{"id":7380,"date":"2009-04-14T14:06:58","date_gmt":"2009-04-14T21:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7380"},"modified":"2012-09-12T18:59:54","modified_gmt":"2012-09-13T01:59:54","slug":"susan-boyle-class-age-and-prettiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7380","title":{"rendered":"Susan Boyle, Class, Age, and Prettiness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"590\" height=\"332\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/wnmbJzH93NU\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m finding the story about Susan Boyle, a &#8220;Britain&#8217;s Got Talent&#8221; contestant whose audition video has been very popular on Youtube, interesting.<\/p>\n<p>The video (which can be found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY\">here<\/a>) is great fun to watch, because Susan Boyle herself is very appealing, her voice is great, and because it&#8217;s always satisfying watching a high point in someone&#8217;s life.<\/p>\n<p>But primarily, the video&#8217;s fun because everyone likes watching the underdog kick ass.<\/p>\n<p>But the weird thing is, why is she <em>such <\/em>an underdog? Partly it&#8217;s because she&#8217;s not TV-pretty (Boyle herself was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unrealitytv.co.uk\/britains-got-talent\/britains-got-talent-susan-boyle-hates-the-way-she-looks\/\">apparently dismayed<\/a> by how she looked on TV), and TV has taught us for years that only thin, pretty people have any talent. Partly it&#8217;s because she&#8217;s heavyset (at least by TV standards, which are harsher for women than men), and partly it&#8217;s because she&#8217;s nearly fifty. I agree with <a href=\"http:\/\/gendergoggles.com\/\">Crowfoot<\/a>, who in <a href=\"http:\/\/shakespearessister.blogspot.com\/2009\/04\/britains-got-talent-susan-boyle.html#comment-8101534\">Shakesville comments<\/a> wrote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This has made me bawl my eyes out. I&#8217;m also fat and in my forties and feel ugly and I <em>know<\/em> no one would take me seriously as a performer. I also gave up on acting because of the sexism and the lookism. So watching her up there blowing them all away in the face of their bigotry.. *sniff* The sexism\/sizism\/lookism displayed by the audience and the judges just breaks my heart. How <em>dare<\/em> they laugh at her because she isn&#8217;t skinny and young and beautiful. Douchebags. How many people&#8217;s lives are diminished by this crap? We are a stupid stupid stupid species.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Even more than that, however, I think people were shocked because of the class markers she carries &#8212; in her voice, her attitude, and her hair and clothes. Ms Boyle&#8217;s presentation fairly screams &#8220;working class,&#8221; and people don&#8217;t expect working class to do good work. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theherald.co.uk\/features\/featuresopinon\/display.var.2501746.0.The_beauty_that_matters_is_always_on_the_inside.php\">Colette Douglas Home<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Susan [was] roundly patronised by such mega-talents as [Britain&#8217;s Got Talent judges] Amanda Holden and the aforementioned Morgan, who told her: &#8220;Everyone laughed at you but no-one is laughing now. I&#8217;m reeling with shock.&#8221; Holden added: &#8220;It&#8217;s the biggest wake-up call ever.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Again, why?<\/p>\n<p>The answer is that only the pretty are expected to achieve. Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect. If, like Susan (and like millions more), you are plump, middle-aged and too poor or too unworldly to follow fashion or have a good hairdresser, you are a non-person. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>She lived with her parents in a four-bedroom council house and, when her father died a decade ago, she cared for her mother and sang in the church choir.<\/p>\n<p>It was an unglamorous existence. She wasn&#8217;t the glamorous type &#8211; and being a carer isn&#8217;t a glamorous life, as the hundreds of thousands who do that most valuable of jobs will testify. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Then, when a special occasion comes along, they might reach, as Susan did, for the frock they bought for a nephew&#8217;s wedding. They might, as she did, compound the felony of choosing a colour at odds with her skin tone and an unflattering shape with home-chopped hair, bushy eyebrows and a face without a hint of make-up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m not above judging people by their presentation. Presentation is one of the ways we assure each other that we know what we&#8217;re doing. If someone hasn&#8217;t learned how to present themselves professionally, we assume that they also haven&#8217;t learned how to do their work professionally. And sometimes that&#8217;s justified.<\/p>\n<p>The trouble is, a &#8220;professional presentation&#8221; is bound up in a lot of things &#8212; voice, grooming, body shape, clothing &#8212; which are in turn connected to class, to race, to body shape, to gender presentation, to disability status, etc.. None of these are hurdles that it&#8217;s impossible for (say) a fat Black person auditioning, or applying for a job, to overcome, if they have sufficient talent and drive. But these are hurdles that well-off, abled, gender-normed, thin white men don&#8217;t face.<\/p>\n<p>And for the judges and audience to be <em>so<\/em> utterly <em>shocked<\/em> that a woman whose presentation isn&#8217;t &#8220;professional&#8221; sings beautifully&#8230; it&#8217;s says something pretty sad.<\/p>\n<p>But that Ms Boyle was such a hit &#8212; and that millions of people have viewed her on YouTube &#8212; maybe that says something optimistic. Maybe it says that there are a hell of a lot of us who are sick of the sick, slick standards TV promotes. That would be nice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m finding the story about Susan Boyle, a &#8220;Britain&#8217;s Got Talent&#8221; contestant whose audition video has been very popular on Youtube, interesting. The video (which can be found here) is great fun to watch, because Susan Boyle herself is very &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7380\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,30,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-poverty-labor-related-issues","category-fat-fat-and-more-fat","category-popular-and-unpopular-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15828,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7380\/revisions\/15828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}