Our first instinct, when someone claims we fangirls are fat and ugly (which must be the only reason why we protest comics art and writing, not because we have intellectual and social issues), is to establish our non-fat, non-ugly credentials. It's so understandable. We are brainwashed all our lives to perceive our value in terms of a fluctuating value for thinness in our society. It's rubbed in our faces by the media and by our own families, by parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who ask if we aren't getting kinda big; maybe we should exercise more; haven't we gained a lot of weight. I've had friends reduced to nightly tears as the adults in their lives hound them about what they eat, and as their peers ranks out on them for what they weigh. Girls weight-check each other constantly, and boys are allowed to make remarks about what girls weigh without anyone calling them on it. I've had total strangers yell at me from passing cars to insult my weight.
Is it any wonder that we immediate rush to establish our slender credentials, immediately followed by our attractiveness credentials? Are we really so far from the world in which an unattractive woman was a corner woman, an attic woman, a nursery woman, a useless woman? Women who doubt their looks (and their parents) make plastic surgeons wealthy. No wonder we all jump like frogs touched with wires through which current is being run.
We're having a helluva time breaking this conditioning. Maybe we need to start breaking its hold over us. Maybe we need to stop jumping to the defense of our own looks, and start telling ourselves, "I'm more than what's outside. I'm not defined by a cruel social demand for my body and face."
And there is a still more vicious subtext to the idea that women who protect anything to do with "attractive women" are ugly and fat.
It is that ugly and/or unattractive women have no right to an opinion.
None. They probably don't even have a right to exist. But no one wants to hear from them unless they're slender and pretty.
WHAT?
Since when is any woman barred from the right to express an opinion? Once we start qualifying what kind of woman has the right to express herself, for any reason, don't we become as oppressive as the society we are trying to change?
Looks don't matter. Weight doesn't matter. It's the voice that matters.
We need to stand up for each other, for all of us. Skinny, fat, attractive, nondescript, downright ugly. We need to break this idea that women are valued first for their looks, then for what's between their ears. And we need to get in the faces of those who would cause us to tell each other, even inadvertently, "I'm prettier than you."
That's my thinkage. I may not be good at the practice, but I'd like to get better at it, be more aware.
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Even if it is only their perceptions of themselves.
There's a quote from Queen Rania that I love and it's the reason that I got into teaching - If you educate a girl, you educate the future...one of the most important things that you can do for a girl is to empower her... - surely that can be applied here.
If you teach someone to dispell societies perceptions of what they're supposed to look like and the limitations that society places on them, through their weight and looks and empower them with a saying that acts as a shield against people's comments and their own thoughts, then you are effecting the next generation of girls/women. You are changing how they think and view themselves.
A generations issues are passed down to the next generation. Working to change something like that, might not change our own generation, but it might change the generation to come.
I am not going to claim that attractiveness doesn't matter. Attractiveness does matter. Attractiveness has a huge affect on our lives, on the way people treat us, on the assumptions people make about us, and therefore on who we are, how we think, and what we do. I will not say it should be that way. I will not say that the results are fair.
What I will say - what I have been saying good and loud over at my own LJ, and what I have said consistently over the years in a variety of fora - is that attractiveness or the lack thereof should not be the criteria on which we choose to hear people or not hear them.
I will also say that I am darn sick of having to provide my bona fides in terms of attractiveness before I say what I think. This is the internet fer gossake. For all you know, I'm Richard Nixon. I'd prefer it if we kept it that way. It is my experience that when anyone prefaces their opinion with statements about their attractiveness ("I am 5'15", I weigh 72 lbs., and maybe I'm no judge, but all six of my boyfriends tell me I'm nice looking...") the surrounding discussion becomes a referendum on whether they actually qualify. Are they really skinny and attractive? Are they skinny and attractive enough that we can take them seriously when they say that they know tentacle porn when they see it and they're not just objecting because those girls are prettier than they are?
The net has the potential to be a space where we can all present ourselves to each other on the basis of our ideas, without having to deal with the innumerable biases inherent in face-to-face contact. I would so very much enjoy debating on that basis that I'm sorry I don't get to do it more often.
I think in the case of a lot of guys they are never going to listen, but that doesn't mean we should give up and abandon the field. We are entitled to our opinion, and we have the right to speak it, regardless of whether the other person listens or not. Behind the bigmouth bloggers and naysayers on message boards are dozens of lurkers who do listen and who do consider your points.
>> It's not fair that they won't listen to women about women's issues but for the type of people willing to dismiss a woman's opinion for imagined ugliness, it's often the case.<<
The world is full of fatheads. That's no reason to give everything to them.
>> Its why Dr. $teve is such an asset to g-w.org. <<
And it's wonderful to have guys like him, but it's also vital that we speak for ourselves, even if the only person who benefits is the one who is speaking. We have to stand up for ourselves and for each other, if only so we feel we aren't living the life of the doormat, for these idiots to wipe their feet on.
You owe it to yourself to speak up, because every time you don't, your spirit registers that defeat. Even if you don't convince the person you argue with, at least you know you tried. You didn't let that person win by default, and you may well convince the lurkers who don't speak.
We can't rely on guys, no matter how good, to fight our battles.
1. Making specific claims to attractiveness gives credence to the belief that the unattractive don't matter.
2. Making specific claims to attractiveness opens us to accusations that we're vain, shallow, and/or not as pretty as we think we are.
I completely understand the temptation to step in and lay claim to enough beauty to have standing to kick ass, but it is my experience that making this claim is not a functional strategy. We need a better one.
Pointing out that the overweight and unattractive have perfectly valid opinions may not work either, but at least we don't wind up accidentally defending the enemy line when we do it.
It's also important to keep in mind that insults of this nature are a conversational tactic used by people who do not want to examine their beliefs and assumptions, and who will throw tantrums if you try to make them. Before you try too hard with these folks, you need to put some thought into whether the effort is going to be worthwhile.
Definitely not--it's a statement of a basic human right, one that obviously has to be brought up more often, since too many people appear to have forgotten it!
I don't give a rat's ass about them, and they can whine all they want. I do want to reach the people who hear them, especially the ones who are hurt by them, and let them see what idiotic arguments these clowns are putting forward. If I can get the clowns to put forward even more idiotic arguments to try and defend the indefensible, so much the better, from where I sit.
When you expose an asshole, everyone sees how truly ugly it is (unless you love assholes, of course).