Status conventions can be deadly for those who conform to them

Evidence

Despite a basis in mutual expectations and collectivities, conventions are not necessarily fair or democratic. If normal status depends on adhering to tacit rules, there are always political dimensions to who starts a convention and who maintains it. “Norms of partiality” benefit one group over another. Majorities commonly promote social norms that advantage themselves over minorities, and in internalizing these biased conventions, even the disadvantaged parties may come to accept them. The feminist critique of women’s beauty standards, writes the sociologist Karen Callaghan, posits that “the woman who strives to achieve an aesthetic idea does so not for self-actualization or accomplishment, but for masculine approval.” These standards have not just been oppressive but deadly. In the nineteenth century, stiff crinoline petticoats puffed out skirts so far that the cheap materials often brushed against open flames and caught fire. This arbitrary convention of dress caused three thousand women to be burned alive. Meanwhile, men wore wool suits both flameproof and close to the body. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 139

Categorization

• CANDY: Crinoline petticoats burning three thousand women alive while men wore flameproof wool is a striking, tweetable trivia nugget.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing interest in how conformity signals and embodied status conventions exert real physical costs, and echoes the dress-norms article on immodesty as coded class signaling. — connects to: Everyday conventions carry status value that yields social rewards or penalties — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 153; Absences of conventions themselves act as status signals — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 203; Status-seeking drives humans to comply with conventions that then reshape perception. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 123 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: deadly fashion conventions as evidence that status-seeking overrides even survival instinct — a piece on the body as site of conformity risk.

Broader Connections

• Fashion conventions can be deadly for those they disadvantage #exemplifies (0.90) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 139
• Status-seeking drives humans to comply with conventions that then reshape perception. #expands (0.88) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 123
• Aspirants to higher status distinguish themselves via group-approved performance to avoid sanctions for norm-breaking #expands (0.82) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 170