Search This Blog

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Women! *eyeroll*

Kathy Shaidle: Cry Me a Rivers
How or why Joan Rivers (or anyone within earshot) figured her voice suddenly needed fixing, I couldn’t tell you. Since she wasn’t beautiful, Rivers’ voice was usually described as “raspy” or “grating.” Had she looked like Kathleen Turner and sounded exactly the same, the word would’ve been “husky” instead.

To state that Joan Rivers’ life would’ve been completely different if she’d been better looking is to say nothing—“If we had ham, we could make a ham and cheese sandwich if we had cheese”—and, yet, everything.

Beauty is the female’s primary reserve currency. Some women inherit a pulchritude trust fund; others, like Joan Rivers, are the ones we hear about in stump speeches, those born already owing some five-figure debt to someone or other.
What *is* it with women vis-à-vis other women?! [edit] Also, what *is* is with women that everything they don't like -- even when it's typically done by women, rather than by men -- is always due to the alleged "sexism" of men or of "society" (which is generally used as just another way of blaming men)?

Joan Rivers was a very beautiful woman -- I speak as a man who holds to an all-but-impossible ideal of female beauty (*) -- *until* she turned herself into a freak with plastic surgery. Also, her voice was indeed “raspy” and “grating", and would have been called so even had she looked like the young Liz Taylor.

(*) Some of my cousins are so beautiful that first meeting them can literally take your breath away. And that's just the men. My siblings and I are the "plain" ones of that side of my family (and I'm the "plain" one of the four of us). I know it's not reality, but my setting for "normally attractive woman" is turned up several notches past "5".

1 comments:

B. Prokop said...

Ilion,

What do you think about these comments made by gnu Sam Harris?
(excerpted from an article in The Washington Post)

I also asked Harris at the event why the vast majority of atheists — and many of those who buy his books — are male, a topic which has prompted some to raise questions of sexism in the atheist community. Harris’ answer was both silly and then provocative.

It can only be attributed to my “overwhelming lack of sex appeal,” he said to huge laughter.

“I think it may have to do with my person slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people..People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this – it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”