Pretty plain

There have been some discussions and studies in the media lately about how social networking sites make us feel, about ourselves, and each other. The ones that claim that social networking sites make us feel worse about ourselves make me skeptical. For the most part, I enjoy checking my Facebook account.

Truth be told, there are days I feel like an addict. I’m on Facebook way too much, and the impetus to take a few seconds to see if I have any updates is a strong one, making me feel ashamed, like an out-of-control junkie.

But then there are those wonderful Facebook connections, those times when you have that meaningful interaction with someone you barely know, or don’t know at all, or maybe someone you haven’t talked to in years, and you realize that but for Facebook, the encounter probably wouldn’t have happened at all. It’s that feeling of clicking, that someone gets you—and you get them in return. Maybe someone swoops in to you lift you up right at that moment when you feel as though you couldn’t possibly lift yourself. Maybe you find that someone shares a deeply held belief that you thought might be yours alone. Sometimes a hilariously spontaneous thread knits itself together right in front of your eyes like magic.

The invention of social media has also brought to light a phenomenon that I find both fascinating and somewhat troubling, and again, it’s one of those things that I don’t think we would’ve discovered about ourselves if not for social media: Facebook acts as a sort of living high school yearbook. Instead of being a quaint bit of memorabilia stuck back in our teen years, though, it never ends. It just goes on and on, forever.

There are those women on Facebook—we all know who they are—who can post of photo of themselves and immediately get a string of responses like this: “Pretty! Beautiful! You are so gorgeous!” etc., etc., etc. I have myself reacted this way to photos of my attractive female friends on Facebook. The collective human response to a beautiful woman is, after all, a powerful one: Like moths to the proverbial flame.

Then there are the rest of us. I have never seen a similar response to any male friend of mine who posts a photo of himself, even the dudes who are considered good looking. I mean, sure, if a guy is deliberately mugging for the camera, flexing his bicep, or wearing a tux for a formal event, people might say things like, “Looking good, buddy!” or something else vaguely complimentary, but there’s not the stop-dead-in-your-tracks reaction that occurs when we’re looking at an attractive woman.

When I post a photo of myself, I rarely get the “Pretty!” reaction. I might get, “You look so happy!” or “Nice earrings!” or “You look tired. Are you okay?” But never the cascade of compliments that an attractive woman gets. I would like to say that this doesn’t matter to me. That I have grown up and matured and come to be so comfortable in my own skin that not being pretty doesn’t hurt.

It still does. Just like it did in high school. And I catch myself wondering what it would be like to be one of those women who has the power to render others speechless just by walking into a room.

Don’t be like that. I tell myself. You have no idea what it’s like to be pretty. Maybe it kind of sucks.

Maybe it gets tiring to have people concentrate more on your looks than your abilities. Or your brains. That’s one thing I never have to worry about. I’m no genius, but I don’t normally worry about someone thinking I’m stupid. And if someone does think I’m stupid, I don’t give a shit because I know, deep within me, that he or she is dead fucking wrong. So screw that asshole. End of story.

But maybe when you’re pretty once in awhile you’d like to post a photo of yourself and have people say things like, “You look so happy!” or “Nice earrings!” or even, “You look tired. Are you okay?” Instead of “Hubba, hubba!” or “Hot stuff!” Maybe that sort of reaction starts to feel superficial after awhile. Maybe it starts to wear on your soul.

And it makes me wonder what this fixation on women’s looks does to all of us women, the plain and the pretty.

A treatise on breastaurants

 

From the very first moment I heard about Hooters—and I think I was in high school—I was outraged. Now you can simply put my outrage down to some bitchy feminist ideal, but I assure you that my outrage goes much further than that. Still, it’s an outrage that, over the last twenty years or so, I’ve had a little trouble defining.

I do know that the concept of hiring women—and only women—for a certain position within a business is by definition discriminatory. How is it possible that a so-called legitimate “family” business—not a strip club mind you—can get away with hiring only women, and not men, as servers? Further, how is it legal, in this day and age, to practice single-gender hiring based on a woman’s looks?

And what does it say about us as a society that we’ve taken the forward strides brought to us by so many brilliant, equal-rights-fighting, capable women like Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem, and Anita Hill and pretty much flushed them down a big fucking toilet? What started with Hooters has now lead to several national chains that have taken the hiring process to a place so degrading that it’s about reducing women to one (okay two) body parts: their breasts. These businesses are literally hiring a good pair of tits to wait on their customers. (I’m sure that they would argue that it’s not just about the boobs. They have to hire a pair of boobs with the ability to wait tables, a feat that I am positive is not easy for anyone, boobs or not, which is why I always tip at least 20 percent, even when the service is less than stellar.)

And these businesses don’t even have the common decency to sugar-coat what they’re doing. They put their boobishness on big-ass signs right out front: Hooters, Twin Peaks, Mugs N Jugs.

Yet another part of me argues that women who are good looking and have been blessed with a nice rack have every right to use their genetic advantages to make money if they so choose. After all, if guys are going to continue to be so easily manipulated as to drop a few bucks when they see a pair of tits, then who am I to deny those women their right to collect their piece of the American pie?

Of course, that argument goes the other way too. What about all us plane-Jane types who have to rely on brains and hard work to make money? That kind of sucks.

In a burst of injustice-induced frustration, one day on Facebook I announced that I would be opening a string of restaurants called Sausage Fest. The menu would be sausage-based and we would be hiring only good-looking young men in their twenties who would sport uniforms that show off their “packages.” I said that we’d only hire young men of a certain length and girth, if you know what I mean. “Who wants to invest?” I asked, and about 20 of my female friends “liked” the status, which at this juncture of our culture is of course the only vote of the people that seems to really count for anything.

A male friend of mine pointed out that such a venture would never work. First off, heterosexual women don’t tend to patronize that kind of establishment in droves. You could cite the popularity of an enterprise such as Chippendales, but the fact of the matter is that its popularity is limited. There are strip clubs for men in virtually every town in America, but only a small smattering of Chippendales-type shows for women. Secondly, my friend pointed out that sexually explicit material that may start out aimed at heterosexual women is often usurped by gay men. Take the publication Playgirl, as an example. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing—I’ve enjoyed a couple of really good strip shows in gay clubs alongside my gay brethren—it still changes the basic intent of my brilliant idea.

And that made me madder than ever. It also made me come to a realization: I’m not mad at Hooters for exploiting women nearly so much as I am for the fact that straight women aren’t able to exploit hot young dudes in the same fashion. ‘Cause if Sausage Fest was real? I’d be eating there breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And that, I realized, after twenty long years, may be the real reason I despise breastaurants.

A big pile of … dirt

 

See this pile of dirt? This pile of dirt represents what it’s like to be part of the 1% in the U.S. today. Because when you’re part of the 1%, you can do this. You can shit all over your neighbors, your community members, your fellow Americans. You can plan a housing development, and pile up a big ol’ mass of refuse, blocking some sap average homeowner’s view. A sap homeowner like me, who’s had to look at this pile of injustice for over three months and counting. If you’re like me, just some regular shmuck, there’s nothing you can do about it, unless you can afford a lawyer, and even if you do that, the 1% guy who’s shitting on you can afford a better lawyer. Also, the rules are different for you, Sap: if you were to pile up a mountain of dirt on your property like this, do you think it would go unpunished? Oh hell no! You’d be fined or ticketed—maybe even taken to jail—and maybe your neighbors would take you to court, and you’d be shunned and shamed, and society would deal with you appropriately. But a one-percenter? He’ll just bitch to his 1% friends about how some loud cunt is making trouble in his bid for “progress.”

Gawd bless America!