meaning, supporting justice and the renewal of cultural value

Introduction

Sherri Irvin’s essay “Choosing Our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice” reimagines beauty as a space of perceptual freedom rather than conformity. Her concept of aesthetic exploration encourages open attentiveness to overlooked features of bodies and environments, challenging exclusionary norms and expanding what may count as aesthetically engaging.

The strengths of this model, however, also generate unresolved tensions. By foregrounding perceptual autonomy and bracketing shared evaluative reference points, aesthetic exploration risks forms of detachment and isolation that can undermine collective uptake and normative coherence. These risks do not arise from aesthetic detachment as such, but from a mode of exploration that lacks sufficient resources for reflective correction and social integration.

This paper examines these tensions and develops an account of aesthetically conscientious practice as a reflective extension of Irvin’s project, albeit briefly. Rather than rejecting aesthetic exploration, it integrates open attentiveness with critical responsiveness to shared cultural standards, preserving aesthetic freedom while situating it within a framework of social accountability.

Irvin’s Aesthetic Exploration

Irvin defines aesthetic exploration as a practice that promotes curiosity, attentiveness, and multisensory engagement with bodies and other aesthetic objects. It invites open interaction with what is immediately present and aims to identify aesthetic qualities that provide enriching experiences while challenging dominant beauty norms. This approach emphasizes the appreciation of unique and often overlooked features and encourages individuals to move beyond narrow and exclusionary ideals of beauty (Irvin, 2025: 2-3). Aesthetic exploration, for Irvin, is not merely a rejection of norms but a pursuit of aesthetic pleasure in what might otherwise be dismissed.

Irvin argues that aesthetic exploration promotes both personal empowerment (7) and social justice (9-10). It seeks to counter the harm caused by conventional beauty standards, including the alienation and self-loathing felt by those deemed unattractive (3). By appreciating diverse embodiments, aesthetic exploration reduces participation in the privileging of certain bodies and expands access to meaningful aesthetic experiences (4).

A central element of Irvin’s position is her rejection of the comparative logic inherent in conventional beauty practices. Aesthetic exploration avoids ranking or identifying the “most beautiful” and instead values the richness and complexity of one’s own and others’ bodies. It prioritizes attentiveness to qualities such as texture, movement, and shadow, which contribute to a more inclusive understanding of embodiment (5-6).

Irvin acknowledges the difficulty of this practice. Cultural conditioning shapes aesthetic perception, and the process may provoke discomfort or disgust as individuals confront internalized biases (2, 6). Still, she maintains that aesthetic exploration can cultivate curiosity and pleasure in what was previously unfamiliar (2, 6).

For Irvin, aesthetic practices are not merely private. They reflect how we express respect, inclusion, and value in relation to others (3). By transforming how bodies are aesthetically perceived, aesthetic exploration can support broader cultural change (8).

Irvin’s framework builds on feminist and embodied aesthetics that challenge dominant beauty standards and recover marginalized forms of aesthetic experience (see Bartky, 1990). Her focus on aesthetic agency, ethical responsibility, and the reimagining of beauty as a site of liberation makes a meaningful contribution. Yet her model raises concerns. The tension between personal autonomy and shared cultural reference points remains unresolved and may weaken the inclusivity and transformative potential it aims to advance.

Limitations of Aesthetic Exploration

Irvin’s vision of aesthetic exploration offers a compelling alternative to dominant beauty norms, yet its emphasis on perceptual individuality introduces unresolved tensions. When shared evaluative reference points are bracketed, exploration risks abstraction, isolation, and loss of coherence, showing that aesthetic freedom requires relational and ethical grounding to remain inclusive.

The Paradox of Aesthetic Detachment

Irvin (2025: 1-2, 6) suggests that aesthetic exploration can emerge independently of societal norms, yet also concedes that self-perception is shaped by cultural context. This tension prompts a key question: can one explore the body aesthetically without referencing social values? If not, Irvin’s vision of a fully individualized aesthetic experience may risk abstraction rather than empowerment. This potential for abstraction is not merely theoretical. Irvin’s own exercise-class vignette illustrates how aesthetic self-exploration can turn perception inward in ways that risk detaching the self from its embodied ground. At the same time, any aesthetic experience involves a minimal subject–object distinction, even when the object of attention is one’s own lived body, and nothing in what follows is meant to deny the inevitability or legitimacy of this structural form of detachment.

The risk of abstraction operates through perceptual detachment, where the subject’s gaze turns inward until the body is encountered as spectacle rather than presence. Observing her thighs from an unusual angle, Irvin (2025: 1) seeks to “explore what’s here,” treating her body as a landscape rich with textures and patterns. Yet the very stance of exploration, in which one looks at oneself as though surveying unfamiliar terrain, divides the perceiver from the lived body that acts and feels. The self becomes both seer and seen. Such reflective distance is not, by itself, problematic: moments of aesthetic self-objectification can play a legitimate role within a broader process of reflection and self-understanding. However, what begins as curiosity may slip into self-alienation, where the body is apprehended as an aesthetic object rather than as the embodied subject of experience, when this perceptual stance becomes stabilized rather than treated as revisable. This is not merely a generic risk of self-admiration. It is a structural feature of Irvin’s method. Because aesthetic exploration explicitly brackets shared social meanings and evaluative reference points, it offers few internal resources for distinguishing reflective self-attention from the internalization of evaluative gazes shaped by disciplinary norms. Thus, her framework risks reproducing what feminist phenomenologists describe as the internalized split between perceiver and body, the stance of self-surveillance that underlies modern forms of objectification (Bordo, 1993: 2–5, 11–15), not because self-objectification occurs as such, but because it can become the end point rather than a moment within an ongoing, normatively guided process. The concern, therefore, is not detachment as such, but a specific mode of aesthetic self-attention in which reflective distance becomes stabilized, self-authorizing, and insulated from normative correction.

Perceptual detachment also interrupts the cognitive process that gives aesthetic experience structure. As Lakoff (1987, 139-145) observes, perception gains meaning through acts of comparison and classification that allow discernment and learning. To appreciate aesthetic qualities is to locate them within relations of similarity and difference. By rejecting comparison, Irvin’s (2026: 18) framework flattens perception into immediacy. The explorer perceives but does not learn. Without comparative discernment, aesthetic curiosity dissolves into fascination without understanding, a condition where all appearances are equally interesting, yet none are meaningfully distinct. Her rejection of comparison, therefore, deepens the abstraction already built into perceptual detachment and replaces judgment with unanchored attentiveness.

This cognitive flattening feeds back into the phenomenological problem. When perception no longer moves through discernment, the self cannot situate its experience in relation to the world it inhabits. The act of seeing turns inward and loses its dialogical quality. What results is not only a lack of learning but a weakened sense of embodiment. Self-alienation shadows any act of aesthetic self-regard. To see oneself is already to stand partly outside oneself. Yet Irvin’s model renders this distance methodical. By treating perceptual detachment as the defining feature of aesthetic exploration and suspending social meaning, her framework transforms a latent phenomenological risk into a constitutive condition. The very strategy meant to free perception from oppressive norms deprives it of relational grounding and allows curiosity to slide into objectification by another route. This does not imply that self-objectification carries the same moral weight as objectification imposed by others. The latter is coercive and sustained by social hierarchies, whereas the former involves an internalized gaze that mirrors their structure without reproducing their harm. The concern is that Irvin’s framework normalizes this perceptual stance and lets a subtler form of alienation persist within the pursuit of aesthetic freedom.

A more grounded approach recognizes that aesthetic self-understanding arises through perceptual curiosity shaped by socially mediated meaning. When personal perception is insulated from dialogue and reflection, detachment risks sliding into abstraction and isolation, weakening the connection between aesthetic experience and shared aesthetic life.

Aesthetic Isolation and Insularity

When perception loses its relational grounding, aesthetic experience risks withdrawing not only from embodiment but also from the shared interpretive and communal spaces that give it meaning. Irvin (2026: 13, 19) presents aesthetic exploration as a response to the harms of conventional beauty norms. While her focus on personal empowerment is compelling, it risks encouraging aesthetic individualism by separating aesthetic experience from collective frameworks of understanding. Without common reference points or interpretive tools, individuals may struggle to relate their experiences to others, which can lead to aesthetic insularity and weaken the practice’s capacity for collective transformation.

Aesthetic practices always reflect social values and historical traditions. Yet Irvin’s framework offers no clear means of connecting personal exploration with communal engagement, which heightens the risk of isolation and insularity. Orgad and Gill (2022: 159-160) show how confidence culture reframes self-care and empowerment as highly individualized and aestheticized projects. What appears as resistance to exclusionary beauty norms often becomes a form of curated self-display in which personal cultivation is performed publicly but experienced in solitude. This reflects the privatization of feminist and aesthetic self-expression, a process that Irvin’s account may inadvertently reinforce. Irvin’s own aesthetic explorer exemplifies this same pattern, valuing self-curiosity without mechanisms for shared interpretation or communal feedback. In this way, her framework lacks a means of translating private appreciation into shared meaning, leaving aesthetic values untested and prone to reproduce the hierarchies it seeks to challenge (see Bourdieu, 1984). The distance between personal perception and public engagement turns what could be a liberating practice into a solitary one.

This structural tension appears even within Irvin’s own description of the aesthetic explorer. The explorer gains empowerment through perceptual independence rather than shared dialogue. In learning to transcend communal norms, the explorer secures freedom from social judgment but loosens the ties that connect aesthetic experience to collective meaning. Because the practice idealizes perceptual independence, it cannot easily sustain reciprocity. The very conditions that make aesthetic exploration liberating also render it vulnerable to isolation.

This isolation is not evenly distributed. While aesthetic exploration is in principle available to anyone, the capacity to detach from social judgment without incurring significant social cost is unevenly distributed in practice. The power to aestheticize one’s body without penalty presupposes forms of social buffering that protect some bodies more than others from stigma, sanction, or misrecognition. Irvin’s aesthetic explorer, while presented as an accessible figure, is therefore more easily embodied by those buffered by class, profession, or cultural capital. Contemporary body-positivity and self-love cultures illustrate this asymmetry. The point of this comparison is not that aesthetic exploration depends on social media or mirrors body-positivity discourse, but that aesthetic practices organized around individual self-cultivation without reciprocal uptake tend, in public contexts, to be amplified through already legible and socially protected bodies. The most visible advocates of aesthetic empowerment often remain close to dominant beauty ideals and possess the resources needed to curate and circulate their explorations.

When aesthetic exploration is conceived primarily as an individual capacity rather than a shared practice, it thus risks taking on an elitist function, even if it does not require elite status to be undertaken. Those who are able to aestheticize without incurring disproportionate social risk are more likely to have their explorations affirmed, taken up, or granted authority. Even when such agents broaden norms in progressive directions, the resulting transformation remains precarious if it flows from visibility rather than reciprocity. Isolation therefore not only fragments aesthetic experience but also stratifies it, reinforcing hierarchies of access, authority, and uptake within aesthetic life.

To overcome these difficulties, aesthetic exploration must be grounded in both personal experience and collective meaning. Practices of shared reflection can preserve individuality while sustaining reciprocity and coherence. Inclusivity requires a normative framework that joins openness with reflection, allowing aesthetic freedom to remain socially responsive and evaluatively oriented.

Normative Coherence in Aesthetic Exploration

Irvin (2026: 20-23) distinguishes aesthetic exploration from aspirational transformation. She claims that exploration “directs me to appreciate my body’s current affordances rather than to aspire for it to manifest a certain form or set of aesthetic qualities” (Irvin, 2026: 19). In her account, aesthetic engagement concerns perception rather than change. Yet the process she describes involves gradual learning to notice new qualities, to adopt different perspectives, and to modify responses. These are developmental activities that shape perception over time. Callard (2018: 6-8) defines aspiration as the rational acquisition of values that are not yet fully one’s own. Aesthetic exploration fits this account because it trains individuals to view familiar features through newly formed evaluative lenses. A person who learns to see scars, wrinkles, or weight as expressions of vitality participates in value learning rather than simple acceptance. What Irvin presents as exploration is therefore a form of self-cultivation that shifts aspiration from bodily form to perceptual understanding and brings a process of value formation that changes how beauty is perceived without altering the body itself.

This aspirational movement requires ethical direction. Freedom in perception carries responsibility for how it is exercised. Liberal societies protect personal autonomy but also limit it to prevent harm, as Mill (2003) argues. Aesthetic curiosity can deepen self-acceptance, yet without reflection, it may turn toward self-harm or disregard for well-being. Irvin may not endorse such practices, but her framework provides no clear way to separate reflection from excess. A practice that encourages curiosity without ethical guidance risks losing coherence and moral clarity.

This tension extends beyond personal ethics into the social sphere. Irvin (2026: 22-23) suggests that aesthetic exploration can coexist with conventional beauty practices. She notes that these practices may compete but does not explain how the conflict should be navigated. Without such orientation, aesthetic exploration risks falling into opportunism. This instability exposes a deeper problem: the absence of normative coherence. A person may affirm self-acceptance in private but conform to dominant beauty norms in public. This oscillation between resistance and compliance weakens its transformative power. The difficulty lies in the structure of the framework rather than in individual inconsistency. A conception of aesthetic practice that lacks aspirational grounding cannot hold perception, reflection, and conduct together.

Contemporary confidence culture sharpens these tensions. Orgad and Gill (2022: 146) show that it promotes a feminism of choice and authenticity while obscuring structural constraint. The same culture turns empowerment into performance and aligns it with aesthetic conformity. Within this environment, exploration without reflective discipline is easily absorbed by the ideals it aims to resist. To remain transformative, aesthetic practice must join reflection with value learning so that perception develops through ethical consistency rather than convenience. Ethical orientation does not narrow exploration; it preserves its integrity by keeping it responsive to the well-being of self and others. When perception and care move together, exploration becomes a practice that empowers without harm and connects openness with moral depth.

Aesthetic autonomy rests on this unity between aspiration and responsibility. Mackenzie (2014: 42–43) argues that autonomy grows through reflection and shared values rather than isolation. The same holds for aesthetic self-understanding. When the aspiration to see differently aligns with attention to well-being, exploration becomes a disciplined and creative mode of self-cultivation. It balances perception and ethics, allowing aesthetic practice to liberate vision while sustaining integrity in personal and collective life.

Proposal: Aesthetically Conscientious Practice

The following proposal refines but does not exhaust the model of aesthetically conscientious practice (ACP). Because of the limits of this discussion, its scope is intentionally selective. Its purpose is to translate the preceding critique into a positive framework of aesthetic reasoning. It demonstrates how the framework works in principle while leaving broader applications for future study. What follows develops ACP at the level of conceptual architecture. The aim is not to offer a full normative system but to outline a framework whose principles can guide further aesthetic inquiry.

Rather than rejecting aesthetic exploration, ACP is best understood as a reflective form of aesthetic engagement that integrates personal exploration with critical responsiveness to shared cultural standards. It protects aesthetic freedom while keeping judgment normatively grounded, socially inclusive, and attentive to the correction of injustice. ACP grows out of the tensions that appear in Irvin’s model of aesthetic exploration. Like Irvin’s aesthetic exploration, ACP begins from the value of open attentiveness and the deliberate suspension of habitual judgments; its point of departure is not a rejection of aesthetic exploration, but an attempt to extend and stabilize its emancipatory promise through additional normative and relational resources. It preserves this openness and curiosity of exploration but restores the relational and normative grounding required for inclusivity and justice. Rather than shifting opportunistically between personal discovery and conventional beauty norms, ACP treats the two as interacting forces within a reflective process. The aim is not peaceful coexistence but mutual transformation. Individual perception is disciplined by reflection, while inherited norms are re-evaluated through lived experience. The practice functions as a kind of practical wisdom in aesthetic life, one whose coherence depends on careful adjustment between perception, community, and normative responsibility. This adjustment unfolds through three connected principles: balance, inclusivity, and mutual correction. Together, they show how aesthetic freedom and social accountability can work within the same practice.

Balance keeps aesthetic freedom and social meaning in proportion. Drawing on Rawls’s (1999) idea of reflective equilibrium, ACP treats aesthetic judgment as a process in which particular perceptions and shared principles are revised until they cohere. In aesthetic life, this allows individuals to test personal discoveries against communal meanings. When exploration drifts toward self-absorption, reflection restores orientation; when conventions harden, fresh perception opens them to renewal. Balance thus functions as a continuous act of recalibration that prevents detachment and keeps aesthetic experience responsive to shared understanding.

Inclusivity expands aesthetic dialogue by resisting forms of exploration that become elitist when insulated by leisure or cultural privilege. ACP grounds aesthetic discovery in communication and exchange, drawing on Nancy Fraser’s (2003) idea of participatory parity, which requires equal standing in social interaction. In aesthetic life, this involves access to interpretive resources and public visibility so that diverse participants can shape what is valued. By using shared aesthetic languages as points of entry while keeping them open to critique, inclusivity transforms aesthetic attention into a practice of recognition and mutual respect.

Mutual correction secures normative coherence by linking exploratory perception with shared aesthetic vocabularies. Drawing on Dewey’s (1980) view that aesthetic meaning emerges through active experience, ACP treats encounters between perception and convention as opportunities for mutual revision. Aristotle’s (2019) concept of practical wisdom adds an ethical dimension, understood as the cultivated ability to discern when openness deepens understanding and when it loses direction. It governs the rhythm between curiosity and reflection, ensuring that aesthetic judgments remain revisable through dialogue. In this way, freedom is preserved while remaining accountable to responsibility.

ACP works through a recurring rhythm of perception, reflection, dialogue, and recalibration. A person first attends to an aesthetic object or bodily feature with deliberate openness, setting aside habitual judgments in order to notice qualities that established norms overlook. In ACP, however, this moment of aesthetic attention, shared with Irvin’s model, is never treated as self-sufficient or authoritative, but as a provisional stance whose adequacy depends on subsequent reflection, dialogue, and reflective recalibration. At this first stage, however, a crucial distinction is required. This does not mean that considerations of justice or inclusivity determine what may be aesthetically perceived or felt in the first instance. ACP preserves the autonomy of aesthetic experience at the level of first-order appearance: objects may strike an agent as fascinating, unsettling, grotesque, eerie, or beautiful without restriction. Normative reflection enters at a second-order level, governing which aesthetic responses are endorsed, cultivated, stabilized, or publicly expressed as fitting within shared practices. In this sense, ACP does not replace aesthetic judgment with ethical judgment; it offers a model of aesthetic agency under normative constraints, where ethics governs the cultivation of aesthetic practices rather than aesthetic experience itself.

The next step situates perception within broader social meanings and recognizes how history, expectation, and power shape response. Dialogue follows, bringing this perception into conversation with others whose perspectives test and refine it. Finally, perception and principle are recalibrated in light of what survives this exchange. Each repetition of the cycle integrates balance, inclusivity, and mutual correction, allowing agents to decide when to rely on exploration and when to draw on convention. Aesthetic judgment becomes an evolving craft rather than a fixed rule.

The operation of ACP can be seen in a community art workshop where participants create images of their own bodies. At first, many reproduce conventional ideals of proportion and youth. As discussion and reflection continue, they notice what those ideals omit. Wrinkles, scars, and asymmetries begin to appear not as flaws but as expressions of lived reality. Participants learn to balance personal discovery with shared cultural imagery, to include one another’s perspectives, and to correct earlier assumptions through conversation. Their collective vocabulary expands while remaining coherent because every act of creation is connected to reflection on social meaning. The example shows that aesthetic freedom and social responsibility can develop together.

Through this process, ACP challenges aesthetic injustice by transforming rather than preserving inherited standards. Reflection and dialogue weaken the authority of exclusionary norms by exposing them to critique. Appreciation of bodily and cultural difference becomes a contribution to justice rather than an act of indulgence. Recognition is redistributed so that diverse forms of embodiment participate in shaping beauty. In this respect, ACP fulfills what Irvin’s aesthetic exploration sought but could not secure: inclusivity grounded in normative reflection.

The same structure explains how ACP resolves the main limitations in Irvin’s framework, beginning with the paradox of aesthetic detachment. Irvin’s explorer risks self-alienation by treating her body as both subject and object of aesthetic attention. ACP restores continuity between perceiver and world by embedding perception in dialogue and reflective equilibrium, ensuring that detachment remains revisable rather than self-authorizing. When agents test private discoveries against shared meaning, solitary observation becomes collective understanding. The self becomes a participant in a shared inquiry into beauty rather than a spectacle for its own gaze. Detachment is transformed into reflective distance that enriches, rather than denies, embodiment.

The second limitation involves aesthetic isolation and insularity. Irvin’s model prizes individual exploration but offers no path for integrating it into communal life. ACP provides that path through inclusivity and mutual correction. By structuring aesthetic engagement around commitments to equal interpretive standing, it turns personal discovery into a source of collective refinement. Perceptions are expressed, contested, and revised in social contexts where differences of experience expand the boundaries of appreciation. Isolation gives way to an interactive community in which diversity strengthens rather than fragments understanding.

The final limitation concerns normative coherence. Irvin suspends normative guidance to protect perceptual freedom, but this suspension undermines the learning aesthetic life requires. ACP restores coherence without stifling openness. Drawing on Dewey’s view of experience as an ongoing transaction, it treats each encounter as reshaping both perception and norms. Aristotle’s practical wisdom supplies judgment, guiding when curiosity should pause for reflection and when convention should yield to new insight. In this way, ACP turns exploration into a disciplined practice of revision rather than a rejection of standards.

Through these mechanisms, ACP transforms Irvin’s problems into resources. Detachment becomes embodied reflection, isolation becomes participation, and normative suspension becomes reflective coherence. The practice joins personal freedom to collective meaning, achieving equilibrium between aesthetic autonomy and moral accountability. ACP thus advances beyond Irvin’s model while retaining its emancipatory ambition, turning aesthetic exploration into an ongoing conversation between perception and justice.

Conclusion

Irvin’s aesthetic exploration broadens the scope of beauty and resists restrictive norms, yet when it brackets shared evaluative frameworks, it risks detachment, isolation, and incoherence. ACP answers by pairing perceptual openness with reflective, relational grounding. Through balance, inclusivity, and mutual correction, it preserves aesthetic autonomy while governing its cultivation within shared practices, extending Irvin’s emancipatory aims without reducing aesthetics to ethics.

References

Aristotle. (2019). Nicomachean Ethics, transl. Terence Irwin, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company).

Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge).

Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, transl. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

Callard, A. (2018). Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (New York: Oxford University Press).

Dewey, J. (1980). Art as Experience (New York: A Wideview/Perigee Book).

Fraser, N. (2003). ‘Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation’, transl. Joel Galb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke, in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso), 7-109.

Irvin, S. (2026). ‘Choosing Our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice’, Debates in Aesthetics, 20:2, 9-26.

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Mackenzie, C. (2014). ‘The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability’, in Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 33-59.

Mill, J. S. (2003). On Liberty, David Bromwich and George Kateb (eds.), (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Orgad, S. and Gill, R. (2022). Confidence Culture (Durham: Duke University Press).

Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)

Bodily Expression: Toward a Deeper Appreciation of Bodily Beauty

Ian Heckman

Coquitlam College

Philosophical reflection on bodily beauty has been fairly neglected within the aesthetics tradition. How do we understand what it is for someone to be beautiful? This issue warrants more attention, and one of the more prevalent concerns of bodily beauty is that it is a source of great distress and oppression to people whose bodies do not conform to standard ideals of beauty. This paper looks at some recent philosophical work on bodily beauty that seeks to respond to these concerns. It argues that these oppressive problems of bodily beauty are not merely moral or political problems but are also aesthetic problems. Our appreciation of bodily beauty is too shallowly visual. It then argues that an understanding of bodily beauty that sees it as beautiful bodily expression is more likely to overcome these problems than existing solutions.

Bodily Expression: Toward a Deeper Appreciation of Bodily Beauty

Sherri Irvin has sparked some debate in aesthetics recently regarding the nature of, and appreciation of, bodily beauty (Irvin, 2017; Irvin, 2026; Protasi, 2017; Frazier, 2022; Ravasio 2023; Zhao, 2024). At least partially motivated by moral concern, she argues that we should replace our existing practices of the appreciation of human bodies. They cause significant harm to people, especially those who are the most vulnerable in society. Instead, she argues, we need an exploratory approach to bodily beauty. I agree with Irvin that our aesthetic practices around bodily beauty need to shift and change, but I do not think her exploratory approach captures the best way to respond to the moral and political concern of existing human body appreciation. For our bodily beauty practices to address these concerns, we need to see the object of bodily beauty appreciation not just as a visual exploration of a body, but as a body that expresses.

The Problem: Moral and Aesthetic

Bodily beauty presents a case where an aesthetic concern comes in conflict with moral values. Human bodies are objects of aesthetic appreciation. We judge them as beautiful, ugly, graceful, clunky, and powerful. Yet, there are people behind these bodies, people who have desires, hopes, dreams, and emotions. People are not the appearance of their bodies, and yet people often are judged, valued, helped, or outcast by their appearance. To make matters worse, not everyone is expected to conform to the same standards. It is more difficult, if not impossible, for some groups to satisfy beauty standards, such as those with disabilities or minorities, with some groups held to higher standards than others. Bodily beauty standards are used and manipulated to reinforce social and economic hierarchies, leaving some behind, and others ahead. The problem is how commonly people use someone’s physical beauty as a measure of someone’s worth. Irvin’s earlier article provides a comprehensive overview of this problem: from how perceived attractiveness influences the attention and support infants receive to the hiring process (Irvin, 2017).

I support Irvin in thinking that the negative moral and political effects of our aesthetic human bodily practices warrant shifting our aesthetic practices to counteract those effects. However, one might think this is overstepping. This is part of the core of Matteo Ravasio’s objection to Irvin’s view (Ravasio, 2023). Why should we change our beauty practices just because they have terrible moral and political consequences? Moral and political problems should have moral and political solutions. It is not beauty’s fault if people mistakenly conflate bodily beauty with moral worth. So, we should allow bodily beauty to be itself, and if we want to solve the moral problem associated with bodily beauty, we should teach people not to conflate the two. Another option Ravasio presents is that society could redistribute wealth so that people have more opportunities to have access to plastic surgery to “improve” their bodily beauty. Irvin responds to Ravasio with moral considerations: it is unlikely that these interventions will work (Irvin, 2015). I agree with Irvin on this, but I think there are aesthetic considerations for revising our bodily beauty practices as well. To see that there are aesthetic problems with our existing bodily beauty practices, it is important to explain more explicitly what they are.

The typical approach to bodily beauty is to search for singular or multiple ideals by which all people are compared.^[1] This might include straight white teeth, clear unblemished skin, symmetrical well-proportioned limbs, and a certain percentage of body fat. Other possibilities include but are not limited to pale skin, “healthy color”, the thickness, length, texture, and color of one’s hair, eye color, face shape, body hair (or lack thereof), the use of glasses to see, one’s muscle mass, and one’s foot shape. In short, perhaps the (classic white) Barbie doll represents the beauty ideal for women and the (classic white) Ken doll represents the beauty ideal for men. Of course, some might have different ideals than others, but they nonetheless apply their ideals and judge people in relationship to them.

According to this typical view, everyone exists in an ordered relationship with these ideals, and perhaps no one embodies them in their entirety. I do not look like Ken, and if I strove to pursue the Ken beauty ideal, I would probably need a haircut and shave. I would need a full body wax, a tattoo removal, a gym membership, and undergo years of consistent exercise and dieting. Even then, I would probably fall short. I do not have Ken’s jawline, nor do I have his eye color. The list of alterations is long, and on top of this, I would have to fight against aging. To get myself to look like the exact image of Ken, I would have to change so much of how I look, spend significant amounts of money, and spend my entire life constantly maintaining the ideal. This is all true even when I exist as a non-disabled body of the dominant race, culture, and gender. This description is not to draw sympathy for any plight I experience. It is to highlight just how impossible the standard is to attain and maintain. While I am in some way harmed by beauty standards applied to me, the order of magnitude for that harm does not approach the harm that results from beauty standards applied for people of other genders, races, cultures, and disabled bodies. For many of them, their appearance becomes a matter of survival.^[2]

This highlights Irvin’s moral response to Ravasio. The demands of meeting and maintaining bodily beauty standards are exorbitant and impossible to satisfy. But there is an aesthetic problem with these practices too.[3] It seems that appreciating someone’s body as their ability to meet some ideal is limited in its aesthetic value. It sounds almost as if we have found a beauty ruler, and we measure people to see if they live up to the ruler. This type of appreciative practice is inconsistent with pretty much all the literature about aesthetics I know of. Part of the difference between judgements about beauty and judgements about the length of my desk is that there is no ruler. You cannot just apply some objective standard to something and determine its beauty. The appreciation of beauty is less obvious than that. And if this description of typical bodily beauty practices is accurate, then it seems that bodily beauty practices are missing the true beauty of bodies. To see the real beauty there, there needs to be something more than matching bodies to preconceived ideals.

This is true even when there are feelings of beauty attached to the ideals. People might have what they consider a “10” because it provides them with the most feeling of beauty compared to other body types. It’s not just that they match up to the ideal; it’s that the ideal itself, when represented, is beautiful. This is still not right. The manifestation of beautiful ideals is beautiful. But I believe that beauty is more than that. This way of approaching bodily beauty is a particularly shallow form of appreciation. It is akin to finding a particular shade of blue beautiful and enjoying blue objects to the extent that they match that color. I would be remiss to look at a painting that uses many different shades of blue that I do not like and be disappointed because my favoured beautiful shade is not there. I would miss out on the beauty of the painting that would likely be more beautiful than if I saw a canvas that was just painted with that one favoured blue shade. I am missing out on beauty because I am fixated on what I like, and I am not appreciating the beauty of the whole painting. The problem with standard bodily beauty aesthetic practices is that we have an idea of what we find beautiful and judge others on whether they meet our idea of a beauty. We miss out on so much bodily beauty, and this likely means our bodily beauty practices as they are, are impoverished from the perspective of beauty.

Transforming Bodily Beauty Aesthetics

Our existing bodily beauty practices are impoverished. How can we enrich them? Irvin’s view about aesthetic exploration gives us a clue. Looking back at the example of the blue painting, using the aesthetic ideal of a particular shade of blue limits our ability to appreciate the painting. Irvin’s suggestion that we should instead be “…exploring what is before us with interest and curiosity, with the specific aim of seeking out aesthetic qualities that afford positive aesthetic experiences,” (Irvin, 2026: 11) provides guidance as to how to proceed. Appreciating the blue painting as not attaining a particular colour blue ideal is stunted and shallow. While if we take a more searching, explorative approach as Irvin suggests, we might be able to uncover more of the beauty of the blue painting, perhaps consisting in the ways the different hues play with one another, or how they illuminate the subject of the painting. Irvin’s suggestion, if applied to art, enriches the appreciation of art, so it seems that if applied to the body, it will provide a more enriched appreciation of the body. Aesthetic exploration allows us to see and appreciate more aspects of the body than we did before. Things that used to come across as ugly under typical bodily beauty ideals can now afford us significantly more aesthetic enjoyment. As Irvin puts it, regarding her stretch marks, “There was so much to see, so many unique contours, such a richness of texture and shadow. Layered over the ugliness I have been taught to assign to such a disruption of flesh was the direct experience of something fresh and fascinating” (10).

I think we can enrich our aesthetic bodily beauty practices even further than aesthetic exploration. When Irvin speaks about aesthetic exploration, her examples are exclusively visual. She notices how bodies change in terms of how they look from an external perspective. But the body is so much more than that, and our appreciation of our bodies can extend way beyond the visual. The body is not just a painting, nor is it a sculpture, so our practices surrounding our appreciation of our own and others’ bodies should not be limited to the visual domain, or even any specific sensory domain. Our bodies are living, breathing flesh. People exist through their bodies. People smile and cry; they express their longings, sufferings, and joy through their bodies. Bodily expression is part of bodily beauty.

To enrich our practices of bodily beauty further, we can see bodily beauty as expression. On this conception, one’s body being beautiful means that you beautifully embody an expressive ideal. Expressive ideals are ways of being in the world that we emulate. You can be graceful, commanding, authentic, caring, professional, easy-going and casual, cold, warm, friendly, charismatic, cute, among many others. The focus is not so much on someone’s appearance, taken in abstraction from social context. It’s not about how closely one resembles some doll or pictures on social media, but about how one lives and embodies these expressive ideals through their lives. Appreciation of the body consists in the entirety of the body, and a large part of the body is how we use it in our lives.

It is difficult to provide a full theory of what this means. There are two main questions that need to be tackled: (1) what does it mean to embody an expressive ideal? and (2) what does it mean to see an embodied expressive ideal as beautiful? Regarding the first question, the most robust literature on expression typically centers around inanimate art objects (Lipps, 1931; Langer, 1953; Kivy, 1980; Budd, 1985; Davies, 1994; Ridley, 1995; Matravers, 1998; Robinson, 2009; Trivedi, 2017). It is typically asked how can something that is inanimate such as music have animate qualities such as sadness, liveliness, and so on. Resemblance solutions to this problem presuppose that the human body is expressive (Kivy, 1980; Davies, 1994; Trivedi, 2017). According to this solution, music is sad because it resembles the ways in which humans appear. This presupposes that humans are expressive of sadness. Persona theories do not fare any better, as they think expression is contingent on personas we see in the art object (Vermazen, 1986; Levinson, 1996; Robinson, 2009). Thus, people are projected into inanimate objects. It is assumed that people, who are animate, have expressive qualities to them, and then we see their personas in inanimate objects. Arousalist theories are perhaps more promising (Ridley, 1995; Matravers, 1998). Human bodies might be expressive insofar as they cause reactions in viewers. Seeing someone moving around joyfully might make us joyous. Look again at the list of expressive qualities I have in mind: graceful, commanding, authentic, caring, professional, easy-going and casual, cold, warm, friendly, charismatic, and cute. There are reactions we have to the presence of these expressions, but it would be difficult to think that all the expressive qualities, such as authenticity, care, easy-going, and charismatic, are contingent on the arousal of emotions.

The foregoing discussion highlights is that the expressiveness of human bodies is generally not thought to be controversial or in need of explanation. So, at the very least, even though I do not have a theory of how expression is embodied, it does not seem as if it is much of a question. The best I can really do is to say that expressive qualities are embodied via a combination of how we act spontaneously in life, with the different emotions that we experience, and more practiced and imposed, “artificial” expressions, such as when we make fashion and makeup choices to look certain ways.

I have less to say about the question of what makes the embodiment of expressive ideals beautiful. The best I can do without a full theory of beauty is gesture toward artforms where expressive qualities are often present and are thought to be beautiful uncontroversially. Expressive qualities are qualities of fictional characters, and actors take on those qualities and express them to an audience. There can also be expressive qualities of dancers embodying movement. In both acting and dancing, it seems that embodying expressive qualities is thought to be an important part of the beauty and value of those art forms. And if there is beauty in doing so inside the theatre, it is reasonable to expect similar beauty outside of it. Artists try to represent these qualities of character. And we can (and often are) artists of our own lives in this way. I imagine there being an art form of expressive bodily beauty, an art form that reflects what happens in the theatre. After all, techniques that are used in the theatre to modify one’s appearance are also used in daily life (e.g., make-up, fashion, voice tone, gesture, words, etc.).

There is considerably more richness when it comes to bodily beauty when we see it as expression and not just appreciating the body for its more isolated visual appeal. There are so many more aesthetic qualities to enjoy, be dazzled by, and be engrossed with. However, it is important to consider a possible objection: when people typically talk about bodily beauty, they do not mean such a rich thing as bodily expression. They just mean the body’s physical appearance taken in isolation of social context. I do not think that’s true. Sometimes when humans talk about human bodies being beautiful or not, they are talking about just a pure, isolated visual quality. But most of the time, at least when we are not living on social media, we see human bodies in motion, acting and living in their lives. And it seems that, to understand the true beauty of our bodies, we need to appreciate those aspects even more than a snapshot of a picture will tell us.

Enriching Bodily Beauty and Countering Oppression

I believe that a fully enriched practice surrounding bodily beauty will include the appreciation of expression in this way. Of course, part of that includes aesthetic exploration. There will not just be a preconceived notion of aesthetic expression ideals imposed on others; it will be a more open relationship. There are many ways of expressing through our bodies and we are constantly uncovering new ways of doing so. I believe my view to be friendly to Irvin’s, even if I think isolating the body’s visual features is probably not the best way to go when we are aesthetically exploring the beauty of the body.

The question is: have we achieved what we set out to do? Our goal with this discussion is not just to enrich our appreciation of the human body, but to overcome moral failings of human society: bodily beauty is used as a tool to raise some and to oppress others, without real consideration of the person behind the body. Does seeing bodily beauty as expression help us dismantle these problems?

I think that participants in these discussions typically think there are two main ways that reconceiving bodily beauty might help overcome this problem. One way is by building self-confidence and comfort with one’s own body. The typical approach to bodily beauty conflates bodily appearance with personal worth. It can lead to a tortured relationship with one’s own body, because one is judged by how they appear. This is apparent in Irvin’s account because many of her personal examples have to do with her experience of aging. She can either accept the judgement of convention that as she grows older, she’s growing more flawed, or she can explore the new opportunities for aesthetic pleasure that comes from her body changing as she ages. The latter creates a more life-affirming and perhaps empowering relationship between oneself and one’s body. This is also present in Madeline Martin-Seaver’s and Céline Leboeuf’s views (Leboeuf, 2019; Martin-Seaver, 2019). Their approach to bodily beauty is to think of bodily beauty as mainly about what it feels like to be in one’s body. We engage in bodily practices which emphasize our experience in our own bodies, and we can cultivate satisfying relationships with our own bodies that are empowering, rather than alienating or disheartening.[4]

Another way these discussions hope to alleviate the problem of beauty oppression is by helping viewers reconceive of the way in which they engage in their appreciative practice of human bodies. Do not just say, “This is what I find beautiful,” and then see if people fit into that description. You should explore more possibilities. Seeing more beauty and more possibility of beauty in the human body will combat the ways in which society has come to judge people for their appearance.

I think my account utilizes these two strategies. Thinking of the beauty of our body as our expression through our body can help us create a healthier relationship with our own bodies. It’s not just about looking at our flaws in the mirror and trying to cover them up or change them. It’s about learning to embody ourselves more fully and to express ourselves in ways that people around us will appreciate, or that are appropriate to the context. It might even include the kinds of bodily practices that Martin-Seaver and Leboeuf speak about. It’s more difficult to express ourselves beautifully if we have a tortured relationship with our appearance and how we present ourselves. Also, as has already been mentioned, perceivers of bodily beauty now have many more possibilities of beauty to encounter. This view encourages people to get out of their preconceived understandings of bodily beauty and engage in a way that sees beauty as much more than fitting into an ideal.

I think that there is an additional way that my account of bodily beauty helps fend off oppression. It provides people with tools that they can use to resist the oppressive practices of typical bodily beauty. One limitation of these existing strategies is that they do not really tackle the problem that, no matter how much you accept yourself, and no matter how much we try to train people to see people in a more aesthetically worthwhile way, people are still going to be judged for their conformation to chosen beauty ideals. Irvin’s aesthetic exploratory view requires aesthetic education to be able to see the beauty of others. While aesthetic exploration might seem readily accessible to those of us who contemplate beauty and art on a regular basis, it is less common with society at large. One benefit to thinking that bodily beauty is beautiful bodily expression is that it is more transparent and easily grasped by a less aesthetically sensitive viewer, while also giving people the tools to express themselves more beautifully. You can be graceful, commanding, authentic, caring, professional, easy-going and casual, cold, warm, friendly, charismatic, cute, and dramatic. These are qualities people regularly detect in each other without much effort, and they are things we can, as individuals, have some control over through the ways in which we inhabit our bodies.

References

Budd, M. (1985) Music and the Emotions. London: Routledge.

Davies, S. (1994) Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Frazier, C. (2022) Fat Justice: Mitigating Anti-Fat Bias Through Responsible Aesthetic Agency. PhD thesis, University of Oklahoma. <https://shareok.org/handle/11244/335574> accessed 07 July 2025.

Irvin, S. (2017) ‘Resisting Body Oppression: An Aesthetic Approach’, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 3(4), Article 3.

Irvin, S. (2026) ‘Choosing Our Aesthetic Practices Wisely: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Justice’, Debates in Aesthetics, 22(2), 9-26.

Kivy, P. (1980) “The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 17(1), 47-55.

Langer, S. (1953) Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.

Leboeuf, C. (2019) ‘Anatomy of the Thigh Gap’, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 5(1), Article 2.

Levinson, J. (1996) The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lipps, T. (1931) ‘Empathy, Inward Imitation, and Sense Feelings’, in E.F. Carritt (ed.), Philosophies of Beauty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 252-256.

Martin-Seaver, M. (2019) ‘First-Personal Body Aesthetics as Affirmations of Subjectivity’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 17(1), Article 12.

Matravers, D. (1998) Art and Emotion (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Protasi, S. (2017) ‘The Perfect Bikini Body: Can We All Really Have It? Loving Gaze as an Antioppressive Beauty Ideal’, Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 6(2), pp. 93-101.

Ravasio, M. (2023) ‘Engineering Human Beauty’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 101(4), pp. 998-1011.

Ridley, A. (1995) Music, Value, and the Passions Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Robinson, J. (2009) Deeper than Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trivedi, S. (2017) Imagination, Music, and the Emotions: A Philosophical Study. New York: SUNY Press.

Vermazen, Bruce. (1986) “Expression As Expression.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 67(3), pp. 196-224.

Zhao, X. (2024) ‘Engineering Human Beauty with More Caution’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 102(3), pp. 777-782.

^[1]  Protasi (2017) identifies the typical approach as searching for a singular ideal and then sees the multiple ideal approach as better, though not the best way out of oppression. I have my reservation in thinking that there has ever been a singular ideal for a beautiful body. At the minimum, there have been different ideals for different genders, and I suspect that there are many more ideals at play in society at a given time.

^[2]  For a comprehensive overview of these problems, see Irvin’s original article (Irvin, 2017: 3-6).

^[3]  Irvin (2026: 23-24) notes that there are aesthetic reasons for preferring the exploratory approach compared to the typical ones, but not that there’s a problem with the way we are appreciating the body aesthetically.

^[4]  Sara Protasi (2017) thinks that bodily beauty consists in being the proper subject to the loving gaze. I take it that what she thinks is oppressive about bodily beauty ideals is that people are taught that they’re not loveable and not of value, and through understanding that they are in fact loveable, they can overcome this. I take it that this is a similar approach to creating a healthier relationship to ourselves and our bodies.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

SHERRI IRVIN is Presidential Research Professor of Philosophy and Vice President of the American Society for Aesthetics. She is author of Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press, 2022) and editor of Body Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her current work centers on issues at the intersection of aesthetics and justice, both in art and in everyday life. sirvin@ou.edu

ANN J. CAHILL is Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished University Professor at Elon University, where she also serves as the Director of National and International Fellowships. Her research interests lie at the intersection of feminist philosophy and philosophy of the body. She is the author or co-author of three books: Sounding Bodies: Identity, Injustice, and the Voice (2021, co-authored with Christine Hamel), Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (2011), and Rethinking Rape (2001). In addition to her book-length works, she has published over twenty-five peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters, addressing topics such as miscarriage, beautification, pedagogy, and inequality in academia. cahilla@elon.edu

IDIL ÇAKMUR is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and ethics, focusing on the place for conceptual work in our moral lives.

JOSHUA BRECKA is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. He works primarily in epistemology on topics like group knowledge and testimony, and in AI ethics, particularly on issues involving trust and trustworthiness. Joshua also maintains active research interests in the philosophy of religion and in aesthetics, particularly questions about human beauty. j.brecka@mail.utoronto.ca

C. R. MULLER is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marist University. Their research interests include pretense theory and anti-realism about fictional characters, gender- and race-bending in fiction, the role of games, play, and playfulness in helping us engage with the world and ourselves, and various questions related to puppetry. cathleen.muller@marist.edu

KAZI A S M NURUL HUDA is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Zuzana Simoniova Cmelikova Visiting International Scholar in Leadership and Ethics at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, USA. He received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on questions of recognition, epistemic injustice, open-mindedness, trust, legitimacy, and responsibility at the intersection of epistemology, social and political philosophy, and ethics. He is particularly interested in how social and institutional structures shape epistemic and moral life in contemporary societies. His work also extends to leadership and applied ethics, especially in the areas of development, business, environmental, and educational ethics. He regularly contributes to news outlets as part of his engagement as a public philosopher, bringing philosophical perspectives to contemporary social, political, and ethical issues. huda@du.ac.bd

IAN HECKMAN received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of British Columbia in 2022 and has since been teaching at Coquitlam College in the Vancouver area. His research focuses on issues in the performing arts, especially dance, and has published articles in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the British Journal of Aesthetics. He also performs locally as an independent dancer, singer, and choreographer. iantheckman@gmail.com