In her Fat, Ugly and Pissed post, Carla/seeksadventure makes some points that deeply discomfited me. Please understand, I'm not trying to point fingers at anyone except myself, and those people who say lousy things. I'm thinking on keyboard here, and ask y'all to think with me, not believe I'm accusing anyone here.

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.