Feminism is a bitch.
I just got slammed hard by a friend (she called me "the oppressor") for suggesting that the socialized concept of beauty, bane of all womankind, isn't doing wonders for men, either. My point is this: I am conditioned to believe that women are inherently beautiful and men inherently ugly. Two women kissing is hot; two men kissing is gross. The feminist argument takes this information and paints a (largely accurate) picture of beauty developed as a tool to oppress women, but there is another side to the story.
I'm taught to believe that women are objects to be admired. Ok, that's bad. But I'm also taught ot believe that I am ugly. It's not that there is some impossible standard of beauty that I can never quite attain; I am fundamentally unattractive because I am a man. There is no amount of scrubbing, shaving, waxing, trimming, styling, crimping, injecting, carving, or polishing that will ever make me pretty.
So yeah, it doesn't hinder me in the workplace, and it doesn't stop me from being president, but it's no fucking picnic.
Furthermore, sexism is an illusion in the same way that all forms of discrimination are: it's not about penises and vaginas, it's about money. There's a line in the movie Bullworth that illustrates this well, "Rich people have always stayed on top by separating white people from colored people, but white people have more in common with colored people than they do with rich people." Sexism is the same situation. It's not that rich people don't want a woman to be president; they don't want anybody but them to be president. And the "battle of the sexes" is just another tool to keep the rabble fighting among themselves. Men have more in common with women than they do with rich people.
On a side note, "read some [author] and get back to me" is not an argument. It's a bullshit cop-out that allows people to act smug because they know that you will never go read the works of their precious fem-commander. The implication is that I can't possibly understand the complexities of the argument without getting it from the source, when, in reality, if you understood the argument in the first place, you'd be able to explain it. The fault is not on my end.
But, of course, now I must go to the library and check out the sole copy of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, (which, shockingly, has not been checked out by one of the several thousand women that attend my college) because I will not be pushed around by empty rhetoric.
-Weasel
I just got slammed hard by a friend (she called me "the oppressor") for suggesting that the socialized concept of beauty, bane of all womankind, isn't doing wonders for men, either. My point is this: I am conditioned to believe that women are inherently beautiful and men inherently ugly. Two women kissing is hot; two men kissing is gross. The feminist argument takes this information and paints a (largely accurate) picture of beauty developed as a tool to oppress women, but there is another side to the story.
I'm taught to believe that women are objects to be admired. Ok, that's bad. But I'm also taught ot believe that I am ugly. It's not that there is some impossible standard of beauty that I can never quite attain; I am fundamentally unattractive because I am a man. There is no amount of scrubbing, shaving, waxing, trimming, styling, crimping, injecting, carving, or polishing that will ever make me pretty.
So yeah, it doesn't hinder me in the workplace, and it doesn't stop me from being president, but it's no fucking picnic.
Furthermore, sexism is an illusion in the same way that all forms of discrimination are: it's not about penises and vaginas, it's about money. There's a line in the movie Bullworth that illustrates this well, "Rich people have always stayed on top by separating white people from colored people, but white people have more in common with colored people than they do with rich people." Sexism is the same situation. It's not that rich people don't want a woman to be president; they don't want anybody but them to be president. And the "battle of the sexes" is just another tool to keep the rabble fighting among themselves. Men have more in common with women than they do with rich people.
On a side note, "read some [author] and get back to me" is not an argument. It's a bullshit cop-out that allows people to act smug because they know that you will never go read the works of their precious fem-commander. The implication is that I can't possibly understand the complexities of the argument without getting it from the source, when, in reality, if you understood the argument in the first place, you'd be able to explain it. The fault is not on my end.
But, of course, now I must go to the library and check out the sole copy of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, (which, shockingly, has not been checked out by one of the several thousand women that attend my college) because I will not be pushed around by empty rhetoric.
-Weasel