Re: News Flash! Middle Class White Guys Not Sole Arbiters of Attractiveness!

[saerwen_13]

...I can't believe this never got posted. :( I can't figure out why it's not up, and now I have to rewrite it...

Link.

Comments

[poisonarrows]

What a strange rant essay. I mean, I have a lot of feminist notions, but sometimes I feel as though people just go way too far with their finger-pointing. You can find someone attractive without wanting to have sex with her/him, and you can be sexually attracted to someone without all of these nonsensical gendered implications. And, as a fatty, I wouldn't necessarily want someone to be like, "Hell yeah, you're fat, but that turns me on!" (way to make it about you, bud!) but there's no issue with saying, "I'm attracted to you, regardless of your size/shape." I don't have evidence to back it up, but I think the latter is much more common, by the way (like, really, how many straight-up fat fetishists can there possibly be?).

[saerwen_13]

Yeah. :\ I found it kind of hard to articulate why that essay bugged me, but... yeah. You're right. I am a feminist, but I have trouble hanging out on a lot of, say, feminist blogs because sometimes they'll roundly condemn people for doing something like this, and I just go... "What?" I mean, am I saying that I think women are nothing but lifeless sex dolls if say I find someone attractive? @_@ Way to take a simple compliment a lot farther than it was intended to go, man...

[poisonarrows]

Exactly. It seems almost anti-feminist, in a way. I mean, what are you supposed to do, ignore every woman's potential outward beauty and break her up into mere pieces of a whole? What would that accomplish, besides completely unnecessary oppression once again? Shouldn't we be embracing woman and seeing her as a whole entity?

[saerwen_13]

Yeah...

I've always been a proponent of highlighting beauty in the human form; I don't think I've ever seen a human form that I thought had no beauty, so. Besides, refusing to acknowledge aesthetic appeal isn't going to keep it from existing, as we found out with sex, Freud, and the Victorians...

[ehrenyu]

Well. I think they have a problem with being objectified mainly.

I'd like to say that being called attractive helps me feel beautiful about myself, but it doesn't and never has. It's so ingrained in me to think that I'm ugly and disgusting that I think someone close to me is too biased to make a judgement call and it clouds their view of things.

It finally dawned on me that I might be fairly attractive when a stranger's baby (it was a cute little tyke) seemed mesmerized by my face/facial expressions, etc. Just by smiling, he laughed/gurgled/giggled at me and his mommy sort of looked puzzled at him and then I waved at her and she smiled at me. So. ... Yeah.

[saerwen_13]

Is it necessarily objectification, though? O_o;; 'Cause normally, if someone I know is saying they're unattractive, and I think they are, my first instinct is to say that. After that comes the "...Besides, why do you have so much riding on this, anyway?" part. And I've spent years of my life reading feminist lit, I don't know if it'd occur to someone who hasn't been exposed to as much of it to point that out.

[ehrenyu]

Yeah. I think it's less about objectification and more about self-esteem/good-self-body-image. XD;; Fem lit always blames the 'other' party, aka MEN NEED TO CHANGE THEIR WAYS NAO. yeahhh

[saerwen_13]

That... is true, actually. |D I'm not going to condemn that, necessarily, because I do believe sexism exists and has negative effects on society. Sometimes, though, I think feminist writers assign outright malice where it simply isn't there.

[saerwen_13]

I disagree, as you might've guessed. Some people make a big friggin' deal out of appearances, but they don't think appearance is the only thing anyone has- there's a reason ugly people have just as many civil rights as anyone else, I'm guessing.

[saerwen_13]

I'm sorry to say so, but I think you're too much of a misanthrope. ^_^