MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and
chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.
well, I've often wondered if she has Marfan's as well, though I hope not because I don't want her in my tribe. (And yeah, I've heard that I'm ugly, anorexic, and/or horse-faced most of my life too, so as much as I totally despise Ann Coulter and everything she stands for, it would be nice to hear fellow Coulter-haters lay it on without resorting to bullshit about how she looks. Seriously, I've gotten the exact same shit all my life, and it fucking sucks.)
scody, agreed. I thought that AskMe, and its answers, were just in horrendously poor taste. Ha ha! She's ugly! We're so much better than her cuz she's skinny!
She makes plenty of stupid comments for which she can be attacked quite entertainingly. There's no reason to resort to juvenile attacks on her looks.
In general I completely agree with you, scody and occhiblu. But don't you think that Coulter is trading on her looks as part of her pundit persona?
I don't know—the whole thing is problematic.
The things she says are so repulsive, so intentionally over-the-top and extremelly hateful-yet-smug, that I am unable to apply normal rules of human decency to how I think about her. In any possible ugly, hateful way in which she could be humiliated, I am inclined to eagerly participate.
Yes, but so must any woman in the media. It's not exactly her fault that skinny young blondes get more attention than overweight old women on TV. Given the stacked deck, I'm not going to blast any woman for playing into the system.
And I think it's just hateful for intelligent people to say it's unfair she's using her looks to get ahead, and then attack her based on her looks, because they're buying into the same sytem that put her on TV -- namely, it's somehow "natural" to judge women based on their looks.
thanks, occhiblu. I've bit my tongue (or at least, my typing fingers!) a couple of times lately here and in AskMe in the threads that wind up being pile-ons on skinny chicks (OMG, anorexia! OMG, real women have curves! OMG, only a dog wants a bone!) but I'm starting to get real, real sick of it. I have to work so hard to keep weight on -- it's the double curse of having Marfan's and being on a high dose of thyroid hormone post-cancer, which keeps my metabolism artificially high in order to keep the cancer in remission -- and I'm just so tired of it. I was at the gym the other day and I overheard a couple of women whispering about me -- "oh, I guess the heroin chic look is still in." It took all the willpower I had to say "yeah? Well at least I can go home, eat a cheesecake, and not have to throw it up, BITCHES." And I hate, I really hate being pitted against other women like that, and I hate the fucking beauty norms that say my body's ugly because I don't have big breasts or voluptuous hips.
All of which is why I think I have such a girl-crush on Catherine Keener. I mean, YAY! A pretty, sexy movie star who's built like me? Unheard of in this stupid town. (Actually, she's possibly even a tad skinnier than me.)
on preview: I certainly agree that she does trade on her looks, kmellis -- she gets a mass media soapbox in part by virtue of being blonde and thin in a way she certainly wouldn't if she looked like, say, Andrea Dworkin did. But yet the ugliness with which she is attacked for being skinny/horsefaced/homely/etc. can't help but hit me deeply when I hear it -- I cannot tell you how many times I've heard those same words applied to me, either to my face or behind my back. There are times to this day I feel sick to my stomach looking in the mirror, sometimes, because I've heard those words my whole life. I gave up acting because of it. I hate having my pictures taken because of it. I assume anyone who pays me a compliment about my looks is either condescending or making fun of me because of it. That shit cuts deep, and when I hear it applied to her I hear the echoes of it being applied to me.
Now, calling her out for being a fucking sociopathic fascist blackshirt? Fair game entirely.
scody, I know you're not in any way fishing for compliments here, but I feel like I can't let your last comment pass without saying that I've been consistently blown away by how attractive you are in any meet-up photo I've seen of you.
I'm really touched by your comments here, scody, and I wish I knew the right words to validate how you're feeling (not that you need my validation, mind you) and the right words to somehow make things at least just a little bit more right. But I don't know the words.
"...in the threads that wind up being pile-ons on skinny chicks"
There's a common human instinct to prefer to attack instead of praise as a corrective to a perceived injustice. If, for example, one believes that the American female beauty aesthetic favors skinniness and unjustly spurns fattiness, an instinctive response is to bash skinniness and praise fattiness as a corrective. What people don't realize is that they're just repeating the same unfairness against a different target, no more deserving than the first. So fat women have been made to feel like they're unattractive, deficient, worthless, and perverse...the solution is to make skinny women feel like they're unattractive, deficient, worthless, and perverse??
And of course the true injustice, the true affront to human dignity, is this all-pervasive investment of a women's self-worth in her physical appearance. Saying that the beauty standard should be this instead of that isn't making the world any better for women. Just different.
My best friend is very skinny and has always been very skinny. He's far enough from the norm that it's a notable characteristic and people do, in fact, take note of it. The thing is, though, that because so many people are overweight and trying to lose weight, they assume that his skinniness is something they can mention and joke about. He's self-conscious about it anyway, the frequent comments only make it worse.
But what I find more interesting, and more sad, is that although most people upon learning of his self-consciousness and insecurity about his weight apologize and subsequently refrain from similar comments, there's a strong minority of people who refuse to take his feelings seriously and are somewhat insulted that he could possibly take insult. Because everyone wants to be skinny, right? He should get over it.
I'd like to think anyone here who might be inclined to take this view could take a step backwards and reconsider.
I assume anyone who pays me a compliment about my looks is either condescending or making fun of me because of it.
Go easy on scody -- she still keeps forgetting that she's hawt and all. Next time I see her, I'll remind her by smacking her on the head. Or maybe on the ass.
(Seriously there -- many would kill to look like you, including your boobs 'n' hips. Remember that one of the first comments I made in your direction on MeFi was an A/S/L wisecrack when you mentioned having a "model-like" figure? Condescending, making fun of you -- well, many of us also, you know, find that body type attractive.)
I was super skinny until a couple years ago (and now I'm "normal" for my size). This wasn't dieting or exercise on my part -- it's just how my body was. I didn't hit 100lbs until my late 20s, and I was always really self-conscious about it, like what scody's saying.
I never got the behind-the-back heroin chic comments (or at least never overheard them). But I tell you what was a constant: Other women (many of whom I did not know) saying "Oh, but you're so skinny...." As in, "you're so skinny you can [eat/wear/X/Y/Z] whatever you want."
These comments were usually totally out of context, and they were certainly unwelcome and unprovoked on my part.
And it sucked.
I never, ever would have said to any of those women, "Oh, but you're so chubby, there's no way you'd fit into this lovely pair of pants." Or, "Honey, you are so fat. Why are you eating that cheeseburger?"
But they felt okay commenting on my body.
Body issues are almost common enough to be a rule, period. It doesn't matter what kind of body we're talking about.
I think people should remember that when they accuse someone of being anorexic. It's no different from accusing someone who's slightly overweight of being a gluttonous pig.
mudpuppie: Yeah, the supposed "freedom" to comment on my body always shocks me a little, too. I've gotten it from strangers, coworkers, friends, and family, and remember it as early as mid-childhood (there was once the memorable comment from my grandma, who said she to fed me hot fudge sundaes on a regular basis in the hopes that I'd wake up fat one day just like her).
And it's not just my body I've heard comments about my whole life. There was the makeup director for a movie I'd auditioned for at age 14, who called all her assistants over to look at me and my "terrible profile problem" that would be such a challenge to make look "normal." There was the friend I overheard in grad school describing me to a classmate as "homely and horse-faced -- but still, really cool!" There was the random guy off the street a couple of years ago who came up to tell my friend who I was walking with how beautiful she was, and then turned to me without missing a beat and said, "boy, it must suck to have a pretty friend, huh?" And people sometimes wonder why I've been in braces for nearly 3 years and voluntarily had both my jaws broken and re-set just to try to improve my weird Marfanoid bite/jawline/profile? Jesus, I only wish I could have done it 20 years sooner.
Sorry if this sounds like the Scody Poor Self-Esteem Thread; truly, I do know I'm not in danger of having to make my living in the freak show, and yes, I have come to understand that some folks even find me attractive. I even feel that way with some regularity now, myself. So thanks to kmellis and occhiblu and DaShiv and mudpuppie for the compliments and empathy. Like I said, I usually keep my mouth shut about this stuff, so I appreciate y'all letting me vent a little.
Wow... scody. I think you're gorgeous, so hearing those stories is kind of shocking. Yeah, no wonder you're sensitive about this issue.
Regarding Coulter, it seems she definitely does make capital off her appearance, so comments are inevitable... But it's kind of strange. Her personality (or possible her "persona") is so monstrous that garden-variety criticisms of her physicality are ... well, like attacking Vlad the Impaler for wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
Incidentally, I was thinking about Coulter today in the context of the recent MeFi thread about assassination. It occurred to me that she's an exception to the rule that assassination does more harm than good. She's so inherently noxious and not genuinely admirable—even from a conservative's perspective—that there's no real danger of a substantial martyrdom. She'd be largely forgotten in only a few years. Yet her influential demagoguery would have been eliminated.
This is all speculative, of course. I certainly do not intend to encourage some young idealist into violent action. Heavens, no. That would be wrong.
I would just like Ann Coulter to go away. . .It is pretty obvious, as most have said, that her corrosive message gets so widely spread because of her appearance. (Disclosure: I have looked at all the pics on her site, including the one with her aiming a shotgun off her porch.)
Her whole deal is sick and twisted. And she's gotten rich off it.
My understanding is that Coulter's latest includes a chapters-long attack on evolution. The full contemptibleness of Coulter is that she does not believe what she writes. She is just a self-made marketing creation. That the conservative movement should have fallen from Bill Buckley to George Will and now to Ann Coulter is a tragedy for the whole country.
eekacat, my comment was something to effect that she is probably anorexic but I prefer to think that food refuses to nourish her out of spite because she's so mean.
You know, she's probably lapping up all this latest publicity and trying to figure out what her next outrageousness is going to be so she can keep milking her fifteen minutes for another few years.
danf, at the end of the day though, she's just a vicious and hate-spreading harpy and that's something I would have having to live with. It makes me feel better to believe that she, deep down, hates herself very much.
scody, I've seen a few photos and each time thought that you were beautiful. Being on the other side of the body image scale (in all ways) I can, and do, empathize. I often remind myself that the people commenting obviously have their own issues.
The first time I saw Ann Coulter (I think it was on Politically Incorrect) I thought she was pretty. Then she opened her mouth and spewed her bile and ever since then I can't see her as anything other than ugly. It isn't her weight or her body or her hair or her face. It's what comes out of her mouth. I don't feel guilty for thinking or saying she's ugly. Whether her idiocy is an act or a joke or genuine, it's damn ugly and it colors my perspective on her looks. She could be built like a brick shithouse with the face of an angel and her desperate attention-whoring would still make her repulsive to me. The same goes for all the male wankers out there too.
The thing is, while I agree with what LeeJay is saying, I think there's a strong gender imbalance (heh. When don't I think that?). I don't consistently hear people calling Rush Limbaugh or Karl Rove or whoever "ugly," while it seems to be among the first few adjectives lobbed at Coulter. It's like we're allowed to dismiss women simply because we find them unattractive -- that becomes shorthand for everything negative about them -- while we don't make the same appearance-based shorthand comments about men, for the most part.
"Chimp" being an obvious counter-example. But still, I mean, GWB seems to sum up a great deal of what's wrong with "conservative" America just now, and I don't see entire threads dedicated to how ugly he is, nor do people tend to immediately condemn his appearance every time his name comes up.
Just for the record, for some reason I don't think I've ever seen any photos of scody. I'm sure if I had, I'd have sung her beautacious praises. Which, frankly, without ever having seen her, I'm absolutely certain are extraordinary.
scody, I know you're not in any way fishing for compliments here, but I feel like I can't let your last comment pass without saying that I've been consistently blown away by how attractive you are in any meet-up photo I've seen of you.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, scody is hot. Anyone who says otherwise is obviously blind.
I don't really know much about Ann Coulter (I assume she is some American self-declared celebrity who everyone assumes the whole world cares about), but she looks mean. They say beauty is only skin-deep, but that's not true - beauty comes from within and just because you match the "formula" that the media tells us makes you beautiful doesn't stop you from being the ugliest person around.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
