Caltrops - Motherfucking News - Woman at Atlantic Monthly: some women just aren't beautiful.

Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News

by Zseni 02/14/2007, 6:26pm PST

Asking women to say they’re beautiful is like asking intellectuals to say they’re geniuses. Most know they simply don’t qualify.

Right, but you're not going to go home alone because you're not smart enough.

This article makes good and interesting points which are hidden under the author's peculiar and ingenuous naivete about how beauty myths influence - and darken - women's lives. The weird part is that it's a WOMAN saying "HOLD ON THERE, SISTER, let's not go FEELING GOOD ABOUT OURSELVES just yet." While it's difficult to disagree with her thesis that women shouldn't pretend to be something they're not - beautiful - it is also difficult to confront the extremely homogenous images of beauty presented in the media and feel groovy about it.

The Dove ads do have a very feel-good fairy-fresh niceness to them, but this author, in rejecting them, appears to be accepting wholeheartedly the heavily modified and airbrushed Standard Public Image Of Beauty. Which is sad. And it's not just sad because that shit falls on a woman like a ton of bricks every time she leaves the house; it's sad because homogenous images of desireability live in concert with homogenous desires.

I know a guy who loves unshaven armpits on voluptuous women with boyish faces. We call this sort of thing, crudely, a fetish; but he doesn't "fetishize" any of the details - he can live without any particular one - this is just what he likes the most. Another dude I know digs fat chicks, and he is mortified of talking about that even with his closest friends and family because everyone he mentions it to thinks he has a fat fetish. Like a kind of religion, the grip of Standard Beauty divides the population into believers and apostates: normal humans and fetishists.

You can talk to me all you like about the ancient biological drives that power these supposed idealizations of beauty: women are SUPPOSED to be young, fertile, and have high percentages of ladyjuice. Men are SUPPOSED to be big burly providers and protectors. That's how we're MADE. That's fine if you're willing to accept that in a more catholic way - that there is always something abnormal about departing from ancient drives, and that all traditions and received notions are correct because they are old and innate. But it's not usually like that; it's usually a flippant line delivered by a squat desk jockey on a Blackberry before he drives home and has a TV dinner.

Highly unnatural shit like that happens every second of our collective lives, but for some reason this ancient drives nonsense justifies for most people - and especially people who are not "fetishists" - any sort of retribution against those who attempt to shift standards of beauty and desireability.

I know perfectly well why some ancient drives are more ardently protected than others.

At the same time, there is no sense of making a timely shift in desire to match more current characteristics of survivability: there is no movement towards the woman who looks like she has tremendous earning power - there isn't even a visual representation of such a woman - and no movement towards the man who looks like he won't be a cocksucker. Instead the public representations of beauty get narrower, and more women decide to have families without husbands or boyfriends. The truly cruel joke is that women are still begging for acceptance and attention from people they will, later on, realize that they neither want nor need.

And those men who will later find themselves uselessly alone still won't pony up the acceptance and attention!

So let's not have any more of this heartfelt lionizing of the ancient drives that separate and isolate both genders. There is a yet more ancient drive that is supposed to push us all together to procreate, and it is drowning in this nonsense surrounding the secondary sex characteristics.