MAP Forum

If you scroll through TikTok, flick through a glossy magazine, or sit down to watch a blockbuster movie, the women presented as “beautiful” tend to look eerily similar. They are often white or light-skinned, slim, smooth-skinned, and symmetrical. Their eyes appear large, their noses small, their lips carefully shaped. Most importantly, they look young — sometimes so young that they verge on childlike.

We often treat beauty as if it were natural, a universal standard. But beauty ideals are not timeless truths. They are shaped by history, culture, and power. And when we trace today’s dominant beauty standards back to their origins, the story that emerges is deeply unsettling. They were not created in a vacuum but were engineered through slavery, colonialism, racism, and capitalism. At the same time, these ideals were infused with a fixation on innocence and youth that blurs uncomfortably into paedophilic desire.

Bookshelf wrote: Fri Oct 03, 2025 2:07 pm "It's pedophilia and white supremacy to find these adult women attractive" - modern west for some reason

I didn’t read it in a headline. I didn’t overhear it through gossip. I found out through a text message: my ex-husband is now expecting a child with a 16-year-old girl.

It felt like a punch to the stomach. I froze. Disbelief turned into rage, nausea, grief. The woman pregnant with his child is not a peer, not even close. She’s a minor. She is a child. I don’t want to soften it with euphemisms: this is grooming, this is abuse, this is predatory behaviour.