Belaboring the obvious

Just a follow-up thought on my last post– you know, even if everyone’s personality matched their appearance exactly, and all beautiful people were good and wise while all ugly people were stupid and nasty, that wouldn’t justify being anti-feminist. Being good, wise, and beautiful all at the same time doesn’t make a person any more likely to appreciate being treated as though because she is also female, her primary job is to be sexy. Indeed, I think we could safely say that the more virtuous and intelligent she is, the more likely she would be to resent this.

Greta Christina made a post yesterday that could hardly be more illustrative of the futility of making being sexy the primary goal of your life. Someone actually posted on her blog that he couldn’t take her seriously because she once posed nude for a calendar. He said that made her a whore, and he “separates whores from women I take seriously.” And he said this while freely acknowledging that he had masturbated to the image of her. Now, Greta Christina is a lesbian, so I think she could hardly give less of a damn about whether any man got off looking at her naked. But this particular man made it very clear– because he found her sexually desireable, enough to masturbate to, that makes her a “whore” and her thoughts not deserving of any regard.

You sort of have to be happy when people admit that they think this way, because it’s like waving a nice bedsheet-sized red flag letting you know to give them a wide berth (because, as we know, a person’s appearance does not tell you his/her character, or every man who thinks this way would resemble an upright warthog). Literally– I’d like to be aware of this person while walking down the street, so that I could cross to the other side if I saw him coming. I’d like him to move to some other country, actually, such a perhaps Saudi Arabia where it’s acceptable to believe that men wanting to have sex with women is a flaw of womankind, permissable grounds for viewing them as lesser. But actually that’s not a good idea, because Saudi Arabia has enough people who think that way. I wouldn’t want to inflict any more upon the women who live there.

Greta Christina has balls of steel, by the way. I really should use a more appropriate expression, but that’s the one that evokes the proper reverence. There are all kinds of reasons to admire her, but that nude pic in particular is a reason to give respect, not deny it. Because she had to know that it would mean a future of periodically encountering douchebags like that guy, and she did it anyway.

And again, the fact that he found her photo arousing is only significant in that it conveys the fact that being arousing to someone does not earn his respect. Once that is understood, there’s an enormous freedom and power to be found in not seeking it.