Musing on body image drawn out of an unlikely place
A couple of years ago, Jared introduced me to an Internet reviewer of movies and video games who calls himself Spoony. He's pretty funny and has a good eye for evaluating media, so I've come to be a follower of his site, The Spoony Experiment.
For a while, he was dating a woman who helped him produce his videos during the course of their relationship. Spoony projects an air of being a lonely, horny gamer geek as part of his reviewer persona, so I hadn't been aware that he even had a girlfriend for most of the time I've been watching. Apparently a lot of his fans developed a distaste for her, I'm not sure why. I guess some of them started disliking things Spoony began doing in his work, and in typical misogynist Internet troll fashion, they started blaming her influence despite her probably having nothing to do with it, calling her "Yoko," because of course they couldn't just disagree with their hero's artistic choices, it had to be the fault of that harpy in his life. And of course, they starting running down her appearance because you can't criticize a woman without bringing that up. She showed up in one of his videos once, and was immediately met with a flood of comments about how fat and ugly she was. There are not too many images of her on the web these days, I gather because of a purge in response to that outpouring of cruelty. They are no longer together now, but I only just heard about this stomach-turning little saga. Which has gotten me thinking about something tangentially related that I want to talk about now.
I will say that the woman is not beautiful, at least not to my tastes. Coarse features, a little too heavily made up, and kind of a blocky build. I am not bringing this because I am in any way suggesting that they way they treated her was acceptable. It's one thing to hold a private opinion, it's quite another to treat someone like they've committed a trespass against you simply for daring to appear in public when they don't conform to your personal aesthetic. She's not here to decorate your world, assholes.
The reason I bring it up is because, also as part of the lonely, horny gamer geek persona, Spoony spends a decent chunk of time going on about how hot various female characters are in the course of his reviews. And in general, given that these are media figures and artists' renderings, those characters tend to conform to the very mainstream notion of beauty, suggesting that slavish devotion to the ideal that makes so many women feel like they can never possibly measure up. And yet, for as much as he goes on and on about characters that look like that, he was involved, and apparently happy, with a woman who was in no way like that ideal.
The extremity of that contrast has got me thinking, and this is the reason I'm writing this entry. Because of the omnipresence of the tall thin stacked woman with delicate features held up as the beautiful ideal by the media, a lot of women struggle with the notion that this really is the best kind of beauty. This is something I certainly wrestle with myself. I have a hard time letting go of the notion that the current beauty ideal has attained its primacy because that's what people, at least most people, genuinely like best. And that if I don't conform to it myself, then at best someone who wants me is "settling" for being less attracted?
And yet. How often do we encounter people attracted to woman who drool over media figures and yet are in a relationship with a more average-looking woman who they clearly adore? Where does that come from? That's not the message we have driven home all the time.
Jared's take on it was that, at least for him, there are many kinds of beauty that he finds attractive. Yes, Airbrushed Skinny Stacked Celebrity Woman is definitely appealing. But she's just one kind of appealing, perhaps one that he is less likely to encounter in real life and so must be enjoyed in her media context. But she's not better than the other kinds of appealing that women can be. He just enjoys her as well as all the other kinds.
That's it for Jared, anyway. I'm sure it's different for other people. But I do think a fairly universal truth of it is, as much as the media and advertising may suggest to the contrary, I think most real people genuinely don't hold up one notion of beauty as the "best" or "most desirable." And even if a person does find a "more idealized" appearance technically more attractive, appearance becomes genuinely less important in the wake of the more significant qualities of personhood. It may be that we don't actually need to teach each other to stop fixating on unattainable beauty, because we're not actually all that fixated on it. We just need to keep from internalizing the idea that that's actually what others want and expect us to be.
No one in my life thinks I'm not good enough the way I am. So I need to stop being afraid of something that's not there.
It's not a new idea I'm talking about here. It's just a hard one that I, and I think other people as well, have a hard time holding in my head. But there's evidence of it everywhere, if we just believe the evidence of our eyes.
For a while, he was dating a woman who helped him produce his videos during the course of their relationship. Spoony projects an air of being a lonely, horny gamer geek as part of his reviewer persona, so I hadn't been aware that he even had a girlfriend for most of the time I've been watching. Apparently a lot of his fans developed a distaste for her, I'm not sure why. I guess some of them started disliking things Spoony began doing in his work, and in typical misogynist Internet troll fashion, they started blaming her influence despite her probably having nothing to do with it, calling her "Yoko," because of course they couldn't just disagree with their hero's artistic choices, it had to be the fault of that harpy in his life. And of course, they starting running down her appearance because you can't criticize a woman without bringing that up. She showed up in one of his videos once, and was immediately met with a flood of comments about how fat and ugly she was. There are not too many images of her on the web these days, I gather because of a purge in response to that outpouring of cruelty. They are no longer together now, but I only just heard about this stomach-turning little saga. Which has gotten me thinking about something tangentially related that I want to talk about now.
I will say that the woman is not beautiful, at least not to my tastes. Coarse features, a little too heavily made up, and kind of a blocky build. I am not bringing this because I am in any way suggesting that they way they treated her was acceptable. It's one thing to hold a private opinion, it's quite another to treat someone like they've committed a trespass against you simply for daring to appear in public when they don't conform to your personal aesthetic. She's not here to decorate your world, assholes.
The reason I bring it up is because, also as part of the lonely, horny gamer geek persona, Spoony spends a decent chunk of time going on about how hot various female characters are in the course of his reviews. And in general, given that these are media figures and artists' renderings, those characters tend to conform to the very mainstream notion of beauty, suggesting that slavish devotion to the ideal that makes so many women feel like they can never possibly measure up. And yet, for as much as he goes on and on about characters that look like that, he was involved, and apparently happy, with a woman who was in no way like that ideal.
The extremity of that contrast has got me thinking, and this is the reason I'm writing this entry. Because of the omnipresence of the tall thin stacked woman with delicate features held up as the beautiful ideal by the media, a lot of women struggle with the notion that this really is the best kind of beauty. This is something I certainly wrestle with myself. I have a hard time letting go of the notion that the current beauty ideal has attained its primacy because that's what people, at least most people, genuinely like best. And that if I don't conform to it myself, then at best someone who wants me is "settling" for being less attracted?
And yet. How often do we encounter people attracted to woman who drool over media figures and yet are in a relationship with a more average-looking woman who they clearly adore? Where does that come from? That's not the message we have driven home all the time.
Jared's take on it was that, at least for him, there are many kinds of beauty that he finds attractive. Yes, Airbrushed Skinny Stacked Celebrity Woman is definitely appealing. But she's just one kind of appealing, perhaps one that he is less likely to encounter in real life and so must be enjoyed in her media context. But she's not better than the other kinds of appealing that women can be. He just enjoys her as well as all the other kinds.
That's it for Jared, anyway. I'm sure it's different for other people. But I do think a fairly universal truth of it is, as much as the media and advertising may suggest to the contrary, I think most real people genuinely don't hold up one notion of beauty as the "best" or "most desirable." And even if a person does find a "more idealized" appearance technically more attractive, appearance becomes genuinely less important in the wake of the more significant qualities of personhood. It may be that we don't actually need to teach each other to stop fixating on unattainable beauty, because we're not actually all that fixated on it. We just need to keep from internalizing the idea that that's actually what others want and expect us to be.
No one in my life thinks I'm not good enough the way I am. So I need to stop being afraid of something that's not there.
It's not a new idea I'm talking about here. It's just a hard one that I, and I think other people as well, have a hard time holding in my head. But there's evidence of it everywhere, if we just believe the evidence of our eyes.