If there is, among my circles of feminist acquaintance, any woman who is NOT half in-love with Margaret Cho, I’ll eat my copy of Intercourse. I didn’t really get acquainted with Cho until I was in my mid-twenties, which is to say until I started feeling like I might actually own myself. And then, some lazy law school afternoon (I rarely attended classes), I watched Cho’s HBO special and laughed my ass off and wondered why I wasn’t even half as awesome as she was.
So I was surprised, recently, to hear that she was a part of this new Lifetime series called Drop Dead Diva, in which a thin woman dies and her soul is somehow transported to the body of a fat woman. (Mea culpa: I haven’t watched this yet for psychological/I-only-have-so-much-time-for-tv reasons, but you can read Jezebel’s take on the first episode here.) When you have a show that seems so obviously destined to subscribe to old tropes about the thin and the not-thin (I hear there is an aerosol cheese incident), it’s hard to reconcile that with the kickass image I’ve built up of Ms. Cho. But, don’t treat people like ciphers, blah blah blah.
While sort of musing about this on the second track of my brain I happened to come across an interview with Margaret in the Huffington Post. It’s not a great interview because the interviewer mostly bought the press packet, for this show, hook, line and sinker, but then Margaret says something that I found interesting and illustrative of why she might participate in a project like this:
… I always thought that people told you that you’re beautiful, that this was a title that was bestowed upon you – that it was other people’s responsibility to give you this title. And I’m sick of waiting, people! [laughs] Waiting around for people to tell me that I was! I’m tired of waiting. And I think that the world is pretty cruel to women, in what it considers beautiful and what it celebrates as beauty. And I think that it’s time to take into our own hands this power and to say, “You know what – I’m beautiful – I just am. And that’s my light – I’m just a beautiful woman.” And I am just going to start talking about how beautiful I am, and people will start talking about it after I start talking it. And I’ve noticed – and I’ve done this now for a couple of years – and it’s changed the way that I carry myself, it’s changed the way that people respond to me, and it’s changed the way that I feel , and I think this is an important experiment and an important thing for people to do. To start telling people that you’re beautiful, or just feel beautiful, just start acting like you are the most beautiful woman in the world. And it really improves everything! Because your sort of psyche responds to it – like this is truthful! I think self-deprecation is such a disease, and I want to cure everybody of it and so that’s my contribution.
There’s a Stuart Smalley element to all of this, of course: tell yourself you are beautiful and you will be; tell everyone else and they’ll think so too. We toss this idea around, women do, when we talk about being confident (often in terms of “what guys want,” but in other contexts too), as if that would change everything.
But I know what Margaret is trying to do here, and I respect it. I respect it because the more times beautiful gets associated with things that other people maintain, often vehemently, are NOT beautiful, maybe we might be able to drill a hole in this big wall.
As I said above, I’m not yet in a position to opine as to that particular show. And I’m on record as saying I don’t think claiming that we have power is the same thing as actually having it. But do any of you find any comfort in these kind of mantras? I don’t myself, but I am beginning to wonder if I ought to try.
I definitely think that allowing other people/the world at large to decide whether or not you are beautiful is a trap. I think I’ve mentioned before that my sister is uncommonly conventionally beautiful in the sense of having been defined that way by nearly everyone she comes in contact with. But it is a total prison for her; she is dependent upon others to affirm her beauty and believes that a disproportionate amount of her human worth is derived from it, perversely causing low self esteem and fear of aging among other afflictions. I also think it is strange when people tell you emphatically that you are beautiful. It so often comes with a sense of entitlement — I think you are beautiful and therefore I own you, or I get to have you, or you should love me in return, or be enchanted that I find you beautiful. It’s much more empowering to meet the plaintive, “you’re beautiful” with, “I know. I’ve had this face my whole life. Can we move on?”
I also get what you are saying about not being able to wish oneself into beauty-privilege. However we all know enough ordinary looking people who everyone falls in love with, and gorgeous people who appear to be ignored, to believe that what is considered beautiful and what is are often very far apart, and I would believe that ineffables such as self-carriage, confidence, self esteem, etc. all can play a role.
we all know enough ordinary looking people who everyone falls in love with,
Well, hmm. I know ordinary-looking people that someone has fallen in love with, sure, but that “everyone” has? Maybe I’m not sure what you mean here.
Perhaps because I spent so much of my life feeling painfully awkward and unloveable, I internalized a lot of negative messages about myself. Flaws became the only thing I could see in the mirror. I was always very confident in my intellect but not at all in my looks. It didn’t help that everyone always thought my little sister was beautiful. But one day, I’m not sure what inspired it, I decided only to tell myself positive things about myself, to only allow myself to dwell on things I like about myself when looking in the mirror. Cliché though it sounds, eventually it started to stick.now flaws aren’t the first thing I see. I don’t act like a weirdo when given a compliment. I can actually own my own beauty. So yeah, I think self-talk is a powerful thing!
I’m a little skeptical of Margaret Cho since her dust-up with Melissa McEwan, but I respect her putting her own body out through burlesque and belly-dancing as a demonstration that you don’t have to be white and skinny to be beautiful. But for me personally… I prefer the “who cares about being beautiful?” route to the the “we’re all beautiful!” route.
Ooh, I’m a sucker for internet drama, Spark, I’m gonna have to look into that.
I agree about not caring about being beautiful, but it’s the same wishing oneself out of power problem in some ways.
I had the same kind of experience as funnyface. When I was twelve, I started to break out REALLY badly on my face and back, and of course the kids at school who already picked on me took it as another thing to make me feel ashamed of. And I did, for a long time, feel ashamed of it. I would hide my face as much as possible and would never wear anything that showed my back.
But eventually I got sick of being ashamed of something that is purely genetic (my dad had bad acne for a long time and my brother does too) and almost completely beyond my control. I watched how other people brought more attention to their own “flaws” by losing their self-confidence and trying to hide them, and I realized that it was better for me to just be confident in myself than to act like I was totally marred and a lesser person than everyone else because of it.
It didn’t, of course, make everyone ignore the acne; I still get rude stares and comments sometimes, and still have a difficult time getting retail jobs even though I’m a very good salesperson. But I do think that people treat me a lot better because I not only treat MYSELF better, I expect them to, too.
I prefer the “who cares about being beautiful?” route to the the “we’re all beautiful!” route.
I feel the same way. I find daily affirmation-type stuff false, and reject claims that I and every other person on the planet are uniquely beautiful. Some of us just aren’t pleasant to look at. There’s no use in trying, because one’s looks are not the important thing anyway.
@PhDork, enjoy!
Yeah, there’s some mental gymnastics involved, but what I mean is: I’ve learned to love physical attributes because they’re mine–part my identity and how I see myself–not because they’re beautiful. Maybe the other side of Margaret Cho’s coin.
This might not be completely on track but definitions of beauty fascinate me because they differ so much anyway. Even between countries as superficially similar as the US and the UK there are huge differences between what is considered beautiful. In that sense I think that while I too prefer the ‘who cares about being beautiful’ approach it is also pretty reasonable to conclude that one person’s beautiful can be another’s not terribly attractive at all (as anyone who has heard my husband on the subject of ‘Park Avenue Princesses’ would know).
Oh, I mistook initial-P harpies for each other. Sorry!
It’s ok, Spark, we get confused too. In real life I consistently refer to BeckySharper as “Becky” even though it’s not her real name.
And SarahMC, I just can’t agree with you, not least because I think you put yourself in that category. I don’t know where all this generosity comes from, but I’m not sure I’ve met someone who doesn’t have a beautiful aspect to them, and most people have more than one. I truly have never really understood it.
I just think straining to affirm every person’s physical beauty reinforces the notion that physical beauty is important. I would like our species to get to a point where one could say, “Yeah, she’s ugly; but that makes her no less deserving of respect than a pretty person.” Doubt that’ll happen though.
@SarahMC – Maybe it would help to think of beauty as not simply making a pretty tableau, so to speak. I think that it is important for everyone to be able to connect to their body in a positive way, and part of your body is the outside of your body, and visual pleasure is a positive thing. It’s fine to say, “I may not have good bone structure (or whatever), but I really have a great smile (or whatever)”, you know? I have a hard time believing that there are people who are honestly so terrible to look at the they have no part of themselves that they could get pleasure from seeing.
But, I agree with you about the pretty-people privilege. That’s my favorite episode of 30 Rock, the one about how Jon Hamm lived in an attractive-people bubble.
This post is pretty timely. I have always written off “you are beautiful” type mantras as totally ridiculous. They don’t make you feel any better when you are looking in the mirror and seeing your every flaw. “You are beautiful!”
No. You don’t feel that way.
But sometimes I have this feeling when it comes to other people. Maybe it’s because I didn’t spend very much time on the internet today, or that it was warm and sunny, but as I was walking down the street I looked around and everyone looked remarkably beautiful to me. I wanted to stop them all and tell them so, but then I would seem like a crazy, creepy predator person but also no one would believe it–we’re all conditioned to be so skeptical of “you are beautiful” type stuff that when we hear it we ignore it, especially if we’ve already put ourselves in the “not-attractive” category in our own minds.
And seeing everyone around me (it is not that I was at a modeling photo shoot or anything; there were people who were old, young, with a broad array of body types, skin colors, face shapes, clear skin and pimpled skin and facial expressions) as totally beautiful made me feel like yeah, I probably am too, even though I’ve been struggling with my own self-image lately.
At the same time, I thought: beauty doesn’t really matter anyway. It just felt extraordinary to see it in everyone.
I also had the sense that everyone was basically good and kind, which may have also been a result of not spending much time on the internet today. This whole experience sounds ridiculous, but it happened and was an extraordinary feeling. Repeating a mantra like that in a mirror wouldn’t do any good, but sometimes these senses show up in real life. And they’re powerful when they do happen.
Well, put a pot on the boil, Pilgrim Soul, because I don’t like Margaret Cho. I stopped liking her when she wrote that misogynist screed against Sarah Palin, along with Sandra Bernhard, of the “Palin should get gang raped by black men” hilarity. Somehow I missed that dust up with Melissa McEwan(thanks, Spark) but I’m not surprised that that’s what it was over.
I agree with some of you in that what I want for women is for all of us to be valued for more than our beauty, our fertility, our usefulness to men. I want to rewrite the rubric, not give everyone an A+ for effort.
If we, as feminists, affirm beauty as so valuable, we affirm the paradigm in which our bodies, and our fuckability is always up for comment, even when we’re running for V.P..
Beautiful can mean so many different things, not just physical beauty. I’m reminded of the old Carole King song:
You’ve got to get up every morning
With a smile on your face
And show the world all the love in your heart.
Then people gonna treat you better
You’re gonna find, yes you will,
That you’re beautiful as you feel.
In short, I completely support the idea of saying to yourself, “I’m beautiful” and meaning it in whatever way works the best for you. It doesn’t have to mean “my only worth is my physical appearance” or “physical beauty is the most important thing in life.” These affirmations can work on many levels. We can strive to be beautiful in thought, word and deed.
Somewhere I saw a study that found people who started with somewhat high self-esteem benefitted from positive self-talk and people who started with lower self-esteem actually had lower self-esteem after positive self-talk. I’m sure something different works for everyone, whether it’s feeling beautiful or feeling beauty isn’t important. I think I have some of both. Parts of me are beautiful but beauty doesn’t really matter.
But SarahMC, while I know it’s cliche, beauty *isn’t* just the outside. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of thinking someone was beautiful initially but then discovering that they were actually a really horrible person, which made them actually quite physically ugly. There’s just too much elasticity to a living, breathing person – something that you never see in fashion photographs, nor scripted television or scripted and choreographed live performances – to say that beauty is purely physical.
Hana Maru, rather than throwing out the concept of beauty altogether, can’t we expand or alter it’s definition?
@sarahmc: I know it sounds cliche but I so rarely think any woman I meet isn’t “pretty” (I don’t know why but this word always pops into my head more than beautiful). Its not that its “important” I just think like, what a cute girl or what a sweetie or something. Its totally genuine, so I’m always baffled when people turn to me and are like, “i’m so ugly!” because in my head I’m just like “?” I know a lot of people have issues with their appearance (I do as well) and I’m not trying to oversimplify that struggle, but I do think there’s a mindset that you can get into where, and this sounds so hokey but whatever, inner beauty is really visible to you as outer beauty.
more thoughts: to clarify, let me just say I never think ANYONE is ugly, I’m not saying that to be all “perfect” or whatever, like I really don’t know what that word means to me now that I’m thinking about it. Ugly is just as much of a construct as beauty for the most part.
Margaret Cho is a fantastic, smart wonderfully entertaining feminist, comedian and actress who is so much more than just funny and thought provoking. She can make me laugh and cry at the same time. Her official site has been re-done and is bigger and better than ever but people subscribed to the old rss need to re-do their bookmarks and feeds which are all conveniently listed on her site at http://www.margaretcho.com/ Margaret explains and describes everything so much better than I could ever hope to on her blog.
There are also links to 43 minutes of the pilot (Episode 1) of Drop Dead Diva, Previews of the Easy Cheese incident, of Margaret talking about her role as Teri, about Brooke Elliot as Jane and oh so much more. Love her.
I like her too, but apart from the Palin comments, she also pissed me off when she did this riff on how Laura Bush’s ladygarden tastes like Lysol. I am no Laura Bush fan, but that still seemed like a cheap shot.
fyi PS — i meant like, “pretty” girls on TV who are really ordinary looking with extraordinary grooming.
[...] Margaret Cho: “And I think that it’s time to take into our own hands this power and to say, “You know what – I’m beautiful – I just am. And that’s my light – I’m just a beautiful woman.” And I am just going to start talking about how beautiful I am, and people will start talking about it after I start talking it.” More at Pursuit of Harpyness. [...]