The title of the article alone is appalling. But it is our culture, with its continual belittling and marginalization of any female who scores less than 18.7 on the Miens-Hulmer Scale of Objective Attractiveness (itself skewed heavily towards cisgender and heterosexual biases), that we should truly scapegoat. Disgusting: this poor woman, who caught flack enough during her parents’ presidency over her genetically-excusable synthesis of most of her mom’s and dad’s looks, and who found that even after leaving the national spotlight behind, the snide knocks and sneers kept on coming all through her relatively low-profile undergraduate collegiate career – despite loud cries from the gallery that this or that person found her to be perfectly fine, even adorably gawky or appealing in some other way – deserves better. It’s bad enough to have had that stink-cloud hanging over her during her formative years, and young adulthood. Must we now continue to take every opportunity to track and disparage her physical attractiveness as she ages?
The woman is almost thirty-five. And if you must insist on that anachronistic, ever-nasty principle of measuring a woman’s worth by whether she can attract and keep a male, step off: she’s married. She’s been married for almost four years.
She’s married!? Such ostensible “defenses” of Clinton (the transition to “Clinton-Mezvinsky” having been savvily-eschewed) are themselves pure insult! Yet another debasement of female dignity, no better than basing a woman’s value (or rather, debasing it) on whether she has had a child, or children, by a certain age (Clinton hasn’t). Can we all agree that a woman’s dignity is equal to a man’s? That a woman has every right to political, legal and economic standing equal to what a man enjoys?
No. We can’t. Sadly, it seems we can't.
It’s because you shallow mother fuckers are constantly making, tolerating, and/or enjoying cracks about this or that aspect of a woman’s appearance (and don’t even get me started on the use of the word GIRL!). Classing women based on weight, length, width, volume, area, or even height - that's just plain invalid. Wrong. Bad. Don’t. And as to other so-called criteria - Chelsea Clinton is not Asian. So what?! Would you use even that against her? Racist!!
Why should that even come into it? How can that ever even be an issue?
I am sick of people like you, continuing to read an article like this long past the point where its complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy has been established beyond doubt. Is this how you get your thrills? Are your thrills sick? Don't even answer that, it was a rhetorical question. What, do you get your sick little rhetorical thrills by answering other peoples' clearly-rhetorical questions? And you STILL continue to read! The title alone should have been enough to warn you off - yet still you read! YOU are the one who, by your idle curiosity, by your permissiveness, your apathy – YOU aid, perpetuate, support, ratify, validate and otherwise in other ways put your stamp of approval on the culture of manifest female disempowerment.
Wow. "The culture of manifest female disempowerment." I think I just made that up! You like it?
YES. YOU DO. Or at least you sit by and do nothing, passively supporting it as it runs amok. Hence the problem.
Don’t go looking around the room! It is YOU who does it. Yes, YOU. You do. It’s a horrible world you make for future generations. Maybe consider jumping into the fray with the rest of us! We need you. We need your help. "But what can I do," you ask? As if you didn't know! You are the one missing from the movement! Your voice is the one that could complete the chord, a harmony that rings out loud in hard-edged, no-business tones telling Big Culture “No! We do not take this! GAME OVER.” Picture yourself, striding and swaggering down the street of some third- or second-world metropolis in company with Bono, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Faith Hill, Usher, P!nk, the lead singer of The Maroon Five, and probably one of the more prominent or at least one of the closer to critically well-regarded American Idol champions. You would all be trading verses, zooming in to mug at the camera - joining in en masse on the bouncy, hard-hitting chorus! It would be a great big multivocalist tour de force, decrying the everyday humiliation and degradation of women in a feel-good global smash hit! Which is very much more than only appropriate, considering all the women, all over the world, who are being forced constantly to undergo, at the hands of comments like these we've seen about their appearance, torment and discomfort. For what? Why?
Maybe you should be asking yourself that question.
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