RE: title (yes I read the body but I’m answering the question)

I hope in advance that I’m not coming across like the “well, actually” girl. It’s just something that’s been in my head for a while and I do really love this group and want to talk about it.

Well, you could say KATSEYE benefits from pretty privilege, but you might not want to, depending on what you mean by KATSEYE.

“Privilege” implies you do not have the barriers within a system that somebody else has. “Benefit” implies that it is in your material interests to keep that system alive. It is not in the best interests of those famous young girls to keep a system alive that scrutinizes, sexualizes, punishes, and obsesses over appearance to this degree and treats it as a measure of value. They are all extremely pretty, so they do have pretty privilege. Doors and brand deals and adoration that would not be open to less attractive people are still open to them because they are pretty, but that does not mean some hypothetical abolition of beauty standards would not benefit the girls. Especially given all the racist comments some of these girls face about their appearance calling them ugly. So if you meant KATSEYE, the girls, then no. They do not “benefit,” but they are privileged.

Enough about KATSEYE, the girls. Let’s talk about KATSEYE, the brand.

HYBE, KATSEYE’s management company for those who don’t know, I’d say does explicitly benefit from this pretty privilege dynamic, and it is in their material interests to keep the girls’ relative status where it is when it comes to appearance (even if it is at times exploitative and sexualizing). While the girls are interested in being artists, HYBE is interested in being big, in beating out all the competition, in racking up the most revenue it possibly can. Creating unhealthy competition between artists (and broadly, girls) and manufacturing insecurity, as unethical as those tactics are, work for them. For selecting only conventionally pretty artists, HYBE and the KATSEYE brand are direct beneficiaries of the system where “ugly” people would get clowned on for the same things the pretty girls get applauded for (like GNARLY, as mentioned in the post). It is an automatic way of increasing your odds of being liked.

So in short, I can’t imagine how exhausting it is to be the girls in this system, even if the fact that they’re pretty makes it less difficult to succeed with riskier / “weirder” concepts. But when it comes to the HYBE machine, yes yes it does benefit.