The rant I made about the idea that a good looking woman has something to “fall back on” if she doesn’t have brains reminded me of things I’ve often heard said about women that are really just faulty leaps of logic and I wish people who claim to be intelligent would fucking think about for five minutes and realize the fallacy of their ways.
As a first example of this, don’t ask me why I had to listen to this for a time but I did, there’s this radio DJ named Tom Leykis who is on my list of people I would arch were I a super villain, and he’d always say things like if women have good looks they don’t bother becoming CEO’s or lawyers and such because they can just land them a rich man and not have to work and expand their own horizons. As proof of this supposed phenomenon he cited magazine articles about the world’s most powerful businesswomen and said they were all homely, or something like that.
First of all, this whole idea disappears in a puff of logic once you realize that any person, male or female, who has become a great success in the business world is obviously not going to be twenty fucking years old. If then you saw pictures of said women when young and came to the same conclusion, I think this logic is STILL faulty because of one thing.
Looking “hot” in the plastic Barbie sense takes effort, desire, and work. For everyone. Don’t believe me? Google “celebrities without makeup” sometime. Underneath the concealer and rouge everyone looks like a human being.
I’ve mentioned before how guys on various law school forums lament the lack of “hot” women in law school–and in particular one comment I saw said “intelligent women” are not hot in any field, whether it be law, engineering, science, etc, because they don’t wear makeup, they don’t wear hot clothes, etc.
Any woman with the privilege to be in a program of graduate study, which is expensive, could buy makeup and wear revealing clothing if she so chose. Any such woman could spend student loan money on a boob job, and on a tummy tuck, and on a nose job, and decide to go on a 900 a day calorie diet to become appealing to someone who only cares about these things if her desire was to land a man rather than to be instrumental in the procurement of equal rights for all people or to discover the cure for cancer. Really, plastic surgery is so cheap we’re a tiny bit of free will away from becoming that twilight zone episode where every person gets to choose between two models of what to look like and then has surgery to conform.
The thing is–these women aren’t trying to attract these dudes. It is really the height of narcissism to come to the conclusion that if a woman doesn’t look like Carmen Electra she’s forced to become an astrophysicist because otherwise she’d prefer to be a desperate housewife because that’s the pinnacle of achievement for a woman. Even women who want to be housewives and want to stay at home with the kids rather than have jobs don’t all look like Angelina Jolie and they STILL don’t all want to attract the kind of dehumanizing tacofucker who thinks women are like blow up doll objects one acquires, kind of like a speaker system or a Lexus. They want someone who, err, sees raising the family as an important job that deserves as much respect as anything else. Like someone who has ever used the phrase “upgrade” when speaking about women would ever think that in a million years.
Think about it.
They don’t wear makeup?
They go around in shirts that say “Hyperbole is the best thing ever” and comfy blue jeans rather than tube tops and stiletto heels?
Is it really outside the realm of possibility that they do not care if assholes find them hot? Is it so hard to believe that they might–gasp–not even WANT anything to do with these stupid asses?
I mean, it’s hilarious that Tom Leykis and dudes like him really think that smart women would be with THEM instead of blazing trails if only they were hot enough.
What, like Melinda Gates? Valedictorian of her undergrad class with a degree in computer science and with a masters from Duke who was a product manager for many years before meeting Bill Gates? Like Michelle Obama who got an undergraduate degree at Princeton, a law degree at Harvard, makes goo gobs of money working for hospitals was Barack Obama’s mentor at the law firm they worked at before they fell in love and married? Oh you’re so right dudes, all men would rather just have a supermodel if they could, and all women would just be trophy wives if they were just hot enough. There must be some bullshit going on with the Gates’ close relationship and philanthropy and the Obamas’ affection and fist bumping that belies the natural order that would exist were that bullshit not there. I’m sure all of the women who are CEOs and partners at major law firms would rather be with dudes who think women talk to much and aren’t worth shit once they start to wrinkle rather than whatever men or women they are with who respect them, if only they could!
The narcissism fucking buuuuurns.
Permalink
Leave a Comment
Ok so I’m not really gonna rip a hole in the space-time continuum. As much as I may like to.
I am just going to whine about NaNoWriMo being in the month of November. Truly, my effort was paltry beyond paltry. I wrote like, ten freakin’ pages. Why is this, you might ask? I suppose I’ve had time to write a lot of total bullshit on this blog–but for a student going to school on the semester system, this is the month in which every single assignment every single professor gives is due. I’m not just in law school–in other schools the professors give out assignments, but yes, a couple of my law school classes have essays rather than finals anyway. I have been writing furiously–just not fiction. I will say, at least, the topics I have to write about are interesting, for my essays I mean, it’s just once anything becomes required it’s fun rather than a chore.
A lot of this stuff I’d probably write about anyway just to argue with pre-pubescent boys on politics forums about. However–turning it into school work rather than research for pleasure makes it drudgery. I partially blame this on having to cite stuff with more than just a link. I hate APA and Bluebook with the firey passion of a million burning suns. But it is also the case that a job tasting ice cream would turn tasting ice cream into drudgery. It also sucks because I’m sitting there trying to guess what the professor wants rather than writing what *I* want. When I write to argue with total morons on forums, I can add, “you unwashed rube” to the end of every sentence if I want to.
I don’t think every job has to be drudgery–I seriously cannot imagine a world where I have a job writing scripts for movies and TV could not be totally sexy and exciting. Well, I guess I could. It could become like essays if I suddenly started wondering what I needed to write to please the person above me, rather than just writing what I think is awesome. In my fantasy world this job entails everyone thinking I’m a genius and not wanting to touch anything I write.
The job I’m going to do instead of being a lawyer is going to be so awesome my head will explode on a regular basis, I think. It’ll have its down points, like any job, but will be overall the bizzle. However, I could see a hobby like playing video games become drudgery if it were a job. Stuff that I love to do on my own time for limited amounts of time would probably not be good career material. Writing, on the other hand–I could do that all the ding dong day. Unless it’s legal writing. Then it can go eat a bag of dicks.
“Every job is drudgery” is something I hear a lot from people who question my desire to leave law school. They think I will also hate anything else I choose to do, and I’m probably just a lazy asshole. That’s the real difference, though. Even if I am a lazy asshole–I’m not gonna deny it–I can tolerate a shitty job for normal hours. I’ve done it before, really. I can’t tolerate a shitty job for 60-80 hours a week.
Permalink
Leave a Comment
