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Title : The Ugly Truth
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The Ugly Truth
I don’t think there’s a woman alive who hasn’t heard a man comment on her appearance—negatively or positively—in an unsolicited and/or irrelevant way.I want to talk about this for a minute, NOT to fish for validation, and NOT to debate the merits of whether these men are right or wrong in any particular instance, but simply to observe the raw power of physical insults AND compliments as a rhetorical device that men frequently deploy when debating women on topics that have nothing to do with their physical appearance.
I encounter this frequently in my blog-life, but sometimes these comments bother me, and for whatever reason one really got under my skin today. An emotional button gets pushed. No matter how much you rationalize it away, it touches something deep and ancient, and it makes you cry, which of course is the point.
From the minute a girl is conscious of her girlhood and her sexuality, society sets out a goal for her that she learns to strive for: to be physically attractive to men. Whatever that means in whatever culture, and whatever it takes, THAT is the mission with which she is tasked. It’s reinforced constantly and relentlessly, all day every day, through messages explicit and implicit: male approval or disapproval of a woman’s looks is what will make or break her in This Life.
Every tiny decision a woman makes in her daily existence—what she eats, what she wears, how she smells—all are a means to this end, and there is always a product you can buy or a procedure you can get to help you achieve it. There are lucrative industries dependent on the never-attainable, always just-out-of-reach end goal of female physical perfection as seen through the male gaze.
Of course, many women grow up and reject this model, or try to. But my point is that this is the baseline model. It takes an ENORMOUS amount of work, effort, and conscious energy to discard it and redefine it for yourself in a psychologically and physically healthy way.
So when you're 40 years old and think you’ve succeeded at discarding it, it’s frustrating when you realize you never fully will.
It doesn’t matter that the person is a total stranger. It doesn’t matter if what they are saying about your looks is “true” or “not true.” As far as I’m concerned, it’s just as bad to be flattered as it is to be insulted, because both are a referendum on something that has nothing to do with the substance of what the woman is saying.
The point is that the physical appearance of the woman who is speaking or writing is always at issue. Always.
It doesn’t matter that the person is a total stranger. It doesn’t matter if what they are saying about your looks is “true” or “not true.” As far as I’m concerned, it’s just as bad to be flattered as it is to be insulted, because both are a referendum on something that has nothing to do with the substance of what the woman is saying.
The point is that the physical appearance of the woman who is speaking or writing is always at issue. Always.
It is thrust into the debate, even when the debate has nothing to do with it. A woman’s physical appearance is her currency and stock-in-trade. If you don’t play this game, you don’t win this game, but if you play the game you just perpetuate it, and you can never win it anyway.
It’s a Catch 22 that transcends politics or substance. People do it to Hillary Clinton. They do it to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. They do it to Tomi Lahren and Lauren Duca. It doesn’t matter what political views are being expressed: defenders and detractors alike immediately resort to the woman’s appearance.
I’ve seen men—and plenty of women, who are actually men’s greatest allies in the fight to make women’s faces and bodies the continued focal point of every debate—say that Tomi Lahren looks like a meth head and that Sarah Huckabee Sanders looks like a chubby soccer mom and that Ann Coulter looks like a “transvestite” (is that even a word anymore?)
Anyway, who fucking cares? You can disagree with literally everything that comes out of their mouths (and I do) and you can do it without calling them fat soccer moms and meth heads.
And yes, granted. Women, including me, call Donald Trump orange and Jeff Sessions an elf and so on. And that isn’t nice or kind or good or particularly useful either. But it’s also collateral to the substance of whatever they and other men are saying, and it’s a last resort, because these men have done horrible, unpunished things to women and/or literally have the power to kill people and it feels like the only weapon available. It’s not now and never has been the central focal point of the discourse.
My point is this: men can reliably go through life without every transaction and interaction and word they write or say automatically becoming an immediate referendum on their face and body.
Make of that what you will. Call it male privilege or whatever you want to call it, but that’s the reality and the cost of having an opinion while female.
It’s a Catch 22 that transcends politics or substance. People do it to Hillary Clinton. They do it to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. They do it to Tomi Lahren and Lauren Duca. It doesn’t matter what political views are being expressed: defenders and detractors alike immediately resort to the woman’s appearance.
I’ve seen men—and plenty of women, who are actually men’s greatest allies in the fight to make women’s faces and bodies the continued focal point of every debate—say that Tomi Lahren looks like a meth head and that Sarah Huckabee Sanders looks like a chubby soccer mom and that Ann Coulter looks like a “transvestite” (is that even a word anymore?)
Anyway, who fucking cares? You can disagree with literally everything that comes out of their mouths (and I do) and you can do it without calling them fat soccer moms and meth heads.
And yes, granted. Women, including me, call Donald Trump orange and Jeff Sessions an elf and so on. And that isn’t nice or kind or good or particularly useful either. But it’s also collateral to the substance of whatever they and other men are saying, and it’s a last resort, because these men have done horrible, unpunished things to women and/or literally have the power to kill people and it feels like the only weapon available. It’s not now and never has been the central focal point of the discourse.
My point is this: men can reliably go through life without every transaction and interaction and word they write or say automatically becoming an immediate referendum on their face and body.
Make of that what you will. Call it male privilege or whatever you want to call it, but that’s the reality and the cost of having an opinion while female.
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