Random
Hotness: Here’s a toast to the douchebags! Here’s a toast to the vain!
Last night, as I walking home in -9 without wind chill temperatures (Celsius) and foot upon feet of snow, I heard the most fantastic (ironic) thing. Granted, I was mad at the weather, and because my anger would be futile against snow and cold, I steered my aggression onto three darling little assholes.
Here is the conversation I overheard:
Guy 1: You know, dudes, I only have one problem.
Guy 2: Not enough pussy?
Guy 1: Yeah.
Guy 3: (With a hint of jealousy and maybe irony) Fuck you.
Guy 1: Nah, really, dudes, my only problem is that I fucking hate fat. Like I can’t stand it if a girl’s fat.
Guy 3: Fuck, dude, like who likes fat chicks?
Then, they turned onto Princess street (our main “drag”) and I had to turn a different way to go home. Needless to say, I wanted to hear more! But given only the brief bit of friendly banter I witnessed, I dedicate this to them:
There was something profound in what they were saying though. In the many conversations about gender and race we’ve had here and the once ground-breaking theory on intersectionality, what people fail to acknowledge – time and time again – is the power of attractiveness.
We talk about gender and publishing or race and publishing, but we just don’t talk about hotness, unless it’s a flippant kind of “what writer would you most like to fuck?” post, which has appeared, not without a degree of resentment or frustration, here on HTML. And yet, it’s impossible to separate the degree to which the attractiveness of a writer relates to his/her success.
Yes, this is a conversation about superficialities. But it is one that has relevance. With AWP around the corner, be honest: As an editor, if you met a hot writer you wanted to bed, wouldn’t you be more likely to read his/her writing with a kinder eye? (I’m not saying you’d publish, but you’d likely be more generous, no? Or maybe I’m the only superficial one. Hey, I can admit it.)
All of this ignores the inherent privilege that comes with being attractive. In my grad student/young professor milieu, the buzzword – almost to a fault – is positionality. Jesus, everyone wants to talk about the position they occupy, as a “white settler” (another hot buzzword here in Canada) or woman of color or whatever. People pay attention to their positionality. It changes the way they speak, depending on who their audience is. I don’t know. It’s like a hyper-political-correctness, a hyper-self-awareness, which is not to say racism/sexism/etc. does not exist. (Canadians are notoriously polite. Their politeness, in my opinion, obscures an obvious prejudice. In many ways, I would rather experience the blatant racism/sexism I’ve endured in places like Texas or Indiana than be greeted with a plastic smile hiding something far more sinister. Or, maybe Canadians are truly more enlightened than Americans, and because of my unwavering disaffection, I assume the worst about people.) We talk about positionality, eagerly, too eagerly maybe. We ignore attractiveness.
I mean, I get it. Attractiveness isn’t discussed in feminist academic writing or even here because it’s so “subjective.” Yes, obviously, we have a Western standard of beauty: “fair” skin, thin, etc. (All this ignores the “exotic.” Asian women, after all, is a stunning #11 on Stuff White People Like. I remember having a conversation with some writer – I can’t remember who – who said that all the male writers he knows living in Brooklyn have Asian girlfriends, except for the Asian male writers, who have white girlfriends.) Nonetheless, the subjectivity of who or what is deemed attractive shouldn’t detract from its obvious impact on our daily interactions with people. It is as much a form of discrimination or privilege – depending – as race, class, gender, able-bodiedness, weight, etc.
A brief detour: This past summer, I did research for a professor on Citizenship and Disability. I read a jarring article on fatness and disability by Nathan Kai-Cheong Chan and Allison Gillick based on a series of interviews. In each circumstance, the respondent – all morbidly obese by medical standards – made the argument that they were on the cusp of being fat enough to have a disability, but they were a few pounds shy. That is, if the respondent was 350 pounds, she’d say disability meant 360 pounds. What remains is the obvious truth that all these people who experience discrimination based on their weight, which is to say, they experience discrimination based on their attractiveness. This takes me back to the dear little undergrads gleefully talking about fat chicks, who certainly can’t come close to the obese line. Chances are, they were talking about girls who have a little belly, stress on the little.
But weight matters. Attractiveness matters. Size matters. I hate to admit this. I feel like I ought to be more enlightened than to care. I used to be a gender studies professor for gawd’s sake! But it does. When I visited my family for winter break, I got some new pants. They used a different sizing system, one I was unfamiliar with, and so, being vain, I looked it up on the internet. And I’m ashamed about how happy I was that they translated to a size zero, a size I haven’t been in a very long time. What should size matter? What should attractiveness matter? But, but, it does! It does!
Size zero: the non-existent size. Website after website with women harking on each other about how they want to be a size zero. You skinny little bitch, they say, with humour, with rage.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. Mostly, I am disappointed with those boys last night, almost as much as I’m disappointed in myself for buying into a system that rewards attractiveness and thinness. If I can be a critical feminist and anti-racist, how can I simultaneously place so much value and weight (pun intended) in attractiveness and thinness?
Tags: attractiveness, hotness, size
you used the phrase ‘wanted to bed,’ which is funny.
but you’re right, and this is something i’ve thought about as well. the internet makes ‘attractiveness’ both more important and less important. it’s easier to hide what you look like by simply not posting any photograph of yourself, or by posting only extremely flattering photographs of yourself, or by posting photographs that are not of yourself and saying that they are of yourself. but on the other side, i’ve noticed writers and editors ‘friending’ each other on facebook, thereby becoming able to see what each other looks like. the anonymous-factor the internet provides is cut into by facebook. nobody should know what i look like. but everyone does, since a little picture of me pops up every time i comment.
and i’m sure you all judge me, because i’m definitely judging you.
“Position” is also – as I think Lily is implying with “hyper-self-awareness” – complicated by the interest in seeming, by hypocrisy.
Here’s what I mean: men love “fat chicks” – especially mama’s boys like Guys 1-3. Men get the “prettiest” (read: most enviable) girlfriend possible – that’s the marketplace, where women consume in the same way – . But when men go to bordellos: always, the busiest woman working is plump.
To me, what’s most compelling about attractiveness as an occasion for thought are the mechanisms of such hypocrisy. For example, if it’s actually normal for heavy women to get sexual/romantic attention, if a plump face is often considered cuter than a narrow one on the same woman, what concatenation of “positionality” produces the shared (at least: Western) ‘romantic’ mania for slender women??
i love kanye west
Yes, Deadgod, absolutely. There is an unending amount of hypocrisy involved, which is why I kept insisting that the emphasis on positionality was to a fault. This is not to say that there are not people who are honestly concerned with their positionality, but sure, a lot of it – I dare say most of it – is fronting. For the sake of being ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ enough.
I wonder how much of your discussion of ‘fat chicks’ has to do with a fetishization of Other. This is why, in part, I brought in the ‘exotic.’ Given that people are told to desire thinness, isn’t fatness or obesity as much a fetish as Asianness or Blackness, etcThis is equally true for people with disability.
Finally, interesting choice in word: Cute. Yes, a ‘plump’ face is often considered ‘cuter.’ I’ve been called ‘cute’ my entire life. (And smart. As opposed to my sister, who was beautiful. But at least I have smarts!) It’s nothing, just me being petty.
Drew: I love the phrase ‘to bed.’ Much more so than any other with the same definition. It sounds simultaneously classier and dirtier.
And don’t even get me started on the artifice of Facebook, which I think I wrote about a while back when the FB movie came out. It’s all artifice. And then more of it. Ok, I’m done. Thanks for your comment. I wasn’t judging you until you told me to. So, there.
i forgot about your article on facebook, but now i remember agreeing with much of it–the artifice, the creation of a persona, the utter fakeness and impossibility of ‘accurate’ portrayl. maybe that’s what makes facebook so much fun.
Again, I’ll ask, what isn’t artifice? We will meet at AWP; we will go out to pie. That morning, I’ll have showered and maybe put on a nicer sweater than I would’ve had I just been hanging out around Indy, because I’m going to be at AWP, and dammit, I want to look sharp. At some point, I’ll think something I won’t say. It might be nice, it might be mean and critical about someone else in the pie shop, whatever. Is there anything less artificial about that than there is about me choosing which photo to make my profile picture, or choosing whether or not to comment on someone’s status update?
But, maybe you addressed that. (I hope in a very un-artificial way that this doesn’t come of as asshole. I’m really looking forward to pie.)
Racism in Indiana? I don’t believe it.
My marketing strategy when I finally publish a book is to just walk around shirtless. Everywhere.
Of course, that might backfire, as Matt Bell has already written Wolf Parts.
you’re right. everything is artifice. we shouldn’t bother talking about it anymore.
Many people will joke that all the white hip boys living in Brooklyn have Asian girlfriends, regardless if they are writers are not. Asian girls are like trucker hats now. They’re accessories. But it goes both ways. All the hip Asian girls date white boys. This is just one of those things you hear. There was also the story about the Hipster Grifter that blew up the internet last year–a hot, hip Korean girl with tattoos who basically fleeced hipster boys out of money–and it kind of brought this conversation into a bigger forum. You know, why do white boys think all Asian girls are hot, etc.
Obviously I am not hip because this notion of Asian ‘girls’ – likely women on the youngish side – as ‘accessories’ seems a bit dehumanizing to my sensibility, something by the way a feminist might also find disturbing or at least disagreeable, or used to, unless feminist means something different as well, perhaps simply a female. As I say, I am out of the loop. That a well-publicized swindle must occur in order to bring this apparently widespread mindset to the fore, causing those who hold this viewpoint to examine (in crisis?) themselves, or not, is equally warped, in my admittedly-out-of-touch opinion. What did the Internet conclude re white boys – men?- and Asian girls (sic)?
Yeah I basically call young men, boys, and young women, girls–those in their early 20s and younger. I’ve done that since I was in my early 20s way back when. Anyway, as far as the Asian fetish–and yes this is what some people call it–the conclusion (broadly speaking) was that the Hipster Grifter was able to fleece hipster white Men because white Men are so easily attracted to Asian Women. They are easy prey, you see. But the internet is a place where people draw conclusions broadly. As far as the accessory thing going…it is offensive but I’m just repeating a description someone gave about it.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about it or that the subject is closed. In fact, I ended my comment with a question, which I didn’t mean to be rhetorical, but I can understand how it could be seen that way. I was asking in earnest whether she thought there was a difference there.
I think I’m going to move to Brooklyn, where I’ll have a girlfriend, is all I can think at the moment. White or otherwise. Which is really to say, we live in the society we live in, and whether our ideals of beauty are primarily a cultural construct or not, nobody’s immune– there are the needs of the body and there’s the desire for partnership or love (whatever that is), and there’s the way aesthetics plays out in social groups. There are few things worse than being thoroughly unattractive, and few assets as great as being attractive. That’s as true for undergraduate cads as much as it is for AWP attendees (although in my experience, AWP is not at all the hook-up fest some allege– there’s plenty of booze and eyelash-batting and schmoozing, and there’s that palpable, awful hunger that permeates the air at the bookfair and at panels on being published, but really, there’s not that much ‘bedding’ going on).
I think I’m going to move to Brooklyn, where I’ll have a girlfriend, is all I can think at the moment. White or otherwise. Which is really to say, we live in the society we live in, and whether our ideals of beauty are primarily a cultural construct or not, nobody’s immune– there are the needs of the body and there’s the desire for partnership or love (whatever that is), and there’s the way aesthetics plays out in social groups. There are few things worse than being thoroughly unattractive, and few assets as great as being attractive. That’s as true for undergraduate cads as much as it is for AWP attendees (although in my experience, AWP is not at all the hook-up fest some allege– there’s plenty of booze and eyelash-batting and schmoozing, and there’s that palpable, awful hunger that permeates the air at the bookfair and at panels on being published, but really, there’s not that much ‘bedding’ going on).
This is something I think about a lot. The theme for the next issue of my journal might be fatness.
I don’t think of artifice as a bad word.
xrl.us/bh8nzm
Pretty is as pretty does.
Pretty is as pretty does.
Cuteness is a curse. Supposedly in the internet dating world inwhich prospective dates judge you based on your photo, being thought of as cute is worse than being thought of as ugly, according to this:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/
My friend just happened to email me this today, I don’t normally read the okcupid blog, I swear.
Not a bad word, Downtown D – you don’t mind if I call you that, do you?, such a nice ring – but artifice is a word that has been thrown around a lot recently, particularly in the academy, but certainly not limited to. As I’m sure you’re well aware, many people use the word incorrectly, or, at the very minimum, as a catch-all.
I think what Christopher was trying to say was that we all actively engage in deception, whether it’s the image (or lack thereof) chosen for our gravatar here or FB or picking up the skinniest jeans and cowboyest boots you can find for AWP. Artifice isn’t a bad word. It’s a very important word. We engage in this deception – we welcome it! – because, I would argue, of the level of anxiety and insecurity we feel on a daily basis. If not for anxiety and insecurity, why else would we deceive? I mean, there’s nothing to gain from impressing some poor bastard writer at AWP (unless, to use my favorite phrase, you want to bed him/her).
To sum up this rambing (note: I have yet to drink my morning coffee. Bad idea. I should always have coffee before responding to anything.), artifice is necessary to discuss in order to address the underpinnings of artifice. Or, I dunno, maybe everyone is content with it. I’m going to change my FB status now.
I think about obesity a lot. I wrote a novel last year about an obese serial killer. I couldn’t imagine it, her body. That was a huge problem. Keep us posted about the journal!
i don’t date white boys…but maybe i’m not hip enough
i don’t date white boys…but maybe i’m not hip enough
Or (most likely): you are TOO hip.
Artifice is awesome.
I wanted to include something about Artifice magazine, but I just couldn’t fit it in. So here’s the plug. Repeat: Artifice is awesome.
I’m sorry, but I’ve never, ever understood this. “Pretty” is technical. It says nothing about the person or their actual attractiveness. It’s just a physical description.
“Cute”, on the other hand, is emotional/chemical.
Lily,
People who are insecure about themselves give weight to such things. Unfortunately, we live in a time where no value is given to one’s original self. When a person speaks of love, it is always directed outward instead of inward.
Make-up, skinny jeans, diet soft drinks, plastic surgery, physical fitness for aesthetics instead of health, colored electronics, etc., etc., fucking etc.
The media is the kingpin pusher of neurosis.
The two boys you speak of will have sex with an unattractive (fat) girl without hesitation. What they won’t do is talk about it publicly out of fear of derision.
On a side note: A man who truly values femininity will find value in all women.
To keep it real: It’s all pink inside; who cares?
Yes, I can see how positioning one’s positionality would be a more, um, involved version of the personality racketeering most of us do most of the time – and frustrating when one is confronted with it in a situation/way that inhibits one from calling ‘bullshit’. Of course, one doesn’t want people to tell one that they’re racist, homophobic misogynists – because one doesn’t want that to be true. But constant self-advertisement of spiritual super-development, especially if you doubt the, eh, thoroughness of the self-examination . . .
You must often see even the anti-PC PC – people whose front is proudly to advertise how brave and lonely their fight against “political correctness” is – blech.
It’s true – and unacknowledged in my post – that there’s nothing ‘essential’ about men’s attraction to heaviness in women, any more than there is anything ‘essential’ about the desirability of thinness — at least, given the epistemological way that we’re (or ‘I’m trying to be’) commonsensical. It’s probably true that the intense pressure on women to be thin evolved in some relation to a willingness among many men to go ‘against’ this cultural imperative.
But I don’t think the vocabulary of “fetishization” is appropriate here, at least in my small understanding of it. I’m referring to what (at least I sense) is a norm that only appears to be transgressive: the suggestion is, not that it’s being slender or heavy itself, but rather that it’s the overwhelming enjoinment to be thin that’s somehow bizarre – that being “told to desire thinness” is untruthful to ‘healthy’ sexuality. I can’t think of a methodologically sound way to prove such an assertion – especially to an absolute relativist – but, as I say, let what men actually choose be a guide to a methodologically imperfect but yet reasonable inference – a better guide than the strategic unkindness of Guys 1-3.
That’s a great link, Eli. The women-on-men data should be as intriguing, and the gay data that some commenters ‘asked for’.
The major criticism on the thread – which has some pretty good comedy on it, too – seems to me nearly lethal: the rating for a woman is for both her looks and her profile/personality. (For example, if she’s a “smoker”, guys who select against that will rate her lower (almost) no matter what she looks like. Or if she’s a creationist, or if she hates sports, or whatever the conflict be. Likewise, close personality matches will get higher ratings than each particular rater can justify by looks alone. If this smearing of looks and personality together in the rating is common, then the data isn’t clear about “cute” or “ugly”, is it??)
But tweaking one of their tentative mid-analysis conclusions a bit does, well, confirm something I already thought was true (if not exactly indicating something new (to me)). They draw out from the analysis this sentence: “The more men disagree about a woman’s looks, the more they like her.” That’s not accurate, in the sense of what their own data imply. What the ‘less messaging for lots of 4s and more messaging for more 5s but also more 1s’ means is: ‘The more men disagree about a woman’s looks, the more the ones who like her like her.’ What correlates to messaging at that site is the extremity, the provocation, that a man feels, not the attractiveness itself. — So a slightly more-attractive-on-average woman will get fewer messages than a woman of more-disputed-but-overall-lower attractiveness.
Despite the methodological problems with the analysis, that’s a not-worthless occasion for thought.
You are wrong. Not EVERYONE engages in deception.
i would really like to read this
Shoot me an email: lily.hoang.326[at]gmail[dot]com.
Thanks, Deadgod. What I meant by fetishization deals more with obesity rather than someone who is simply overweight. People who are moderately overweight are not treated the same way someone who is obese is. That’s sociologically sound. Quite a few studies have been done, sure. To me, “fat chick” means obese (by medical standards, someone with a BMI greater than 30). And obese people are certainly Othered and – um, I’m hesitant to say this but here goes – by cultural norms, they are viewed as “unattractive.” It is this normative “unattraction” that would make someone’s sexual interest seem fetishized. Ultimately, I agree with you Deadgod. I’m just covering tracks, while probably making even more grievous mistakes along the way.
Yeah, no one – except you! Stephen! Thank you! – even commented on the awesome soundtrack to go along with this post. A magnificent performance, wouldn’t you say? I find the lyrics problematic, somewhere between Kanye being extremely self-aware and him being the ultimate misogynist asshole. But damn, it’s a catchy tune.
You’re right. I was being hegemonic there. Not everyone engages in deception. But nearly everyone. You’ll give me that, right, Jereme? There are those who rise above superficiality. There are those with extreme self-confidence (without egoism) and self-love (without egoism) who need not deceive or mask themselves. One day, I hope to be one of those people, sure. Right now, I’m sufficiently happy with being able to point out/acknowledge my flaws, albeit in an often embarrassingly public way.
Of course I will give you that, Lily. But you should know better than to group me in with others.
*insert lame winking smile-face here*
I hope you are one of “those people” one day, too.
I refrained because I didn’t want to be mean towards you.
Michael,
That’s an interesting study but it isn’t an epiphany–at least not for me.
To clarify: comeliness is not an intrinsic attribute of attraction.
If the “pretty woman” has power over other women, it is because we have posited her power. The media being the most culpable.
I am saying, instead of looking for beauty with one’s eyes, look within one’s mind. The 21st century human has been programmed to value all things above themselves. This ideology is sickly.
When a person learns to unconditionally accept themselves–which is my definition of true love–then their entire reality shifts. What you consider attractive now will cease to exist.
A lot of bullshit will cease to exist.
Do I believe people practice this? Fuck no. But I wish they did.
Refrained because of the asshole lyrics or because you think the song sucks? (And thank you, Jereme. You are always nice to me, and I appreciate it.)
I think of artifice as a type of production. An immanent production of everything.
I think what I like about Kanye is how he can be — in the same song, in the same album — both extremely self-aware and maybe also the ultimate asshole. It seems like this is a recurring theme on his albums, him realizing he’s fucking up and feeling remorseful about it, and then in the very next song he celebrates the very thing he was remorseful about. Sometimes I like to think about Kanye West in relation to Sisyphus and Oedipus, how they’re both compelled to do something they really would rather not be doing (Sisyphus carrying that stone up that mountain for eternity, Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother simply because he didn’t know who he was in relation to them), but then I realize I’m thinking way too deeply about Kanye West. But it’s just really human, you know?
I wouldn’t say nice, since I don’t believe in it, but I would say I treat you with respect.
The song or the lyrics isn’t anything to get upset about.
I can tell the people who are influenced by popular media because they talk about the same shit, over and over and fucking over.
I allow only two sources of media into my life: htmlg & fb.
I come to htmlg because I respect a handfull of the contributors. I loathe fb but it has its utility.
In both allowances it seems there is a fucking kanye quota. If you look at him with objective eyes, I think you’ll find he’s not very interesting nor a music genius.
Just wish people would stop grinding my dick with kanye references.
My dick can handle only so much.
You know?
twitter posts are myspace angle shots of the mind
Of course, I’m with you most of the way here, Jereme– that the power of pretty is given, that our society is superficial, that true beauty is within, that we’ll age, and die, and finally what matters or persists will not be a certain idea of beauty.
But. If sexy comes with a minimum age limit, it also tends to bear a maximum age limit. And I suppose what I’m saying is that, as someone who tends to think all of what you’re advocating is desirable, I find it pretty hard to practice even though I see it, I get it, I try to live it. And sometimes, still, I break first for beautiful by standards which I surely did not create.
Revolution starts and ends with an individual.
that’s why I listen to him with subjective ears
Well, right. Except that when it comes to something like attraction, we’re biological creatures, and we’re cerebral humans, and we’re acculturated, and we have our parents, and our friends, and there’s the place we grew up and what its demographics were and what the first girl we kissed looked like and what our first time with yes but just please was like, and there’s Kanye West and Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift and Brittany Spears and the entire absurd something that makes up pop culture, and then there’s the interweb, the porn industry, the fetishes and oddities and vanilla vanilla marriages of the Mormons, and the range of our religions, and our guilt or lack thereof, and our ideas of love, and our broken or reconstructed hearts, and loneliness, and the way our eyes turn after a couple bourbons, and all of that plays out in complex ways, is what I’m saying. And one outcome, I maintain, is that attractiveness is there, and it often broadly fits into certain parameters like ‘hot’ which may correlate with ‘thin’ or ‘pretty’ or ‘blonde’ or the million variables that make sexy. I guess what I have my doubts about is whether there’s a ‘revolution’ to be had. Once, I had a female best friend fall in love with me; I simply wasn’t attracted to her, though I cared about her and thought she was brilliant and deserving of love. Once, I dated a girl who was mad about me and always told me I smelled good– and as it turns out, research shows that biology can trump all: once in a thousand cases a woman finds a man’s smell pleasing because of the way their immune systems cancel (they’d make perfect children) and in those cases once she’s on to the scent, she all but ignores physical appearance (which certainly explains how she could compromise all taste and choose me). We’re not purely animals but we are creatures, is I guess what I’m saying… and sometimes for reasons of our embodied nature we act free of superficial concerns, and sometimes, if we achieve the ‘revolution’ you speak of, we ought to be able to only see straight to the soul, and I guess I think that it’s more complicated than thinking making it so.
I like beautiful things, be they writings or peoples. Sometimes I enjoy them together, sometimes I don’t.
http://birdswithteeth.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/transcriptions/