🧝♀️ On NOVEMBER 13, 2012 3:21
a truly horrific gushy gender and beauty-obsessed glurge post called I've started telling my daughters I'm beautiful was made on this liberal site and unfortunately due to the propensity for so many women to gobble up such female-praising stuff, it became a chain letter that was bragged about as having no negative reaction at all.
Then, meme-manglers got hold of it.
And we really don't like it.
It's another of those "You can fix every woman by telling her she's 'beautiful and you should remember that being beautiful is everything to a woman and you should teach your daughters to worship beauty and the female gender' dreck. Oh, and, don't let your womanly backs get bent carrying the weights of the world, especially religion, be sure to blame any feelings of low-self-worth on it as well as fixating on appearance.
🤦🏽♀️BP: Oh, YEESH. Well, I might as well contribute to the mangling of this glurge. *cracks knuckles* Prepare to breathe your last, viral!
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Before we get to that, here's something else to think about.
In early April 2013, Obama got lots of flak from some feminists for commenting about some woman's good looks. You can read all about it here.
🙎Meme: I've started telling my girls that I think I'm beautiful.
🤦🏽♀️BP: *rolls eyes* Oh, I can see where THIS is going...
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Bleck! This is going to be one heck of a nauseating read, I can just tell "You're so beautiful because you are girls" and all that kruft. *Hauls out barf bucket*
Don't get me wrong. by all means, be genuinely nice and build people up, but not based on such shallow ideas as gender or so-called beauty!
🙎Meme: It's been so easy to tell them how beautiful THEY are, because it's obvious. They are the thing beauty is made of. They are the reason we started worshipping beauty.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: OMG What the - freaking' - heck!?
🤦🏽♀️BP: Whoa, whoa, whoa! Speak for yourself! We're not all NEARLY as enamored with 'beauty' as you think. Society's view of 'beauty' is so skewed as to require its rejection.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: I don't worship beauty, I worship God, and admire things I might consider beautiful, like music,the weather when it's warm enough to be without a jacket, nature. I do not concern myself with who is the most supposedly beautiful person in the world, and certainly not based on their gender.
These gender-related chain letters that go on telling women we're something so totally special and so incredibly beautiful just because we are women while at the same time, painting women as shallow, self-loathers, especially based on appearance, are wrong on so many levels. They seem to value people not because of personality, but via gender-descrimination. The progressive way is to practically worship women for being women, and this chain being written by a progressive, well, that explains it doesn't it? But conservative women get taken in by this too. that was a bit of a tangent. What I'm saying, though, is these gender chain letters encourage so many bad stereotypes and offer fake flattery that is no substitute for real contentment and self-esteem. They keep telling women that women naturally hate themselves over appearance because it's a woman thing and we're somehow doing this hugely outstanding heroic transcendent thing by saying to ourselves and our fellow females "Hey! I'm beautiful! You're beautiful!"
Argh!
🙎Meme: They sparkle and dance.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: The dancing I can understand. But - sparkle? SPARKLE!? What are they, Twilight vampires?
🙎Meme: When they're sleeping, they turn into soft cloud babies, little perfect tufts of white on the moonlight.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh, the cheesiness! It's stabbing me in the face! It hurts! It burns!
🤦🏽♀️BP: Uh, these are children, right? Sound more like some kind of weather monster...
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Or at the very least, something you see in a drippy Mary sue story.
Yeah, I get it, she loves her female babies. But what if they were boys? Would they still be little white moon floating clouds?
🙎Meme: There are a lot of people like me. Women who know things. Women who have seen things. Women with diseases in their livers. There are a lot of women with scars on their arms
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: *Sigh* If you were looking to move me to some kind of awe or to tears, it isn't happening. I know and have seen things. Everybody who lives, eventually does… male or female. Scars, oh, for goodness sake, not with the so-called "battle scars" self-harmer-love stuff again! *Shudder* Moving on. Everybody gets scars in varied places.
🙎Meme: and words that carry themselves like sparrows.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: That makes absolutely no sense. Talk about over-the-top cheesy corny sappy glurgerific bleck!
So words carry themselves, or do words carry all us women? Are the words so strong and gigantic that us women are as light as sparrows in their - uh - grip?
🙎Meme: There are women who were too big for this town,
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Somehow I'm getting this terrible stereotypical mental image of some loud-mouthed, tough-talking girl with a huge chip on her shoulder and thinks she's much too good for the little hick town she was raised in, just blowing the whole popstand in a spectacular display of "Look at ME! I'm way too big for this little town and I'm a goin' off to make mah fortune somewheres else, and woe to any prissy little lady or idiot man who tries to get in mah way! I'm gonna be a big shinin' star in this world and everybody will know me and love me because I'm me and I came from nothing'!" Yeah, like, 'rah rah sistas, she's bustin' out and conquerin' the whole world! *Rolling eyes*
🙎Meme: who had their backs bent carrying things like religion
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: *Rolling eyes* any good little progressive should be sure to put a little hatred of "religion" into their writing. Well, everybody is religious, and that's definitely true for progressives. Religion is only the standards and ethics each individual holds, so even if you claim to dislike religion, that is your religion.
🙎Meme: and a history that originated somewhere in the crook of a branch that extended over a stream.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Huh? if women came from tree branches, where did men come from? Oh, wait, this was actually about how we supposedly evolved from some tree-dwelling ape man ancestor… I'm still free to choose not to subscribe to that belief.
🙎Meme: A place where a patch of the sky was visible through the leaves, where a little girl let her bare leg dangle too far down.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Too far down into what? This makes no sense whatsoever.
🤦🏽♀️BP: *yawn* We done yet? Enough with the purple prose! I'm all for a more creative style, but this is waxing rather cheesy. And not in a good way.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: That's putting it kindly. This drip is absolutely dreadful.
🙎Meme: There are a lot of people like me, because we're all the same.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: NO - WE ARE NOT!
🤦🏽♀️BP: *disparaging snort* Hardly! I'd hazard a guess that I'm not much like you AT ALL. For one, I don't beat people over the head with 'I IS BEAUTIFUL CUZ I IS WOH-MAN!'.
🙎Meme: We're all blood and electricity.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: The phrase is "flesh and blood" and that applies to the male gender as well, lady!
🤦🏽♀️BP: Eh? Last I checked, I'm not a cyborg. Again, trying to sound deep...perhaps if you had spent all this energy on something that isn't completely contrived and pathetic...
🙎Meme: We're lonely under the gaze of god.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Hey, some people, female and male, actually like being in solitude. Even I do every so often. I don't consider myself to be a lonely person, and when I do feel lonely, it's always because there's something else wrong with me. When I'm fine, I just don't get lonely. I usually welcome company too. Again, if I don't, that usually means something's wrong with me.
🙎Meme: We're all wet with dew
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Nope. I'm not a sparrow chick.
🙎Meme: and swallowing hard against DO THIS, CONSUME, SHUT UP and BE AFRAID to die.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Huh? Hel-lo!? That's the whole human condition, those struggles and emotions are not all owned by just one gender, you know, men go through this crap just as much.
🤦🏽♀️BP: Afraid to die, huh? Funny you should acknowledge the inherent flaws within society, and yet *ahem* worship one of the most destructive...
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: *Claps* Right on the nose!
🙎Meme: All of you women with lines on your brow, with cracks between your fingers… it's been a long winter.
🤦🏽♀️BP: Heh- oh, this winter hasn't even started.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Winter? Just ending in November when this was written? That only makes sense if we're talking about the southern hemisphere. At the time of this mangling, winter hasn't even started officially in the northern hemisphere. And so what if some women get lines on their faces and cracked fingers? Men get that too. So freaking' what?
🙎Meme: All of you, you are beautiful and so am I.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh, for goodness sake!
🤦🏽♀️BP: You're feeding into the very problem you're trying, and not succeeding, I might add, to combat. Besides, why should I care if you think I'm beautiful? This might be hard for you to accept, but SOME of us don't really care about that.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: *Applauds*
🙎Meme: The thing is, my children are perfect.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: I get it. You love your children. and you should. But if you want to get really specific, everybody's kids are perfect and everybody's kids aren't perfect - or at least, they'll stop being perfect at some point because all human beings - every - last - one - of - us - makes - mistakes.
🙎Meme: I am the grown up, so I'm supposed to show them everything about life. When they wake up in the morning, though, I stare at them and they're new. They teach me everything. They are babies and they teach me what it means to be a person.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Okay hold it! I take just a bit of issue with this.
So you're saying you didn't know how to be a person before you had kids? Rot. You are and always were a person. Learning to "be a person" isn't the lesson here, it's simply learning to be the best person you can be, and if you think it takes having kids to get everyone doing that, you are mistaken. Kids may have motivated you to strive to be a better person than you think you ever were, but unfortunately it just doesn't work that way for everybody who has kids. And for those who don't have kids, there are other things motivating them to be the best they can be, and sometimes they just don't care either. and - this all holds true for both female and male.
🙎Meme: It's easy to see that they're beautiful.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: 'beautiful beautiful beautiful' I know you love your kids. I'm glad you love your kids. but I'm really sick of this 'beautiful' obsession.
🤦🏽♀️BP: *rolls eyes* Yeah, please. I know enough about parenthood to know every day isn't sunshine and daisies.
🙎Meme: I am slow and I am tired. I am round and sagging.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh, for the love of deepness, get over the appearance thing already!
🙎Meme: I am harried. I am sexless.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: What in freaking heck's that supposed to mean? 'sexless'? if it means you lack a sex life, that's more than I wanted to hear and nobody's business but your own. Otherwise, you're really not making any sense again. You're a woman, so you are not sexless.You were born a girl, once a girl, always a girl. You don't stop being a female at any point in your life, just like you can't literally go back and change your birth date. And being tired and round and sagging and harried and slow doesn't make you no longer a woman!
🙎Meme: I am getting older.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Just like the rest of us and everything else that exists, for that matter! Welcome to Universe Basics 101!
🤦🏽♀️BP: Well, DUH. No physical attribute stays forever. Your hair will grey, might even fall out. You'll get wrinkly. Your joints will creak and stiffen. Your eyes will dim. And- wonder of wonders- you WILL die someday! Shock-horror!
🙎Meme: I am beautiful. How can this be? How can any of this be true?
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: oh, for crying out loud!
🤦🏽♀️BP: *shrugs* Oh, how should I know? I'm sure you'll beat me over the head with purple prose until I get it, though...
🙎Meme: I don't want my girls to be children who are perfect and then, when they start to feel like women, they remember how I thought of myself as ugly and so they will be ugly too.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: So stop fixating on appearance and 'ugly VS. beautiful' and 'rah rah rah, us women against the whole world!" and help teach your children to keep a rational, human, well-balanced outlook, and they should turn out okay unless they are somehow deficient in the personality department.
🙎Meme: They will get older
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Along with everyone and everything else, Universe Basics 101 again!
🙎Meme: and their breasts will lose their shape
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Breasts don't 'lose their shape' they will change over time, right along with the rest of the body. No biggy. Really, no biggy at all! A little piece of glass on the floor is worth a lot more fuss than that. even spilled milk is worth crying over next to this shallow nonsense.
🙎Meme: and they will hate their bodies,
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: if they do, they'll have themselves to blame for choosing to adopt that nasty attitude, and whatever bad influences encouraged them to go wrong. So if you want them not to be shallow, appearance-obsessed drips, you can help them, and not by offering them meaningless 'beautiful' flattery all the time. Don't just talk the talk, walk the walk.
🙎Meme: because that's what women do.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: WRONG! That's what SOME women do. It's what way too many women do, but this nasty generalization sure as heck doesn't apply to a whole group of humanity belonging to one gender. I don't hate myself. I'm no super model by any stretch, and that's fine. So there goes your sweeping statement. Oh, and, males can also feel bad about themselves, even over appearance. Just as ridiculous as when women do IMO.
🤦🏽♀️BP: Hey, whoa- stop lumping us all into one category! You seem incapable of accepting that there are women in the world who don't give a darn. So what if we all age? That's part of life!
🙎Meme: That's what mommy did. I want them to become women who remember me modeling impossible beauty.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: So you've gone from hating your round saggy old self to wanting to 'model impossible beauty'? Lady, how about just being yourself and learning to be content but working on more important things like trying to make the world a better place to the best of your power, and living life the best way you can?
🙎Meme: Modeling beauty in the face of a mean world, a scary world, a world where we don't know what to make of ourselves.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Hey you! Everybody has to live in this 'mean world' it isn't all rosy for the men either.
🤦🏽♀️BP: Oh, give me a bucket! You want to be remembered for slaving to attain an impossible ideal? Hardly what I'd aspire to. This world imposes plenty of impossible demands on us- and you want to go down immortalized as a slave to them? Gee, what a terrific role model! *rolls eyes*
🙎Meme: "Look at me, girls!" I say to them. "Look at how beautiful I am. I feel really beautiful, today."
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: *Gagging*
🤦🏽♀️BP: Yup, I need that bucket. Excuse me. *spews chunks*
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: *Choke cough* Urgh! *cough cough wheeze*
🙎Meme: I see it behind their eyes, the calculating and impression. I see it behind their shining brown eyes, how glad they are that I believe I am beautiful. They love me. To them, I am love and guidance and warm, soft blankets and early mornings. They have never doubted how wonderful I am. They have never doubted my beauty.
🤦🏽♀️BP: Rrrrggg...look, kids don't even really understand beauty yet. Why should they? They have kid problems, like so-and-so not sharing her cookies and that mean boy down the street decapitating your doll. Kids don't worry about beauty- if anything, they parrot out what they've been taught...and YOU are not doing a very good job of teaching them what you profess to know...
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: At least if you're going to go on about how your kids adore you, don't pin it all on something so shallow as "Look at me, I'm so beautiful!" Let's be a bit more honest about it and call it for what it is. Kids who love their parents for loving them and for being good parents. Thinking you're "beautiful" and hinging your whole well-being on that is really pathetic.
🙎Meme: How confusing it must have been for them to see me furrowing my brow in the mirror and sucking in my stomach and sighing.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: *Rolling eyes* As if they'd even notice… Please.
🤦🏽♀️BP: Again, I doubt they noticed. I didn't notice when I was little. Then again, I was a bit of a demon-child, so I probably don't fit in your category of glorious cloud-babies with tufts of moonlight for hair.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: me neither. I didn't give a hoot what anyone looked like when I was a kid, I still don't, and I always have and always will think it's silly and shallow to obsess on appearance, and i'm so sick of people doing that.
🙎Meme: How confusing it must have been to have me say to them, "You think I am beautiful, but you are wrong. You are small and you love me, so you're not smart enough to know how unattractive I am. I know I am ugly because I see myself with mean eyes. You are my child and I love you, but I will not allow myself to be pretty, for you. No matter how shining you are when you watch me brushing my hair and pulling my dress over my head. No matter how much you want to be just like me, I can't be beautiful for you and I don't know why."
🤦🏽♀️BP: *exasperated sigh* Oh, come on! I just cleaned out the bucket! *mumble grumble* If you keep spewing out nauseatingly sappy passages like that...well, it's going to get messy.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh, brother! Lady, if this is what you actually said to your kids, you are one screwed up… Look, The only one going on and on about ugly VS. beautiful is you. Others just don't care so much about that, not to this emotional train-wreck extent anyway. Nobody has ever called me stupid or even implied I was stupid for insisting they weren't ugly.
🙎Meme: It's working, a little bit. I've even stopped hating myself, a little bit.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: yeah right. You either stopped or you haven't. I'm not convinced you've stopped even a little, and I honestly don't get why so many women just gargle and swallow this sort of dreck, I really don't!
🤦🏽♀️BP: Oh, please! Hating yourself for not fitting an impossible ideal of beauty? That's one of the WORST reasons for self-loathing I've ever heard. You've no sympathy from me.
🙎Meme: I'll be what they see. They see me through eyes of love. I'd do anything for them, even this.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Even writing a huge appearance-fixation Mary Sue chain letter, yeah, that's obvious.
🤦🏽♀️BP: So, you'll bow to every whim of society, hate yourself, and then drip on and on about how beautiful you are, even though you think you're an ugly she-beast. Yeah...that doesn't sound idiotic in the least!
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: *Splutters*
🙎Meme: I am beautiful.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: You are annoying!
🤦🏽♀️BP: And I don't care! I've never understood people's fixation with beauty-and to be honest, I find it utterly disgusting. You're merely another cog in the machine. You perpetuate that which you feign to despise. Nice one.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Over and out!
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