When Julie's good, she's very very good..... Today she's talking about beauty vs. brains:
We have never been so confused about beauty as we are now, and it really is the oddest thing to be confused about. You can understand people not getting quantum physics or being baffled by the offside rule, but even a tiny baby shown a series of mugshots ranging from the grim to the gorgeous will smile at the lookers. Being without jealousy, sexual desire or status anxiety, perhaps only a baby can see beauty for what it is; a wonderful thing, as meaningless and transient as a perfect rose. But once these gatecrashers make their presence felt, beauty stops being simple and becomes all about us. And we all know how peculiar that particular can of worms is.I’ve always thought that having a love-hate relationship with anything was a sure indicator of profound stupidity — surely you know if you like something or not! — and beauty brings out this cretinous tendency in so many of us. While pursuing it for ourselves and slavering over those who have it, we also — women even more so than men; this is not a feminist issue — mock those who undergo cosmetic surgery or who live off their looks. The tyranny of the sisterhood has made many professionally beautiful women apologetic as never before; Michelle Pfeiffer thinks she looks like “a duck”, Uma Thurman is forever pointing out how weird she is, while Keira Knightley claims never to have been chatted up.
Maybe I’m missing something, but for the life of me I can’t understand why such body-dysmorphia (if they really mean it) or sucking-up (if they don’t) should be seen as a sign of being pleasingly modern, normal and nice, and make these starry creatures “one of the girls”; in my book it’s old-fashioned female self-loathing/cultural cringe/lying to keep the peace, and as such it should be discouraged. The shameless, blameless days when Ursula Andress was asked why she stripped off for Playboy and answered simply “because I’m beautiful” are long gone; now we get our kit off in a caring way, to empower ourselves/other women/heal our dysfunctional child inside.
This culture of tits-out self-righteousness is so much the norm these days that when the breath of fresh air that is Jordan comes along, stating plainly and repeatedly that she does it for the money, that she can earn more in a day doing this than she would in a year doing the sort of job generally available to someone of her social class, she is reviled as a moron and a monster, someone not quite human. Just for telling the truth, and for being robust and sensible enough to see her beauty as a thing apart from herself.
Good stuff, but a bit disingenuous: it surely is a feminist issue.
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