You're looking at this in terms of your own world and it might be helpful to consider other people's perspectives.
I'm sorry to hear that your image being spread online without your consent makes you uncomfortable. That's totally fair to feel uncomfortable with, and there's a lot that can be said about parents being too comfortable spreading their kids' information and appearance online, and even just people generally being too comfortable spreading the information and appearance of people online.
I can totally understand how that experience makes you uncomfortable when people call young children cute. That experience does not make it abnormal to call young children cute, though. Calling young children cute is normal. You're red flagging massive swathes of people of all stripes.
Similarly, I can totally understand how your own sensitivities make you sensitive to the appearances of others outside the social norm. However, your discomfort does not mean they are doing something immoral that deserves judgment. To get to the point,
The response of these people is often one or both of:
1) You evaluate my appearance in terms of what it does for you, but my appearance isn't about you. It's about me. I don't care that I look less appealing to you. I don't create and choose my experience for the purpose of your approval, I want to look and feel how I want to for my own sake.
and:
2) I am glad that my appearance makes you uninterested in me. I do not want to spend time around people who are hostile to how I choose my own appearance. If that is how you judge me, I don't want to be your friend anyway.
__
In general, it seems like you're mixing up your emotional reactions and judgments. These things make you uncomfortable, which is fair, feel how you like, I would never try to control that or take that away from you. But feelings aren't necessarily correct signs that people are behaving improperly or abnormally.
This sort of mixup creates a mental health challenge. You want the negative feelings to go away so that you feel better, which seems fair enough. But when we say that we ought not to have these feelings, that the world and other people should change in our favor so that we don't have to deal with them, we deny ourselves emotional agency to take charge of our own feelings ourselves.
Sure, we can't control the feelings we have – that's not what taking charge means, some idea of deciding our feelings. (Trust me, I've tried!) But we can sit with our feelings a bit, understand them more, let them exist for some time, and let them pass. We can take our own control of the situation, and how we respond to and contextualize our feelings, despite not taking control of the feelings themselves. This process strengthens us and makes us more emotionally resilient, ready to respond next to the next situation that makes us feel negatively.
On that front, I encourage you to ask what harm people are causing when they do something you dislike. If that harm is "they make me feel negatively," you can ask why you feel negatively, and if that feeling is something you're justified in imposing on other people's behavior or judging them for, or if it's something you'd just personally rather not have to deal with. And if it's something you'd personally rather not have to deal with, maybe you can resolve the situation yourself, which may entail some discomfort in the moment as part of life, but which will help you be stronger, more empathetic, and more gentle in the long run. Maybe there are even third options there's another way around the situation. For example, if someone you know repeatedly makes you uncomfortable by calling babies cute, you could ask them to not, not because doing so is immoral, but as a favor because you have this past situation and this present reaction. And they might agree, and that'd be mighty kind of them, and strengthen your relationship from a ground of mutual even footing and choice.
__
Something I would be careful of is systemic bias. As someone who comes from white and Caribbean culture, I say this sincerely with full genuineness and full neutrality and no hostility, your post is extremely white culture-coded. I don't know how familiar you are with island culture, or spanish and black culture more broadly, but at least for mine, we're generally much more socially assertive and hands-on than expectation for white culture. We will call babies and children cute and more all the time, not because we value children any less, but that's just how we express our joy and love and familial bond and happy, positive energy to the children and their parents. By judging a less distanced form of interaction, you may -accidentally- be privileging a white culture social dynamic over a minority culture social dynamic.
Similarly, what is a socially "appropriate" way to appear is often arbitrary and hierarchical. There is no particular rational justification that male breasts are totally okay to have exposed in various situations, but exposing female breasts is bad!!!! Many normal ways we dress today, especially for women, would be utterly scandalous and baffling for past versions of our own cultures. Societal appearance dynamics are often hierarchical, including patriarchal, with men being given more freedom and women being given more restrictions for no particular rational basis.
I lastly want to note that these sorts of mental hiccups are a normal part of life. And I don't want to pretend I'm above the fray either. (I actually suffer from the reverse, where I suppress my emotional reactions too much in the interest of making as perfectly fair judgments as I can. That direction of excess is not healthy either!!!)
Cheers.
I'm sorry to hear that your image being spread online without your consent makes you uncomfortable. That's totally fair to feel uncomfortable with, and there's a lot that can be said about parents being too comfortable spreading their kids' information and appearance online, and even just people generally being too comfortable spreading the information and appearance of people online.
I can totally understand how that experience makes you uncomfortable when people call young children cute. That experience does not make it abnormal to call young children cute, though. Calling young children cute is normal. You're red flagging massive swathes of people of all stripes.
Similarly, I can totally understand how your own sensitivities make you sensitive to the appearances of others outside the social norm. However, your discomfort does not mean they are doing something immoral that deserves judgment. To get to the point,
The response of these people is often one or both of:
1) You evaluate my appearance in terms of what it does for you, but my appearance isn't about you. It's about me. I don't care that I look less appealing to you. I don't create and choose my experience for the purpose of your approval, I want to look and feel how I want to for my own sake.
and:
2) I am glad that my appearance makes you uninterested in me. I do not want to spend time around people who are hostile to how I choose my own appearance. If that is how you judge me, I don't want to be your friend anyway.
__
In general, it seems like you're mixing up your emotional reactions and judgments. These things make you uncomfortable, which is fair, feel how you like, I would never try to control that or take that away from you. But feelings aren't necessarily correct signs that people are behaving improperly or abnormally.
This sort of mixup creates a mental health challenge. You want the negative feelings to go away so that you feel better, which seems fair enough. But when we say that we ought not to have these feelings, that the world and other people should change in our favor so that we don't have to deal with them, we deny ourselves emotional agency to take charge of our own feelings ourselves.
Sure, we can't control the feelings we have – that's not what taking charge means, some idea of deciding our feelings. (Trust me, I've tried!) But we can sit with our feelings a bit, understand them more, let them exist for some time, and let them pass. We can take our own control of the situation, and how we respond to and contextualize our feelings, despite not taking control of the feelings themselves. This process strengthens us and makes us more emotionally resilient, ready to respond next to the next situation that makes us feel negatively.
On that front, I encourage you to ask what harm people are causing when they do something you dislike. If that harm is "they make me feel negatively," you can ask why you feel negatively, and if that feeling is something you're justified in imposing on other people's behavior or judging them for, or if it's something you'd just personally rather not have to deal with. And if it's something you'd personally rather not have to deal with, maybe you can resolve the situation yourself, which may entail some discomfort in the moment as part of life, but which will help you be stronger, more empathetic, and more gentle in the long run. Maybe there are even third options there's another way around the situation. For example, if someone you know repeatedly makes you uncomfortable by calling babies cute, you could ask them to not, not because doing so is immoral, but as a favor because you have this past situation and this present reaction. And they might agree, and that'd be mighty kind of them, and strengthen your relationship from a ground of mutual even footing and choice.
__
Something I would be careful of is systemic bias. As someone who comes from white and Caribbean culture, I say this sincerely with full genuineness and full neutrality and no hostility, your post is extremely white culture-coded. I don't know how familiar you are with island culture, or spanish and black culture more broadly, but at least for mine, we're generally much more socially assertive and hands-on than expectation for white culture. We will call babies and children cute and more all the time, not because we value children any less, but that's just how we express our joy and love and familial bond and happy, positive energy to the children and their parents. By judging a less distanced form of interaction, you may -accidentally- be privileging a white culture social dynamic over a minority culture social dynamic.
Similarly, what is a socially "appropriate" way to appear is often arbitrary and hierarchical. There is no particular rational justification that male breasts are totally okay to have exposed in various situations, but exposing female breasts is bad!!!! Many normal ways we dress today, especially for women, would be utterly scandalous and baffling for past versions of our own cultures. Societal appearance dynamics are often hierarchical, including patriarchal, with men being given more freedom and women being given more restrictions for no particular rational basis.
I lastly want to note that these sorts of mental hiccups are a normal part of life. And I don't want to pretend I'm above the fray either. (I actually suffer from the reverse, where I suppress my emotional reactions too much in the interest of making as perfectly fair judgments as I can. That direction of excess is not healthy either!!!)
Cheers.
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