I knew I'd have to write something actually thoughtful and serious about this post that Jill wrote the other day about getting called names like "fat" and "ugly" by a bunch of morons on the internet who are afraid of feminists. This is a sticky issue because there's a surprising number of complex and distressing feelings get teased out when people start talking about the delicate issue of someone's appearance and what it means to judge them by it. Add to the whole soup that a large part of feminism is critiquing the way that women's appearance is considered the most important thing about us, alongside our ability to be compliant, in a patriarchal society and you have a huge can of worms that I for one am often wary to open.
Well, Jill wrote a follow-up post today clarifying that it wasn't just the name-calling that wigged her out--a lot of the comments were creepy as hell, with students at her school talking about sighting her and making jokes about raping her, which puts this incident into a different stratosphere from your run-of-the-mill running around and saying that feminists are bitter because we are ugly and/or can't get a man. The rape jokes are of a different degree of awful, but I think it's safe to say that those comments come from the same impulse that causes people threatened by feminism to make assertions that feminists are ugly/bitter/lonely--it's a desire to retaliate against people who speak out against the injustice of male dominance by telling them, in so many words, that as far as you're concerned women exist only as sex toys for men. It's just the amount of overt hostility that varies from comment to comment.
Initially when Jill posted about this, a lot of us immediately responded by saying that the assertions that she's ugly simply aren't true. This response was critiqued, and reasonably so, by others who point out by making it a fight over whether or not Jill or anyone else is pretty, we're feeding into the assumption that the only thing that matters is a woman's looks. If Jill wasn't conventionally attractive, attacks on her looks still would be baseless since they aren't addressing her actual arguments.
Still, in defense of those of us whose first inclination is to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to call Jill ugly, I think the thought process is a little more complex than "Yes she is, no she isn't!" For a lot of us, it's an attempt to dismantle the insinuations behind the insult with one blow. I spent a lot of time wringing my hands over this when I made the move to Pandagon because with the larger audience came a shitload of abuse aimed in my direction, most of it sexually aggressive, and of course the standard issue Amanda-is-fat-and-ugly blather all over this board and others. At the time, I didn't have a Flickr account and I think most people had no clue what I look like and my inclination at the time was to try to shut down this argument by making my image available so at least the bloviaters wouldn't be spreading rumors in a vaccum. Cooler heads than mine talked me out of it.
What I noticed about my feelings during that whole dust-up was that I had two distinct thoughts going on at once--on one hand, I had the base level desire not to have people think that I'm unattractive. (I'll get back to this feeling in a minute.) On the other hand, I wanted to cut off the Limbaugh-esque argument that feminism only exists to benefit "ugly" women at its knees. Calling feminists ugly is actually shorthand for a longer thought process that goes something like, "Women's most important quality is their looks, so good-looking women have everything they could want. The only reason a woman could be dissatisfied is if she isn't good-looking, and so feminism is the last resort of women in denial that they are failures as women." That argument falls apart if you show that conventionally attractive women also feel like second class citizens, and that being eligible for being a well-regarded sex object doesn't mean that you aren't still being treated just as a sex object. Or it should in theory--as the cooler heads that stopped me from trying to retaliate with my picture months ago pointed out to me, this assertion that feminism is an expression of dissatisfaction at being a bad sex object is basically faith-based anyway--the people making it are just being petulant brats, you can't actually argue with them, since most are impervious to reason.
So, I'm not saying the tactic to argue against the "feminists are ugly" statement by showing pictures of pretty feminists is the best tactic available, but I do think there is a logic to it, and people who do it really don't intend, most of the time, to imply that not being conventionally attractive means that you're less worthy or that your arguments don't hold water. We don't intend it, but I think it comes across that way and as such, I'm going to cautiously agree with the critics that the, "She is too pretty!" retort shouldn't be used, or only in very limited circumstances.
I'm troubled, however, by feeling like there's something seriously wrong with having the more base reaction when someone calls you ugly, which is having your feelings hurt because you've been insulted. This is where it gets really complicated for me and I chatted with Lauren some the other night about it, because being called "ugly" is an insult that works on two levels, especially when wielded against women. On one hand, it's shorthand for, "You are a complete failure as a woman by patriarchal standards." But there's also just the garden variety use of the word, when it means, "I think you're unattractive." I'm going to go out on a limb and say in the latter case, it's pretty much understandable by people get hurt by that--the desire to liked and be found attractive isn't really a bad one, unless you want to argue that vanity is a really bad thing, in which case I hope you're prepared to argue that one shouldn't want to be considered witty, smart, pleasant or any other quality that is generally perceived as likeable.
That's what stuck with me when I read Lauren's comment in the original thread.
We don’t put our pictures up to be considered fuckable, we put our pictures up so that people can put a face to our writing. I appreciate this as a reader of many blogs and I’m sure others feel the same. While that does leave us open to be judged on our appearances, I never expected to be commented upon in such a wide sphere.
That gave me one of Hugo's "yes, no, and maybe" moments for sure. (As an aside, Hugo blogged this whole thing well. Highly recommended.) I put my picture up to put a face to my writing, which, as a lot of people at Hugo's place note, is a useful thing to do. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't care at all if people think I'm attractive or not. But definitely, when I think about it, that's not the main motivation or else I'd probably get a some modeling shot and put that up instead of a bunch of snapshots. Wanting people to consider you attractive when you present yourself honestly seems okay to me--not a super-honorable desire, but not really a bad one, either, just human.
But that's where the anxieties lay--how can you tell the difference between the authentic desire to be liked, the authentic pleasure people can take in each other's various qualities, including how they look, when we live in a culture where all those things are blown way out of proportion and male entitlement is such that any one man is free to reduce any woman to a sex object and declare her fit or not? To add to the layers of complication, this male privilege isn't always grabbed at by making crude insults--witness this article where Joel Stein dedicates his entire column to bitch-slapping Maureen Dowd, mostly because he's mad that she did a better job than he did impressing a singer they both like. Stein's way too clever to pull this stunt by calling her un-fuckable. Instead, he pulls a wittier version of Allah's "the pretty girls are always crazy" comment and while ostensibly complimenting her looks is actually complaining that she isn't being a good woman and immediately complying to his whiny demands that she pretend that it's okay that he mock her sex life because he's jealous of her writing.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Most of the time it's pretty easy to tell the difference between routine admiration or not admiration of someone's appearance and when these compliments or insults are being used to assert male dominance. But not always, like when people call on patriarchal beauty standards to "prove" someone is pretty or not, even when those people are well-meaning as most of the people telling Jill that the jokes about her looks are demonstrably untrue. And I just wrote a long, meandering blog post and I'm realizing that I may not be even an inch closer to figuring out what I really think about the subject.
Things are too quiet around here–UPDATED
from Amanda @ Pandagon 04 Jan 2006 9:54 pm
