Becoming Ugly

[ehrnst]

What we as women are forced to carry—because we’re vulnerable and because we are strong—goes beyond the natural disorder of things. Our suffering is not natural; it’s calculated and insidious—the passing of a bill, the protests of a college football team, the success of an actor, and verdict of a judge.

Or, more glaringly, a man who’s bragged about sexually assaulting women being elected to the highest office in the U.S.—not in spite of his vicious misogyny, but partly because of it.

Since the election of Donald Trump, I have felt like a clairvoyant who, instead of seeing ghosts, sees the specter of male destruction everywhere I look: in the money I spend, in the industry I work, even in the minds of other women—the ones too foolish to realize that men don’t protect them anymore or, somehow more offensive to me, the ones who’ve cynically embraced the concept of female empowerment as a brand or an excuse for selfishness, effectively wringing the term of its power and significance.

For the first time, I don’t know how to move past my boiling anger or laugh it away. Also for the first time, I have no desire to. Preferable, I now think, is to stop laughing, to become as repulsive as I can in an insult to these men—so many men—who hate women and the women who adulate them. Vanity keeps me from throwing away my makeup and sanity keeps me from, as I often feel the repugnant urge, breaking the mirror with the surface of my own face and leaving us both cracked open. But I also can’t deny my current impulse to become as ugly and unlikeable as I can, merely to serve as constant reminder of the ugliness inflicted upon us. We’ve been told time and time again that prettiness and likability will protect us from harm, that to be good women, we must play by these rules, but this is a lie. Nothing will protect us except for ourselves—and what’s more fortifying than a defensive exterior? There are days when all I want is to become a human road sign, a blinking hazard to any man misfortunate enough to cross my path: “I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR SIGHT. I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR EVERYTHING.”

http://jezebel.com/becoming-ugly-1789622154

[RedWedge]

1. K&R

[niyad]

2. k and r for an excellent article.

there is a flip side, though. I remember phyllis chesler once referring to make-up as "war paint", and sometimes I see it that way. armour for wearing into battle, for battle it is.

[ehrnst]

3. Yeah. I think of Maxine Waters, and her perfectly put together

armor.

[lunatica]

4. My makeup has always been armor

And my words have been a very effective weapon. In my life I've been victimized by a husband, but I've never seen myself as a victim. I fight back.

[JHan]

5. hell yes

I put on make up so I look nice for my benefit, sometimes for someone else , but my reasons are always mine, not anyone else's.

[OxQQme]

6. An Inspirational site, ehrnst

Also from jezebel --> Cotton Mather, the Salem Witch Trials, and Our Miserable Present

>"At this point in time, though, as Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, slavery was becoming a massive part of the culture of this place, and there was a lot of intellectual capital dedicated towards making it seem morally okay—and Cotton Mather was one of those thinkers, so he was helping to develop these ideologies that stick with us today that are considered racist, right?

There’s no doubt in my mind that Mather sees white European bodies quite differently than the way he sees native bodies, or African bodies. And that he sees these cultures as different and inferior because they’re not Christian. So for him, the problem is largely a problem of religion, and the sense that to be “heathen” is to be in the thrall of the devil. And I agree that his writing is part of the emerging ideologies of the 17th and 18th centuries that seek to define or describe differences and then attribute a hierarchy of qualities or values to them. That’s true, they’re deeply ideological.

[But] I just think to extract out only the deeply disturbing ideologies is too easy. It does harm to a fuller understanding of what those people’s lives were, to our understanding of what it means to be human. I’m not an apologist for Cotton Mather, at all, but look at the complications. Everybody wants to find out why it happened in Salem—is it poisoned rye, is it a land dispute, is it the crappy gender relations? Everybody is looking for the answer, and Salem will never give that answer up, ever. It’s never going to give you the origin of all hell breaking loose. It is constantly asking us to look at complications, a set of unknowns that are never going to be known, and how they intersect.

It’s like when Bridget Bishop says [during her trial], “I’m not a witch, I know not what a witch is.” And Mr. Hathorne says, “How do you know then that you are not a witch?” And you get that moment of a woman being completely cowed and intimidated by a powerful man, and you can talk about the gender relations and class positions, even the legal positions of that. But it doesn’t tell you that Hathorne is a 100% evil man, and that Bridget Bishop is a woman who is completely victimized. It just tells you what’s happening in that moment.

I really worry about these reductions that give us heroes and villains, and victims and oppressors, and that’s all it does. That, to me, is really indicative of our political moment."<


much more:
http://pictorial.jezebel.com/cotton-mather-the-salem-witch-trials-and-our-miserabl-1789775210

[brer cat]

7. K&R

[niyad]

8. . . .