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Miss ???

***I've been interrupted approximately 12 times whilst editing, so I apologize ahead of time for any typos and/or rough transitions. I'm posting it anyway since I want it up tonight. 

 A basic stat from Miss Representation: “78% (of girls) hate their bodies by age 17.”

Not surprising at all, probably not to any of us, right? I’m pretty sure this extends to, for a large number of grown women as well, hating our skin, our hair, our faces, and really, we’d hate any additional parts were we to have them.  Should we manage, though, to circumvent the beauty industrial complex and have the blessing, or courage, or just sheer guts to dare find ourselves attractive and desirable – pretty much guaranteed someone’s going to emerge to remind us that we aren’t. More and more, I encounter this disgusting myth that women only “deserve” to feel sexy, or pretty, or really even to, well, have sex if we’re physically beautiful in the most myopic of ways.  This sort of perverse culture in which young women often wind up feeling “lucky” a man’s interested in them at all, that he’s “willing” to sleep with them, if they’re overweight, etc.  This perversity exposes itself in lines I’ve heard far too many times like, “fat girls try harder”, the logic being, of course, that if she’s physically average or below so, she isn’t entitled to any self esteem and is expected to please in bed, to effectively be appreciative to a partner for deigning to have sex with her despite her obvious physical shortcomings. (This scenario is explored in “Girls” but not the focus of this discussion, so I won’t get into it here.)

That said,  I think this sort of exchange is nicely summed up by this headline: “Lena Dunham Daring To Exist Is Starting This Awful Woman-Shaming Spiral Of Something” . Eve Vawter writes,” the first layer is this conversation about how a woman who dares to be a size eight (Yes, an eight. A size eight, which in real life is medium. Normal. Smaller than normal) dares to take off her clothing on television or who doesn’t dare to hide her size eight/sometimes size six body or something because she is seen wearing shorts or sleeveless tops on occasion. The majority of talk about Lena Dunham – Oberlin graduate, Golden Globe winner, writer, actress- is her appearance.” Imagine the young women who might look up to Dunham – the now 26-year-old Oberlin graduate, Golden Globe (and Emmy) winner, writer and actress – reading and listening to the endless fat shaming of a woman who isn’t by any stretch of the imagination (or medical definition’s) actually fat, listening to the endless critiques of every part of her body and face. DO young women, as the documentary suggests, hesitate to choose options that will put them in front of the public, whether as pundits, politicians, or actress because they fear the backlash: Does this obsequious appearance bashing make them think think even twice about pursuing options? I think it does, and I also think that “thinking twice” is thinking once too much about going after something you really want to do.

In the film liberal pundit Dr. Rachel Maddow jokes about the hate mail she receives, poorly articulated critiques of her sexuality and appearance, noting that, even if you “think [she’s] too hideous for tv”, she’s still going to be there, day after day, doing her thing. Of her on-air appearance and persona, Maddow has said, "I'm not that pretty. Women on television are over-the-top, beauty-pageant gorgeous. That's not the grounds on which I am competing. . . . I'm not Anchorbabe, and I'm never going to be. My goal is to do the physical appearance stuff in such a way that it is not comment-worthy." The irony of course, is that it IS comment-worthy, and endlessly so.

Doesn’t matter if Maddow tries to de-emphasize the physical as much as possible so as to shift the focus to her ideas, or whether Lena Dunham of “Girls” fame overemphasizes it, doing nude sex scenes that show an average female body having sex and – daring! to enjoy it, feeling she’s entitled to it and gasp! possibly actually considering herself attractive while doing it. Like Maddow, Dunham has been harangued, endlessly criticitized not just by internet trolls and bloggers but by a number of public figures. Most recently it was Howard Stern, who called her “a little fat girl who kind of looks like Jonah Hill and she keeps taking her clothes off.” Her response? "I'm not that fat, Howard,” she said. “I’m not super-thin, but I'm thin for, like, Detroit.” She also graciously accepted his apology, in which he admitted he’s now a big fan of the show and “in love” with her character, Hannah.  

A recent “Girls” plot arc depicts Dunham’s character Hannah having a weekend fling with a character played by actor Patrick Wilson, and once it aired, the backlash ensued, all boiling down to “Someone who looks like Patrick Wilson would never have sex with someone who looks Lena Dunham.” Wilson’s wife Dagmara Dominczyk tweeted a response that directly addresses the supposed implausibility of the Dunham/Wilson coupling: “funny, his wife is a size 10, muffin top & all, & he does her just fine. Least that's what I hear ;) rule # 1 - never say never.” And another: “I think @lenadunham is pretty great. Love her boobs, admire her balls. Proud of the episode of my hubby proud of GIRLS.”

   Good for Dagmara, Good for Wilson, and good for Lena Dunham, all of whom seem like evolved, cool people who are invested in lots of things besides beauty.  I think Deborah Treisman gets to the gut of why people hate Lena Dunham (and/or Rachel Maddow). Here, (excerpted from her conversation with writer David Sedaris, who wrote “Jesus Shaves”): “There is a certain amount of just hostility that gets shot at a woman who makes herself central to her work. I think what they share is a certain refusal to be embarrassed about who they are. People like women in the spotlight either to be perfect or to be embarrassed not to be perfect…” And that’s just it – neither Maddow nor Dunham seems to feel the need to shrink back and apologize for filling our giant plasma screens with rather ordinary visages and bodies. Neither physically conforms to current molds of physical beauty, but both appear quite confident.  But they are just two, and such confidence is hard to come by. Miss Representation opens up with this rather alarming statistic: “In one week American teenagers spend 31 hours watching TV, 17 hours listening to music, 3 hours watching movies, 4 hours reading magazines, 10 hours online. That’s 10 hours and 45 minutes of media consumption a day.”  If young women interested in any sort of endeavor or career in the public eye spend nearly 11 hours consuming media a day, they’re learning a lot about what they have to look forward to should they settle on something with a largely public component. As Vawter notes, “This entire conversation is so soul-destroying.” And it really is.