The reason I still follow WM

[la_vie_noire]

... is "Drop It Like It's Hot." Which is an awesome section, I'm not going to deny that.

Reclaiming UGLY:

Let’s think about this logically: what does me or you being beautiful do to improve the lives of others? Nothing, really. Certainly it does not do as much as passion, or kindness, or empathy, or bravery… these are the attributes that change the world… not beauty. And, even better, these are the attributes that have nothing to do with genetics. We can CHOOSE to go out of our way to be kind, to be brave, to passionately chase dreams, to harness our talents to change the world. At any moment, each and every one of us has the power to be a strong, compassionate, brave, and make a difference in the world.

You can’t wake up one morning and just decide to change your apperance to fit whatever mold beautiful takes on in your society (at least, not without a lot of money and pain)… either you fit the mold of beautiful or you don’t. We all know this and yet, we all seem to spend so much more time obsessing over beauty than we do over all of those other wonderful and useful qualities.

[...] Even the concept of “inner beauty” bothers me to a degree. Why not inner strength? Inner kindness? Inner AWESOMENESS? Why does it always come down to beauty?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am NOT trying to belittle the struggles of those who wrestle with body image issues. How could I be, when I am just as entrenched in this as anyone else? All I am trying to do is shed some light, shake things up, and get us to question just WHY it is that we feel so much pressure to look a certain way; to be beautiful.

Instead of trying to change perceptions of beauty, maybe we should just run with it… embrace the title of ugly and use it to force others to see the value in the rest of us; our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams… because at the end of the day, that’s where the real value lies.

Crazy

One thing these people are not: crazy.

I am crazy. I have mental illnesses. I am insane. I am loony. Sometimes, I may even be bat shit crazy.

I am not these people.

My identity is not an appropriate analogy to use to describe these people. They are hateful, horrible, terrifying, reprehensible, bigoted, scary, extremists. Some of them may well have mental illnesses. But you can’t tell that just by looking at someone. And even if they do, it’s not an appropriate epithet to use as an insult; believe it or not, people can have mental illnesses and also have political beliefs. Differing political beliefs and, yes, differences in beliefs about appropriate methods of political expression, are not rooted in mental illness.

[...] When I see people using my identity as a slur; when I see people referring to other people or things which they don’t like with words like crazy, insane, lunacy, insanity, loony, I am reminded of how unsafe the world is for people like me. How people who claim to care about social justice, who claim that being silent is part of the problem, are happily to carelessly erase me when it suits their needs. It’s a thread which runs almost continually through social justice activism. Activism is convenient as long as it does not involve any personal sacrifice or self examination, does not require the actual acknowledgment of other human beings. As soon as it does, there will be excuses, excuses, excuses.

LINKAGE: Veiling and "Save the Muslim Girl!"

Just about every book in this genre features such an image on its cover. These are familiar metaphors for how the Muslim girl’s life will be presented within the novel. The way the girls’ mouths are covered reinforces existing ideas about their silence and suggests that we in the West (conceptualized as “free” and “liberated”) need to help unveil and “give” them voice. The images also invite ideas about girlhood innocence and vulnerability, and invite Western readers to protect, save, and speak for these oppressed girls.

[...] To give you a sense of the range of meaning of the veil, consider for instance that in Turkey—a predominantly Muslim country—the veil (or “religious dress”) is outlawed in public spaces as a means to underline the government’s commitments to Kemalism, a “modern,” secularist stance. In response and as a sign of resistance, some women, especially young university students and those in urban areas, consider the veil to be a marker of protest against government regulation of their bodies and the artificial division of “modern” versus “faithful.” Similar acts of resistance are taken up by feminists in Egypt who wear the veil as a conscious act of resistance against Western imperialism. As another example, before 9/11, the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA) documented the Taliban’s crimes against girls and women by hiding video cameras under their burqas and transformed the burqa from simply a marker of oppression to a tool of resistance.

-- Özlem Sensoy and Elizabeth Marshall, excerpts from "Save The Muslim Girl!," a series on Muslimah Media Watch on Muslim girls in contemporary young adult fiction.

---

I haven't opened a book this Eastern break (is there an equivalent in English for "Semana Santa"?). I have an exam the 7th, then the 12, then the 13. I have a long homework to hand in on Monday. What did I do these past four days? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I so deserve the guilt.

Comments

[outou]

I haven't gotten to reading the full text of the second two links yet, but the first essay completely fails to take into account the physiological causes of "beauty" (and "ugliness"). The ugly and disfigured are, of course, mistreated more than the beautiful or normal, but that isn't so much a product of our social system than it is a product of an instinctive fear of those who look "sick" or "dangerous." Do you know the saying, "A robot that looks 95% human is seen as incredibly lifelike, while a robot that looks 96% human is seen as a sick person?" The 96%-lifelike robot is frightening because it falls into the "uncanny valley," which touches us humans at a very deep and primitive level. (This is grossly oversimplifying the causes behind the perception of inhumanity, as well as the different ways the ugly and the disfigured figure into it.)

It's true that popular culture and changing societal norms change the details of what we consider to be beautiful or ugly (e.g., two hundred years ago it was fashionable to be overweight, yet now it most definitely isn't), but there's always been a standard that's been defined by instinct. And that is why, no matter how great an idea it is to leave the primitive concept of human beauty behind, it will be very difficult for humans at large to do. In other words: I can come to terms with my own disfigurement and be happy, but that is not going to stop other people from treating me differently than if I had no disfigurement at all.

...I would have commented over on the blog itself, but I'm not too keen on giving my email address out. D:

[la_vie_noire]

Yeah, I get your point, but I'm not comfortable calling disabled people not "Normal."

Yeah, she didn't addressed directly the issue of disability, but I kinda agree that the concept of "beauty" is not an important concept. Yeah, it's extremely influential in our society, and that's why is a good thing to try to change "standards beauty," I agree with you, it not something useless. But I consider what she said very important, in the end "beauty" is more useful to make hierarchies; to make people obsessed and feel worthless than for anything else.

[outou]

I'm sorry about using the word "normal" like that. I know the common way to describe non-disabled people is "abled," but I'm not what word to use for non-disfigured people. "Figured?" "Pretty?" "Healthy?" There are problems with all of those terms. (That's not to say that "normal" is a good term to use, since that just reinforces the idea that disfigured people are somehow "wrong.")

Disfigured people aren't necessarily disabled, you know. I'm technically both, what with my partial hearing loss and the congenital nevus, but a lot of people with craniofacial nevi don't have any disabilities. Likewise, people disfigured by burns or by acid later in life may have difficulty breathing or eating depending on where they were harmed, but they also may not. It's difficult to make generalizations here, since there are so many kinds of "disfigurement."

I definitely agree that the idea of beauty, while in the end an instinctive one, is being used by many companies to set up a kind of "beauty hierarchy." She brought up a great point in a later post that even companies not specializing in beauty products (such as cosmetics and clothing) use beauty as a selling point.

[la_vie_noire]

Ah, sorry about that. I really don't want to police you about the way to talk about yourself, it's just that the "anormal" usage to refer to people just irks me (but not coming from you of course).

Yeah, there are many kinds, but I have heard people calling themselves disabled. I have to say I'm pretty ignorant about disability issues since I was able-bodied all my life, and I'm no one to say how people who look different from society's "norm" should be calling themselves. Because my first instinct was to say that a term like "disfigured" strikes me as problematic, but hah! What do I know about the issue? So yeah, sorry about that.