I love this post at Along The Road Home. Here’s how it starts:
There’s a cycle in superhero comics(1) which I am violently tired of seeing.
Step One: Someone (in this case, Misty Lee(2) in a podcast) says something along these lines, “usually, the strongest and loudest protest 1 over sexy things come from ugly fat girls.” Which is problematic and infuriating for so many reasons.
Step Two: Someone (in this case, Tamora Pierce(4) in her blog(6)) responds in an articulate and often angry manner. Which is wonderful.
Step Three: Fans everywhere come out of the woodwork to prove that they are not “ugly fat girls” by showing pictures or mentioning their physical stats or whatever.
Hold up a minute.
How is that response any better than the original person calling them “ugly fat girls” in the first place?
(You’ll have to click through to the original post to read what Carla’s footnotes refer to).
Carla’s post touched off this observation at Random Thoughts:
And there is a still more vicious subtext to the idea that women who protest anything to do with “attractive women” are ugly and fat.
It is that ugly and/or unattractive women have no right to an opinion.
- What was being protested, by the way, was the cover to “Heroes For Hire” #13; the objection was not to the three superhero women being presented as “attractive,” but that they were presented as helpless victims apparently about be raped by a tenticle monster. –Amp [↩]
tentacle monster…
I’m just going to have a Tamora Pierce fangirl moment. I have read Woman Who Rides Like a Man probably more than 100 times. I loved the Alana books so much when I was a teenager, still do.
I really like that she has a blog.
Because all the guys who read superhero comics are svelte Adonises. Christ.
(Not to suggest that it’s OK to hate on fat *men*, of course; just that the double standard is breathtaking in its stupidity.)
I always have that annoyed reaction when people talk about feminism only benefiting unattractive women, and the response that many feminists are very attractive. Huh. Does that mean that if feminism did only benefit unattractive women it wouldn’t be worthwhile? Are pretty feminists secretly, or not so secretly, in agreement with the idea that the unattractive among us don’t deserve equal rights and fair treatment? I consider myself high average cute on a good day, and barely average on a bad day. Does that mean I don’t deserve the same amount of respect on bad days?
THANK you.
This has happened more times than I can count, in every single online forum I participate in. “See? I’m not fat!” And I both cringe for the woman begging for male approval and die a little inside because she has just said that she is Not Me, and therefore she has the right to her opinion.
But of course she doesn’t have the right to her opinion, she has the right to be ogled while she talks/writes. Which is not the same thing.
One thing I hate about women who use this language is how oblivious they are to the fact that it can be used on them. You might think you’re cute and skinny, but no woman is pretty enough or thin enough to be immune to this silencing mechanism. The difference between Misty Lee and Tamora Pierce is not that Misty is a hottie and Pierce isn’t. It’s that Misty Lee thinks it’s awesome to objectify women, and Tamora Pierce doesn’t. The second that Misty Lee criticized a sexist depiction of women, she’d be called fat and ugly, too. The only way to criticize sexism and not be called fat and ugly is to be a man.
And honestly, has anyone ever discredited a man by calling him fat or ugly?
Well, people have tried this strategy on me a couple of times over the years. (Since you asked.) I’m sure it would have happened to me more frequently were I female.
“usually, the strongest and loudest protest over sexy things come from ugly fat girls.”
file under: ad hominem fallacy. it’s that circular file over there in the corner.
or you may also refer to it as the “sexist bullshit” fallacy, in which case, file it in the same place. there are some varieties of sexist bullshit that warrant some sort of intellectual rebuttal of course, but this is just the kind of thing one scrapes off the bottom of one’s shoe.
i laugh uproariously at people whose response to any critique is making comments about the critic’s appearance. they do not deserve a place in the discourse of reasonable, mature adults.
some of my favorite people are what others might judge “ugly” or “unattractive” but to whom i would refer as “unconventionally beautiful”. it saddens and angers me how much our society discriminates against these friends of mine, but their response to it is usually some withering witticism that demonstrates their lack of concern for it. people who are only willing to listen to or look at people who fit a certain physiological mold have pathetic, small lives.
You would seriously not believe the discussion over at scans_daily about this, the cover in particular. One guy has suggested to me that I only see the objectification in that Heroes for Hire cover because of my “victim mentality” and that he only sees “beauty.”
I need 1,000 showers.
But our culture reinforces that “only pretty women should be seen or heard” in nearly everything. From the commercials telling us that we’ll discover ourselves once we lose that extra 20 pounds to TV shows where the ‘fat friend’ is only there for wisecracks about her nonexistant love life. It’s another way to split women up, and have us fight each other. Disgusting.
another problem I encounter which rarely seems to get addressed is the intellectual dishonesty of anti-feminist arguments in comics (which come up with astonishing regularity.)
We’ll go with the classic Women in Refrigerators and its response from anti-feminists. Their responses amount to “guys die too, so there’s no such thing, and anyway, you aren’t the target audience.”
nevermind that “guys die too” is already answered by the charge of WiR. The attempt at claiming it’s a boys club does something I find pretty creepy: Without every saying it outright, what it means is “I WANT to read stories where women are raped without consequence, where theyre killed as plot candy to make the real people angry, and where women are objects in the plot, no more important than any other piece of property. and keep them in tight clothing with exaggerated proportions while you’re at it.”
See, I actually am the target demographic of most mainstream comics (male, mid twenties, single, disposable income reasonably abounding) and even if I didn’t find that objectification objectionable (eurg), I still wouldn’t have any particular attachment to stories being told in that manner. Even if it were a value neutral thing comparable to any other (which it isn’t) I don’t NEED my stories to have that. I don’t need action flicks to have car chases. So the only people who could have problems with removing “Women are spandex backups that are there to be killed or raped” are people who are genuinely attached to that.
and that’s creepy.
karpad, I agree completely. When one argues that women are drawn in overtly, ridiculously sexual poses; the anti-feminists will argue back, but guys are drawn with big muscles which is also unrealistic. As if being drawn with big muscles, or being drawn tied up in your underwear were even remotely the same thing!
The only logical conclusion that one can reach, is the same one you did: these people like things the way they are. The violent, sexist, disgusting way they are. And that scares me, too.
“And honestly, has anyone ever discredited a man by calling him fat or ugly?”
I’ve seen it done many times, IRL and in the media. Here in the UK, a standard way to ridicule a man who’s overweight is to call him a “fat bastard.”
It may not quite as socially shaming as it would be to call a woman fat (but, I imagine, it’s pretty wounding to the invidual), and the man in question usually has to be considerably fatter to have “fat” used as an insult than a woman does, but it still happens a lot.
As does the use of “ugly,” though for some bizarre reason, a lot of the time the men it’s being applied to are supposed to find it funny that they’re being called ugly.
I have been called “fat”, a long time ago, and “ugly” a few times that I can
remember. Never really bothered me. I guess men of my generation were
taught that it is OK to be ugly, and if was indeed fat at a point, it was because I
had serious medical troubles.
I have also been called “weak” and “short”.
The former will make me retaliate with anything I will get away with (I’ve
thrown a guy in the Charles river for it) but after all is said and done, I
remember those occasions with a smile. The latter will make me resent the
person, and leave a bad memory.
I would not call anyone anyone “short” or “ugly” to insult him. I do use “weak” as
an insult. I do not believe I have ever called anyone “fat” to their face… but I
can imagine myself doing it, if I wanted to hurt someone enough. Frankly, it’s
not a very useful insult for starting a fight (who wants to lose to a fat guy?)
and I believe that when I feel like insulting a woman, I should just shut up and
walk away. It saves trouble in the short and remorse in the long term.
Anyway, I do agree that “fat and ugly” is a very sexist comment. Or rather,
that it is so effective only because women are conditioned that pretty and thin
is what they should be… maybe even the only good thing that they could be.
Now it would make sense that men should not let themselves be hurt when
they are called “weak midget” and should not strive to be “big and strong”…
Or something. Damn, I do get off topic :-)
What a perfect opportunity to plug my latest ComicMix column, titled This is for all the fat girls, as it uses Lee’s comments as a launching pad to talk about fatphobia. It’s pretty much “fat acceptance 101” for Alas readers, but it seems to have been well received anyway. Shakespeare’s Sister actually devoted a whole post to plugging it (which in turn, of course, allowed me to plug Alas in that post’s comments section).