Yes, it’s just a stupid tv show and I get that there are traditional aspects to the art form but over and over, week after week, this is about some invisible rigid construct of “pretty” and “feminine” and “sexiness,” one single recognized standard for the “natural sexiness” of a woman.
“I think it came out in moments …you had glimpses of this beautiful, vulnerable girl.”
Fuck that shit.
I just don’t know what to say to that.
Come on, meteor.
Not that it is in any way relevant, but if Hope’s not sexy, I GIVE UP.
A.
But it IS relevant, arguably less so for adults who are able to filter the messages they get from media. But it’s relevant for the same reasons it’s relevant that Chaz Bono and JR Martinez are contestants. Visibility matters, even in ridiculous pop culture circumstances. Just turning on a television and seeing someone you can identify with or from the same situation as you matters. Kids are, in a narrow oversimplified sense, sponges. Everything they soak up and are exposed too has the potential to inform their identity and the signal to noise ratio they develop to navigate their world. So for everything good the stupid show did by just having a transgender man on and having a severely disfigured person on, it does real harm by singling out, week after week, the one woman (one could argue)among the contestants who has risen to the top of her field because of real strength and actual skills, not just her looks, as not being [sexy,pretty,graceful,feminine,emotional,vulnerable, etc] enough and being too [muscular,strong, forceful]. Little girls and teens are being given those messages. That sucks.
Oh, no, I mean it’s not relevant whether *I* think she’s hot. Though I do. What the show throws out there is absolutely damaging for the reasons you explain.
The thing this reminded me of was some story a few years back about all the women kicking ass in action-adventure movies and TV shows, and whether it gave girls an unrealistic ideal to live up to. As opposed to, say, all the OTHER unrealistic ideals we’re trying to live up to every single day? The karate is the problem?
A.
MEH. can teevee get any stupider? I WANT THE GONG SHOW BACK!
Vulnerable woman = sexy woman
Vulnerable to what you might ask, and then it will come to you just how creepy vile the cultural propaganda really is.
As a male, she looks good to me.
Or is sexy only an anorexic Barbie that when you pull the string says, “Math is Hard”??
Reminds me of Cathy Horyn inThe New York Times tut-tutting Christina Hendricks on some red carpet by saying “You don’t put a big girl in a big dress.”
If anyone – man or woman – could look at Christina Hendricks and think “She’s fat!” rather than “She’s a knockout” … well, our standards of beauty (and size) are really, really out of whack in this country.