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Who Gets Stuck in the Friend Zone

(Image by Matthias Ripp used under CC license via)

Well, I finally sat down and saw The Phantom of the Opera a quarter of a century after everyone else. (If you don’t know the story, this parody sums it up pretty well.) I won’t say what I thought of all the songs songs songs because I’m bound to alienate half my readers either way, but by the second to last scene, I was hollering at the screen: “Girl, you’d better not go for that swaggering bully in the mask!” But then she ripped the mask off and he couldn’t stop crying and I was up to my eyelids in Kleenex, wailing: “If only he hadn’t killed so many people! (And talked to her instead of stalked her… ) Now he’s just another disfigured guy stuck in the Friend Zone! But his pain is reeeeeeeeal!”

This week, the word “Friend Zone” has been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. Many of my favorite feminists are not pleased. Because the term is generally thought to be something only straight, bitter men complain about (see these Urban Dictionary definitions), many argue that it’s a misogynistic trope. Lamenting the Friend Zone sends the message, however subliminally, that spending time with a female is pointless unless you gain access to her naughty bits. Because who would want to be friends with a woman?!

Such a bleak view of women is certainly a problem among many men. In the words of John Mix Meyer, “Girls are not machines you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.” Nice for the sake of nice is respect. Nice only for the sake of getting laid is not. As I’ve said before, cross-gender friendship could use a lot more support in books, film, and mainstream society.

But I’ve also used the word “Friend Zone” before because I don’t believe it refers only to this one chauvinistic idea. Unrequited love isn’t fun for anyone. Lots of women have been stuck in the Friend Zone, too. Many people are expected by pop culture to always end up there, because society deems them asexual, and it could be helpful to examine why. Almost every adult on earth craves love and sex, and we are all trying to figure out what attracts those we deem attractive.

Men who sigh, “Girls don’t like nice guys,” need to get over their narcissism. But there are others who wonder in earnest why the Friend Zone seems so jam-packed with quiet guys who genuinely respect women. In stories of every genre, from classic literature (Madame Bovary) to modern literature (Freedom) to dime-a-dozen bodice-rippers (The Bridges of Madison County), bored heroines look past their straight-laced suitors to the tall dark stranger who’s not exactly famous for his fidelity or his feminism. Love triangles always make for good drama, but when the heroine more often than not decides that the devoted sweetheart belongs in the Friend Zone and the unpredictable bad boy belongs in bed, many scratch their heads and repeat, “Why do girls always go for jerks?” Or, as The Mr. T Experience sings, “I have some problems… but even Hitler had a girlfriend, so why can’t I?”

The answer often depends on the situation, but there are two fundamental, heteronormative traditions that prop it up:

The Macho Stereotype – Any guy who isn’t strong and independent to the point of being daring isn’t a “real man.” Obeying the rules, doting on your wife, and being mediocre is emasculating. Hence the double standard men are held to in real life: they are always expected to focus more on their success and autonomy than their emotional fulfillment. Sociologist Stephanie Coontz has pointed out that the inordinate importance of independence to male worth is why homeless men arouse so much more disgust than homeless women.

The Gentler Sex Stereotype – A nice girl can see the diamond in the rough. A man with a nasty wife is hen-pecked and pathetic, but a woman with a bad boy just might be the only one who understands him. From a conservative standpoint, it’s virtuous of a woman to be so selfless and forgiving. From a liberal standpoint, it’s the thrill of conquest and her extraordinarily open mind that keeps her trying.

A man’s worth is defined by his success, albeit many women accept broad definitions of success. Western romances across the ages assert that special girls who search for the softer side of the bully or the bad boy will find it: Beauty and the Beast, Wuthering Heights, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Guys and Dolls, Bonnie and Clyde, right up to Fifty Shades of Grey. Pop culture reiterates ad nauseam how much men love the chase, but this trope shows that scores of women do, too. For the starry-eyed heroine, it’s a challenge to stray from the disapproving masses—or her parents—and become the One Special Woman who can tame the beast and bring joy to his lonely life. The higher the risk, the greater the reward. The reward is knowing that she is deeper, different from those other girls who swoon over bland perfection. Hence even America’s most famous feminist, Lisa Simpson, has looked past loyal, bespectacled Milhouse for Nelson, the schoolyard bully from a broken home.

By far the most horrific result of this romantic tradition is the fact that too many women in real life endure abuse, or worse. Pop culture sometimes concedes this and still has the audacity to romanticize it. My high school did a production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel the same year Time magazine declared it the Best Musical of All Time. After wife-beater Billy Bigelow dies in an armed robbery, his widow tells their daughter, “It is possible, dear, for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and it not hurt at all.” You see, truly devoted wives know that offering yourself up as his punching bag is a way to show your love and nurture him as he struggles with his demons. Only a selfish bitch would leave him when he needs her most.

Carousel was written in 1956, but the trope is still going strong. The final film of the Twilight series lead NPR’s Linda Holmes to observe:

When a saga popular with pre-adolescent girls peaks romantically on a night that leaves the heroine to wake up covered with bruises in the shape of her husband’s hands — and when that heroine then spends the morning explaining to her husband that she’s incredibly happy even though he injured her, and that it’s not his fault because she understands he couldn’t help it in light of the depth of his passion — that’s profoundly irresponsible.

Yes, we’re all having a good yuk over the unhinged quality of it all. And yes, it’s a movie with a monster baby… But romanticizing an intimate relationship that leaves bruises and scars is a particularly terrible idea in a film aimed at girls. Talking about this is tiresome, but then so is putting it in the movie.

Indeed.

But attraction to the forbidden is not always dangerous. Sometimes the bad boy is just misunderstood. There is a powerful romantic tradition of fine ladies risking wealth and status for true love. (See Aladdin, Titanic, Robin Hood, Moulin Rouge, Lady and the Tramp, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Pirates of Penzance, The Pirates of the Caribbean.) There are also classic tales of heroines opening the gates to social progress by debunking their families’ horrid prejudices when they fall for men outside their race/nationality/religion/species. (See Pocahontas, South Pacific, Fiddler on the Roof, The Little Mermaid.) The heroines of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Angst essen Seelen auf stare down the racial tensions of the era in which the films were released. Meanwhile, Cyrano DeBergerac and the Phantom of the Opera both find out—albeit too late—that their beloveds would have looked past their disfigurement and loved them back.

Since then, we’ve seen heroines end up with men with disabling injuries (often from war), while a handful go for guys who are congenitally disabled or disfigured. As noted recently, Peter Dinklage’s romantic roles are possibly, finally breaking dwarf men out of the Friend Zone. Great art obsesses over the blurry border between right and wrong, friend and lover, beauty and banality. These compassionate heroines who try to understand the “bad” boys and the rejects help us deepen our perceptions of attractiveness.

It’s worth noting that the Phantom and Cyrano compensate for the supposed repulsiveness of their disfigurement with the sexiness of their genius. They are supercrips. Granted Gothic tales love to examine the complexity of blinding light draped in darkness. I like a study of conflicting traits as much as the next starving liberal arts grad. But it’s a ludicrously ableist tradition that only gives disabled superheroes a shot at intimacy, restricting ordinary disabled men like Quasimodo or the Seven Dwarfs to the Friend Zone. And it’s an absurdly lookist tradition that restricts almost all of our disfigured and disabled women there.

Can you name a famous heroine who’s disfigured or physically disabled? (Can you name a famous actress who’s visibly disabled, for that matter? I might be able to, but I’d have to check Wikipedia to be sure.) In the old days, disabled and disfigured girls might arouse sympathy (see Helen Keller), but the women were hags. Period. If women who were merely not conventionally attractive ever dared to step out of the Friend Zone and into the dating game, they were annoying. Really annoying. And they were swatted away like flies.

Nowadays, love stories try to speak to women’s insecurities about their looks with quirky retellings of the Ugly Duckling or Cinderella. The heroine perceives herself as unattractive, moaning, “Is it because of my [thighs/eyes/nose]?!” (Rather than cursing, “That shallow jerk stuck me in the Friend Zone!”) But we eventually see that she truly is a knock-out and it’s just a matter of finding the right man who will wipe the soot off her face, pay for a makeover, or simply remove her glasses. Children’s films are getting a little better: Shrek and The Princess and the Frog feature heroines who are green-skinned for part of the courtship, though their Otherness is not quite as realistic as the Phantom’s or Quasimodo’s. We’ve yet to see a heroine reveal a real-life physical disability and see her hot lover swoon.

And why not? Francis Bacon said, “There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.” I’ve overheard countless guys say, “Chicks dig scars.” Which is true. Lots of chicks got scars, too.

The popularity of a story is by no means an empirical examination of our values. Most people I know are so much deeper than pop culture gives us credit for. And there is a lot more to many of these stories than the tropes I just reduced them to. But it would be daft to pretend that they have nothing to do with our collective psyche. Every one of us treasures those romantic moments we experienced that were “just like in a movie.” Our most popular books and films simultaneously reflect and influence what we tend to think is hot. And when it comes to opening our minds, fiction is often the best messenger. We look to entertainment for escape and to art for enlightenment. The most powerful stories provide both.

When I attended a lecture at the Network of Disabled Women in Berlin two weeks ago, there was a debate as to whether reality TV shows and documentaries help or harm perceptions of disabled women. Good documentaries smash stereotypes by providing facts and figures, but the over-representation of disabled women in such reports combined with their invisibility in love stories, detective stories, and silly sitcoms suggests that they exist solely as objects of study. They are there to satisfy our curiosity, but we’re rarely asked to root for them the way we root for Rapunzel or Bridget Jones. We never follow them on a journey dripping with passion. We should.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s newborn definition of “Friend Zone” reads: “a situation in which a platonic relationship exists between two people, one of whom has an undeclared romantic or sexual interest in the other.” It doesn’t say it’s exclusively a problem for men. And good for them. To me, the term will always evoke the potentially destructive idea that certain “types” of people don’t ever need or deserve intimacy. And we’ve got to keep questioning it. Children, animals, and self-proclaimed asexuals automatically belong in the Friend Zone, along with your clients, patients, and students. The disabled, the disfigured, the elderly, the ordinary, and the unsuccessful do not automatically belong there. I’m counting on all of us, the storytellers and the lovers, to recognize the word so that we can recognize the problem.

Tags: Ableism, Asexual, Bad Boy, Beauty Standards, Books, Disability, Dwarfism, Film, Gender Roles, Lookism, Romance, Sexuality, The Friend Zone

Comments 6 Comments
Categories Scars & Appearance, Scars & Class, Scars & Cognitive Ability, Scars & Gender, Scars & Physical Ability, Scars & Psychology, Scars & Sexuality

Does This Feel Ableist To You?

10 Mar

(Via)

This London mural of Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage has been around for a while. Dinklage’s success and visibility has generally been great for the dwarf community. Most of this is thanks to professional decisions made by Dinklage himself. He suavely excoriated dwarf-tossing last year when accepting his Golden Globe. He starred in the only good film about a character living with dwarfism in the real world. And his famous “I don’t have dreams with dwarfs in them!” rant continues to provide me with a perfect answer to those who still snicker about midgets on Facebook. But now that Game of Thrones has helped propel him into the mainstream, not all the attention given to his dwarfism is good.

Fantasy traditionally exiles men with dwarfism to the Friend Zone and Game of Thrones has finally taken a hammer to that. But it doesn’t feel like progress when shallow discussions of Dinklage’s sexiness treat him like a novelty. (And invariably trigger jokes and a sick fascination with the effect of height on certain sex positions.) In her superb list, “Things to Keep in Mind When You Come Across a Person with Dwarfism,” the girlfriend of a dwarf writes on Tumblr:

Don’t go out of your way, if they’re male, to affirm their masculinity by attempting to ‘bro down’ by gratuitously using words like ‘boss,’ ‘man,’ ‘sport,’ ‘champ,’ etc. in your interactions with them. It makes it obvious that you’re uncomfortable with their difference & are attempting to overcompensate.

Her complete list is definitely worth your time. (And oh man, do I remember the high-fives… ) But I’m not going to decide just yet whether the above mural embodies the patronizing attitude she describes. I want to hear what you think:

Feel free to explain your answer in the comments.

Tags: Ableism, Beauty Standards, Dwarfism, Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage, Sex, Sick Fascination, Tyrion Lannister

Comments 5 Comments
Categories Scars & Appearance, Scars & Physical Ability, Scars & Sexuality

So Who Should The Cliques Make Fun Of Now?

6 Jan

A new study claiming that Overweight and Class 1 Obese people have a lower mortality rate has been bouncing around the world since Thursday. National Public Radio’s report seems to be the most comprehensive but hints at the two most extreme, polarized viewpoints:

Cosmetic: This is a victory for the overweight—now we can trash skinny people (again)!

Medical: If people hear about this, everyone will stop exercising and eating their vegetables and then everyone’s going to die!

Both views treat the public like infants who can’t possibly think for themselves.

Doctors are right to worry that a sizeable portion of the population will use this news as an excuse for whatever unhealthy habits they love. This is why it is important to include the many possible factors skewing the results. But many people will always cherry-pick whatever statistics suit their lifestyle or claim to be the exception to the rule. I don’t have any political solutions for engaging with contrarians—whether we’re debating eating habits or global warming—but talking down to them and using scare tactics has a pretty high failure rate.

And from the disability rights perspective, there are exceptions to the rule when it comes to health. Thousands of them. As said before, a round belly is not always a sign of fat. A bony body is not always a sign of an eating disorder. Many forms of exercise can be more hazardous than beneficial to people with certain conditions. And many life-threatening conditions are invisible. Medical tests, not appearance, are always the most reliable indicators of health. This robs us of the easy answers we crave and which facilitate public debate, but there has never been and never will be a one-size-fits-all health program for the 7 billion humans on the planet.

You and your doctor know better than anyone else if you are healthy or not. If she says you are overweight but your genes and cholesterol levels put you at no risk for heart disease, she’s probably right. If she says your weight is ideal but your eating habits put you at risk for malnutrition, she’s probably right. And if her advice seems sound but her delivery makes you feel too ashamed to discuss it, go find someone with better social skills to treat you. At the individual level, it’s no one else’s business. Outside of the doctor’s office, it shouldn’t be any more socially acceptable to discuss someone else’s weight or waist size than it is to discuss their iron levels, sperm count, or cancer genes.

But beauty standards and health trends often go hand-in-hand. And what really needs to go is the lookist idea that we’re all semi-licensed doctors who can diagnose people just by glancing at them and deciding how they measure up according to the latest medical research. The reason we have a hard time letting this go is because it’s fun to point out others’ supposed weaknesses. It’s self-elevating and validating to snicker that ours is the better body type because it calms our insecurities. Beauty standards are cultural and constantly morphing throughout history, but they have always remained narrow. (This is especially the case for women, though I sincerely apologize for not providing more research on men.) Whether fawning over big breasts or flat tummies, public praise for certain body types has almost always been at the expense of others:

After decades of the Kate Moss heroin chic, Christina Hendricks (see above) of Mad Men has garnered lots of attention for her curves and this week’s study is likely to encourage her fans. “Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous…,” says U.K. Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone. “We need more of these role models. There is such a sensation when there is a curvy role model. It shouldn’t be so unusual.” She is dead right that it shouldn’t be hard for curvy women to find sexy heroines who look like them in film and on television, just as skinny women or disabled women or women of any body type shouldn’t have to give up on ever seeing celebrities with figures like theirs. But “Real women have curves!” is just as exclusionary as the catty comments about fat that incite eating disorders. And when Esquire and the BBC celebrate Hendricks as “The Ideal Woman,” they mistake oppression for empowerment.

We can accept the idea that people of all sorts of different hair colors and lengths can be beautiful. Will mainstream medicine and cosmetics ever be able to handle the idea that all sorts of different bodies can be healthy? History says no. But maybe it’s not naïve to hope.

And what does Christina Hendricks have to say about all of this? “I was working my butt off on [Mad Men] and then all anyone was talking about was my body.”

Touché.

Tags: Ableism, Beauty Standards, Body Image, Disability, Equality, Fashion, health, Lookism, medicine, Social Justice, Weight

Comments 3 Comments
Categories Scars & Appearance

Happy Halloween

24 Oct

As of tomorrow, I have to go on medical leave and take a break from blogging for hopefully just a short while. So, in the spirit of season, I’ll leave you with a re-run of my old post, “Curiosity Kills the Rat.” Happy Halloween and be back soon!

―

CURIOSITY KILLS THE RAT

“All the freaky people make the beauty of the world.”

— Michael Franti

Fourteen years ago, I made a trip to Hot Topic—that quintessential 90s chain store for all things goth—in search of some fishnet stockings for a friend. It was my first visit to the store since I was back in a wheelchair for my third and final limb-lengthening procedure and the narrow aisles prevented me from venturing beyond the entrance. My first time in a wheelchair, from ages 11 to 12, had been a completely humbling experience as I was forced to see how very inaccessible the world is for the non-ambulatory. This time around I was battling the hot-cheeked self-consciousness that adolescence attaches to any signs of dependency.

As I tried to look casual while flipping through black gloves, black stockings, and black dog collars, a guy approached me sporting crimson hair, eyebrow rings, an employee badge and a smile. “This is store is easily adjustable,” he grinned, and with that he began shoving aside the display cases and clothes racks—which were, like me, on wheels—clearing a path for me right through to the back and taking little notice of the other shoppers, some of whom took one to the shoulder. It was one of those crushes that disappear as quickly as they develop but leave a lasting memory: my knight in shining jewelry.

Thanks to experiences like this, I have a special place in my heart for the acceptance of physical differences that can often be found in the subcultures of punks, hippies, and goths. From the imagining of monsters to the examination of anything taboo, counter-culture is often unfazed by physical qualities that fall outside of mainstream beauty standards. The first kid in my high school who chose not to stare at the external fixators on my arms but instead held the door for me had green and purple hair. About a month after my trip to Hot Topic, I showed a death-metal-loving friend my right fixator (shown above) for the first time, with the six titanium pins protruding from open wounds in my thigh. He grinned, “That is the ultimate piercing, man!” He hardly could have come up with a more pleasing reaction. That my wounds were cool instead of “icky” or “pitiful” was a refreshing attitude found almost exclusively outside mainstream culture. This attitude more readily understands my belief that my scars are merit badges I earned, not deformities to erase.

However, this tendency toward decency over discomfort is just one side of the alternative coin. Every subculture has its strengths and its weaknesses, and for all the freaky heroes I’ve encountered, I’ve also met plenty whose celebration of difference devolves into a sick fascination with the grotesque. “Weird for the sake of weird” is progressive when it asserts that weird is inescapable, that it is in fact as much a part of the natural order as any of our conventions, and when it serves as therapy for the marginalized. But it is problematic when it involves self-proclaimed artists using others’ reality as their own personal toys.

In a previous post, I referred to a friend of friend including me in an Internet discussion about limb-lengthening. His comments were in reaction to a photo of a leg wearing an Ilizarov fixator that had been posted on a Tumblr page focused on the wonders of the world. There are countless sites like it, where photos of conjoined twins, heterochromatic eyes, intersexual bodies, and medical procedures are posted alongside images of animals, vampires, robots, cosplay, self-harm, manga and bad poetry. I get it. The world is “crazy” and it’s all art. But if that’s not a freak show, what is?

Disabled people are no longer put behind glass or in the circus—at least not in the U.S., Canada or Western Europe—but many people still believe they reserve the right to stare, both in public and on the Internet. Whether under the guise of promoting diversity or admiring triumph in the face of adversity, they suppress any realization they may have that no one likes being stared at. Unless it’s on our terms.

I see endless art in my medical experiences and it can be so therapeutic. During my first limb-lengthening procedure I also had braces on my teeth, leading my dad to observe, “She’s now 95% metal.” Kinda cool. During my third procedure, I had Botox injected into my hips twice to paralyze my muscles lest they resist the lengthening. At the time, when I along with most people had no idea what it was, it was described to me as “basically the most deadly poison known to man.” Whoa, hardcore. When I happened upon photos of my anterior tibialis tendon graft surgery, I was enthralled: “I’m so red inside!” And when a fellow patient recently alerted me to the fact that a high-end jeweler designed a bracelet strongly resembling the Ilizarov frame, I laughed my head off. Almost all of us like looking at our bodies, and perhaps this is especially so for those of us who have had real scares over our health. It’s a matter of facing our fears and owning it. But no one likes the idea of others owning it. This subtle but severe preference, this desire for dignity determines the difference between human rights and property rights.

Two years ago, NPR featured a piece by Ben Mattlin, who is non-ambulatory and who said he used to be uncomfortable with the idea of Halloween and its objectification of the grotesque. From my very first costume as a mouse to my most recent stint as the Wicked Witch of the West, my love of Halloween has not so much as once flickered, but his point is worth discussing. Costume play, Halloween and any celebration of “weird” that is primarily attention-seeking inherently assumes there is a “natural” basis to be disrupted. (And all too often Halloween devolves into offensive imitations of all sorts of minority identities.)

I have my own collection of artsy photos stolen off the Internet that I use as screensavers and montages for parties, but they do not include photos of bodies taken outside the context of consensual artistic expression. Re-appropriating a photo in a medical journal for a site about all things bizarre is protected under freedom of speech, but it can feel like disregard for consent. And in any case, such xenocentrism will always be just as superficial as the status quo it seeks to disrupt.

When conjoined twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel agreed to be interviewed once—and only once—for a documentary about their lives (which I highly recommend), they explained that they don’t mind answering strangers’ questions at all. (Ben Mattlin has said the same, as do I.) What they hate more than anything is being photographed or filmed without permission. While attending a baseball game outside their hometown, a sports film crew quickly directed their attention to the girls. Even though they were already being filmed by their own documentary team, the stranger camera’s invasive, presumptuous stare ruined the day for them.

Sensitivity toward others’ experience with medicine and death should never kill the discussion. These discussions are imperative and art is the most glorious way we relate to one another. But just as there’s more to good manners than simply saying “Please,” there’s more to genuine learning and artistic expression than poking at anything we can get our hands on. Nuance, deference and respect are prerequisites for anyone with artistic or scientific integrity not only because they are the building-blocks of common decency, but because history has shown that curiosity will more likely harm the rat than the cat.

Tags: Ableism, Beauty Standards, Bio-Ethics, Dwarfism, Freak Show, Goth, Grotesque, Language, Limb-Lengthening, Lookism, Macabre, medicine, Pop Culture, Punk, Sick Fascination

Comments 1 Comment
Categories Scars & Appearance, Scars & Physical Ability

Playing Disabled

30 Sep

(Image by cchauvet used under CC license via)

Snow White and the Huntsman is out on DVD in Europe tomorrow. Unlike in most other Snow White films, the seven dwarfs are portrayed by average-sized actors, their bodies altered by digital manipulation. No one in the dwarf community is pleased about this. Little People of America issued a statement criticizing the filmmakers’ failure to give priority to performers with dwarfism, while Warwick Davis argued, “It is not acceptable to ‘black up’ as a white actor, so why should it be acceptable to ‘shrink’ an actor to play a dwarf?”

I don’t believe digitally generated dwarfism is on par with blackface and all that evokes, but it’s not too far off because there is a long tradition in cinema and theater of socially privileged actors portraying socially marginalized characters. And never the other way around. Blackface is a particularly hideous blemish on the history of entertainment because it was almost always used for mockery. Yellowface has a similarly horrid history: Until 1948, anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. banned actors of different ethnicities from kissing onscreen, so whenever a white actor portrayed an Asian leading man, Anna May Wong knew the role of the heroine was off limits to her, despite her being the most successful Chinese-American actress of the era. Meanwhile, as noted before, the circus freak show tradition that caricatures people with disabilities is still going strong today.

To be fair, Snow White and the Huntsman does not create the illusion of dwarfism in order to mock it. This is why, to me, the blackface comparison seems overblown. (A more apt analogy to blackface would be an actor inhaling helium to play a dwarf, as David Hyde Pierce did for laughs on an episode of Frasier years ago.) When a character matter-of-factly has a disability and the performer simulates their body type with artifice, is this not comparable to any sort of makeup or costumes? Danny Woodburn (whom you might know from Seinfeld) discussed it in an excellent interview on The Patt Morrison Show in June:

Directors, producers have every right to cast who they want to cast. I just think this is something that merits discussion when the disability community—not just the little people community but the disability community—is so underrepresented in the film and television industry…

Others without disability portraying people with disability. When producers, directors don’t actively seek performers with disability—[and they’d have to] because a lot of those performers don’t have equal access to casting, don’t have equal access to representation—when they don’t actively seek out those performers, then there’s a real slight against our society, I believe…

This is about making a stand so that there’s at least some due diligence… When you have a community of disabled that is about twenty percent of the population and less than one percent of disabled actors appear on TV. And some of the disabled characters, many of them are not portrayed by disabled actors.

Woodburn and Little People of America raised this issue ten years ago when Peter Jackson announced that he would cast only average-sized actors in The Lord of the Rings. As noted before, part of me was glad to see those magical creatures distanced from real-life people with skeletal dysplasias, but if Jackson had chosen to use dwarf performers to portray the Hobbits or the Dwarves, might someone like Woodburn be as famous as Elijah Wood is today? It’s hard to say. Famous actors create box office draw. Almost no famous actors are disabled and almost no disabled actors are famous. And that’s the problem.

If digital manipulation and theater makeup are someday used to expand roles to minority performers, allowing actors of any body type or ability to play the Huntsman or Prince Charming, it will then lose its exclusionary feel. I adored Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs growing up and, even though I was the only kid with dwarfism, I always portrayed the princess in the living room productions put on for my parents and their friends. But cinema has almost never swung that way. There is no history of ethnic minorities portraying famous white characters or disabled performers portraying physiotypical heroes and heroines. Plenty of ambulatory men have sat in wheelchairs to portray FDR, but no disabled man has been cast as JFK. And that stings a bit.

And what stings even more is the way in which privileged actors so often earn automatic praise for portraying minority characters in epic films, as if all minorities are opaque, mystical people only geniuses could begin to understand. John Malkovich as a mentally disabled man in Of Men and Men, Colin Firth as stammering King George VI, and Patty Duke, Melissa Gilbert and more recently Abigail Breslin as Helen Keller have all been lauded for their performances. They are all fine actors who have proven a wide range of talent, and the stories they tell are truly moving. But the public’s nearly kneejerk assumption that a minority role is a feat of greatness for a privileged actor can feel very condescending.

In the very bizarre, direct-to-DVD film Tiptoes, Gary Oldman was digitally manipulated to take the role of the leading man with dwarfism. Peter Dinklage, who played the comedic supporting role (and, in my opinion, the only good moments in the film), said: “There was some flak. ‘Why would you put Gary Oldman on his knees? That’s almost like blackface.’ And I have my own opinions about political correctness, but I was just like, ‘It’s Gary Oldman. He can do whatever he wants.’ ”

Fair enough, but when he was sappily introduced in the trailer as playing “the role of a lifetime,” I almost lost my lunch.

Tags: Acting, Beauty Standards, Disability, Dwarfs, hollywood, Lookism, Makeup, Racism, Snow White and the Huntsman, Theater

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Categories Most Read, Scars & Appearance, Scars & Physical Ability, Scars & Race, Ethnicity & Nationality

Wear Whatever You Want – We Can Handle It!

2 Sep

(Via)

This family portrait of a father and son in a small town—deep in the province and deeply religious—in Southern Germany has been traveling around the world. When his five year-old boy expressed a love for dresses but found himself alone on the playground, Nils Pickert writes in Emma magazine that the only way to make sure his son knew that he supported him 100% was to be a role model of self-confidence and don a skirt himself.

“Yeah, I’m one of those fathers who believes in liberation when it comes to parenting,” he writes. “I am not one of those academic dads who ruminates and lectures about equality between the sexes, and then, the moment a child arrives, slips back into the old comfortable gender roles: He does his own thing by having a career, she takes care of the rest.”

When he switched to a new kindergarten, the teasing got to be too much and the author’s son stopped wearing dresses to pre-school. But he turned to his father and asked, wide-eyed, “Papa, when are you going to wear a skirt again?” So Dad made sure to keep wearing his skirt out in public. He writes, “I’m very grateful to the woman who stared at us on the street until she walked into a lamppost. My son roared with laughter. And the next day, he fished a dress out of his closet again.”

I don’t have much to add to this story besides the smile it brought to my face. And a hope that someday these two will be models for a poster that will take its place in history alongside Rosie the Riveter.

Tags: Beauty Standards, Classroom, Fashion, Feminism, Gender Expression, Gender Fluid, LGBT rights, Lookism, Parenting

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Categories Most Read, Scars & Appearance, Scars & Gender

Germany Rules on Male Circumcision

26 Aug

(Image by Viewminder used under CC license via)

We’ve been waiting all summer for this decision. On Thursday here in Berlin, the German Ethics Council ruled that male circumcision is legally permissible without a doctor’s order, but several conditions must be met:

- Both parents must be in full agreement.
- All possible risks to the procedure must be explained in full detail.
- Local anesthetics must be an option.
- The procedure must be certified by a medical professional.

Some of these requirements, especially the last two, go against what some fundamentalist religious leaders mandate. Why all the fuss? In Europe, where female genital cutting is illegal, male circumcision is only common in Muslim and Jewish communities. Last year, a German court in Cologne ruled that the circumcision of an underage male constitutes aggravated assault and battery, and the debate has been raging ever since. It has split the nation into two parties: Those that see the procedure as cosmetic at best and mutilating at worst, carried out on patients too young to give consent, versus those that believe any ban on age-old rituals and tribal markers constitutes religious and/or ethnic persecution. That the ritual German lawyers sought to ban is a Jewish custom makes it a particularly sensitive case here.

When we hear stories of female genital cutting in Africa, Westerners are generally horrified. But few in the United States understand that many Europeans gape at our 60% rate of male circumcision and consider it to be of course not quite but almost as cruel. “How on earth could parents do that to their baby boy?!” is the reaction I get from the vast majority of Christian and non-denominational European males I talk to. They are much more prone to believe studies citing the problems it can cause—for example, a supposedly higher rate of dyspareunia for women who have intercourse with circumcised men—than studies that downplay such fears. I usually admit to them that, because it is so very common where I come from, I’d never given it much thought beyond those pop culture jokes about what looks better.

Which just goes to show how powerful cultural customs and values can be. Both female and male genital cutting involves groups that say we should protect the parents’ right to choose what they think is best for their children without government interference, while the others say the government should protect children from procedures that offer no medical benefit before they are old enough to decide for themselves, regardless of what their parents want.

I’ve written before that as someone who’s undergone limb-lengthening, I know how complex decisions about body alteration can be. Determining an appropriate age of consent for surgery can be even more complicated. But also due to my experience, I wince along with Jessica Valenti when parents choose procedures for their children that offer no real medical benefit. While discussing circumcision, my European friends argue that patients should reach the age of consent before undergoing any procedure that, unlike limb-lengthening, does not become more medically complicated with age. Should courts ever rule this way, this will inevitably lead to bans on juvenile nose-jobs like the one Valenti cites. But then what about ear-piercing?

Years ago, I was a panelist at a conference called “Surgically Shaping Children” at the Hastings Center, a think tank for bio-ethics, where we addressed elective procedures such as limb-lengthening on dwarfs and determining a gender for intersex children. After a two-day debate and a resulting book, we concluded that the best way to prevent parents from making decisions that could be damaging to their children is to keep both the parents and their children as informed as possible about every issue that’s at stake: medical facts, cultural identity, individual identity, and agency. The German Ethics Council’s ruling also implies that such comprehensive understanding is necessary.

I think a ban on circumcision would have created more cultural resentment than understanding. But the scientific community, and society as a whole, should take the place of the legal system in helping parents understand all the complexities of altering a child’s body without a medical purpose. There may be no easy answer, but the discussion has got to keep on going.

Tags: Beauty Standards, Bio-Ethics, Circumcision, Elective Surgery, Feminism, FGM, Human Rights, Lookism, Personal Choice, Religious Freedom

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Categories Scars & Appearance, Scars & Gender, Scars & Physical Ability, Scars & Psychology, Scars & Race, Ethnicity & Nationality, Scars & Sexuality

Body Image Part IV: My Choice and Your Choice Entwined

24 Jun

(Image ©Folke Lehr)

I began The Body Image Series with this question: If we were fully convinced that no one else cared one bit what we looked like, how much would we care? Would we have any reason to envy conventionally attractive people? Would weight loss have anything to do with waist size? Would limb-lengthening still touch on the idea of “blending in”?

***

Ten years ago, I attended the premiere of HBO’s Dwarfs: Not A Fairy Tale along with the other subjects of the documentary. Upon seeing me, one of the men with achondroplasia asked his friend, “What’s she doing here? She’s not a dwarf.”

“She had limb-lengthening surgeries to make her taller,” his friend murmured.

“What?!” he exclaimed. “She cheated!”

I felt myself blush before I could think of what to say.

Immediately, a woman with diastrophic dwarfism, the shortest of all of us, turned to me and said, “I’m on your side, Honey. No way did you cheat.”

Part of me finds it hard not to laugh when others dismiss limb-lengthening on dwarfs as a “quick fix.” Breaking bones, stretching them over a three-to-five-month period and then waiting for them to heal for another ten months is not exactly comparable to a boob-job done over the weekend. Then again, you’d better have a damn good reason to be willing to go through something so intensive and risky. So, did I do it to function better or, as a former president of Little People of America insisted, to “blend in”?

I did it to access all facilities I could not modify myself, from public ones like plane or train seats to private ones like friends’ furniture. I did it to correct some of my lordosis, so that I would have less back pain. I did it to have the extra leverage enabling me to carry bigger armloads. I did it to take bigger steps when walking, so I could cover more ground before I got tired. I did it so that my weight would be slightly more evenly distributed, making spinal compression less of a danger. I did it to reach farther. I did it because the patients I met who had done it were just as happy as those who had not. Looking back on it all, this was definitely reason enough for me, regardless of whether or not it is for others. But I can’t just leave it at that.

In my last post, I argued why there is no right way to hate your body. In my experience, you can take dramatic measures to alter your body without hating it. Indeed, the work you put into it can and should be an act of love, not desperation. The night before my first limb-lengthening surgery, I kissed my old legs goodbye. I was willing to let them go, but I kissed them all the same. Yet many if not most outsiders assume that dwarfism is a visible difference the patient must want to erase. After all, trying to argue that you don’t want to blend in, even though you will blend in, sounds like you’re trying to circle a square.

So why not just say that limb-lengthening was my personal choice and my choice doesn’t affect anyone else? But it does. By blending in, I automatically relieve myself of a good deal of prejudice, of stares, of awkward reactions. I have fewer questions to answer from people on the street and fewer chances to educate them. By blending in, I’m breaking ranks with the dwarf community to some degree. That’s nothing to sneeze at when considering that before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, dwarfs had an unemployment rate of 85% in the U.S. all because of lookism. By blending in, I am contributing to the trend that may make limb-lengthening a fashion for people with dwarfism. Both politics and beauty standards measure strength in numbers.

In the late 90s, my first femur surgery was filmed for a feature about limb-lengthening on the American news show 20/20. The interviewer asked a 12 year-old patient with dwarfism, “Did you do it to look normal or to function better?”

Without missing a beat, the boy answered, “So that I could function better. I don’t care how I look. I just want to do what everyone else can.”

Sitting at home watching, I raised my fist in solidarity and whispered, “Right on, kid.”

In the follow-up commentary, Connie Chung reported, “He has since finished the procedure to combat his dwarfism.”

I shot up in my seat in disbelief: “COMBAT?!” Was that the automatic assumption? I wasn’t in a battle against my dwarfism, and obviously neither was this patient. I was working with my body, not against it! I realized then that it was important that others knew this if they were going to know that I chose limb-lengthening.

We may someday live in a world in which every candidate for limb-lengthening makes the same decision I did and in doing so, makes the world a less physically diverse place. I will accept such a world, since my own efforts to function better have helped contribute to it. But I won’t make any arguments advocating such homogeneity. If my dwarfism and limb-lengthening have taught me anything, it is that it’s far more important for me to argue that beauty is about so much more than blending in.

Deep down inside, every one of us wants to be conventionally attractive to some degree, because life seems easier that way. We love the idea of throngs of people admiring us, envying us, falling hard for us at first sight. It makes us feel fantastic on a visceral, heart-thumping level to be praised for our looks. But if everyone agrees that there’s more to love and romance than conventionally good looks, what is the point of having broad appeal? During the years when my curly hair reached my backside, I enjoyed the compliments but they were always the same, regardless of whether they came from friends or strangers. My short, round achondroplastic hands, meanwhile, have garnered a lot more attention to detail. My dad always called them “starfish hands.” A guy in college examined them and disagreed: “They’re Maggie Simpson hands.” Another amended it with a giddy squeal, “They’re finger-painting hands!” When I began my final limb-lengthening procedure, a guyfriend in high school nicknamed me “Legs” because I had the most expensive pair around. Who needs broad appeal when you have genuine affection? What better proof is there of such affection, of people’s capacity to look beyond convention than their fearlessly falling in love with features they’ve never seen before?

If I deeply regretted having dwarfism, then limb-lengthening would indeed be an extreme measure taken to offset severe personal insecurity, and that would be a major cause for concern. Hating my looks so profoundly would impact other dwarfs’ perception of their own looks. This is why I blog. I don’t want to live in a world where anyone is pressured to change their body just to be accepted, and I don’t want my story to be misused to contribute to the forces pushing the world in that direction.

This is not to say every person who is born on the margins should turn their life into a 24-hour political cause. Trans individuals should never have to answer invasive questions about their bodies any more frequently than cis individuals should. LGBT people should never be pressured to come out. Black Americans shouldn’t have to put up with strangers and acquaintances trying to touch their hair all the time. The right to privacy is a human right. Your sex life, your income, your medical records, and your body are all matters you shouldn’t ever have to submit to anyone’s microscope if you don’t wish to. But if we do open our mouths, we have to take responsibility for the consequences.

When I choose to talk about my body and my choices, it feels to me like I’m talking only about myself. But others are listening for how it all affects them. If they don’t care about me personally, it’s their only reason for paying attention. It’s the only reason we read novels and newspaper articles and blogs about strangers’ lives. We’re searching for something we can relate to, and if we can’t relate, we at least want to know how other people’s choices are shaping the world we live in. Opinions such as “I was so gross when I weighed x pounds,” or “I can’t wait to get rid of these hideous scars” both reflect and influence the society comprising us all. We love taking credit for our words when others agree or are inspired by them. But if someone raises the possibility of our statements having a negative impact on others, the temptation to shirk all responsibility for others is strong. But we can’t ever shirk it. That’s cowardly.

This doesn’t mean we must accept others offhandedly judging our most complex decisions. Unfortunately, no matter what we say or how carefully we try to shape the argument, there will always be those out there who judge before hearing the end of the sentence. Putting more energy into brandishing our opinions than admitting what we don’t know is also cowardly.

A friend I met in the hospital was ten years-old and in the midst of limb-lengthening when a woman with dwarfism approached him in public and berated his mother for choosing limb-lengthening for her child. My friend concluded that this is why we shouldn’t talk to strangers.

We are talking to strangers when we publicly discuss our personal decisions, and the Internet is blurring the lines between public and private discussions faster than ever. As decision-makers, we cannot discuss our choices and our views free from any responsibility for the effect they will have on others. As observers, we cannot accurately judge others’ decisions at face-value, free from the burdens of learning.

During one of my limb-lengthenings, I was featured in a French magazine article that posed questions I’ve used in my workshops on dwarfism and diversity, paraphrased here:

Society does not physical accept differences easily. Without a doubt, that is society’s fault. But who should change? Society or the dwarf? For the dwarf to change, she must undergo years of painful surgeries and intensive physical therapy, risking many complications. For society to change, it must alter its way of thinking. Who suffers more in the change? Which change is harder to achieve?

My experiences with dwarfism and limb-lengthening have inspired me to try to change both. As best as a bossy girl from Long Island can.

Tags: Beauty Standards, Bio-Ethics, Dwarf, Dwarfism, Elective Surgery, Feminism, Internet, Limb-Lengthening, Lookism, Personal Choice, The Body Image Series

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Categories Most Read, Scars & Appearance, Scars & Physical Ability

Body Image Part III: Mirror Etiquette

17 Jun

(Image by Trixi Skywalker used under CC 2.0 via)

After picking apart the unhelpful things we often say about others, I now move on in the third installment in the Body Image Series to the unhelpful ways in which we talk about ourselves…

***

Two moments in the Wonderful World of Body Image:

ONE: A woman sitting in the waiting room at my surgeon’s office reveals a leg perfectly tanned, as well as dotted and streaked with fresh scars from an Ilizarov fixator. Our surgeon walks by on his way to radiology and flashes her a grin: “Lookin’ great there with that fixator finally off!” She calls after him without a hint of joking in her voice, “Yeah, but God! What am I supposed to do with these hideous scars?!” She has about a quarter as many scars as I do.

TWO: One of my mom’s oldest friends flips through a photo album with me from back when she and Mom were my age. Every other photo of herself elicits a moan: “God, look how fat I was! Omigod, look at that tummy. Ick, what a fatso!” In every photo, she was thinner than I’ve ever been, save for my limb-lengthening years spent on heavy painkillers.

Trashing one’s own body in front of others is so commonplace in Western female culture, I’ve yet to meet a single woman who hasn’t done it at least a dozen times since puberty, if not yesterday. But it should come as no surprise that whenever you talk about something as self-centered as your body image, your listeners instantaneously have a self-centered reaction, wondering how they fare in your line of judgment. If you hate it on yourself, why would you think it looks good on others? (Indeed, there are scores of studies showing that mothers who vocally criticize their own bodies have daughters with unhealthy body image.) This is why trashing your own body is perhaps the most impolite, if not irresponsible, of all our social customs.

Eating disorder survivor Chloe Angyal has given us the revolutionary battle cry: “There is no right way to hate your body.” This has to be true if we believe that everyone is beautiful in their own way. If we can’t swallow it, it means we can’t let go of competing with others.

In 2002, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon declined the invitation to be photographed for People magazine’s List of 50 Most Beautiful People, arguing that fitting the magazine’s criteria for the list shouldn’t in any way be considered an achievement:

I don’t give a shit [about it] … I only take pride in things I’ve actually done myself. To be praised for something like that is just weird. It just felt like somebody calling and saying, “We want to put you in a magazine because the weather’s so nice where you live.”

I know only a few women who would pass up the opportunity to be rewarded for their looks as he did.

Women usually trash their bodies in front other women not out of malice but because we are culturally conditioned to build close friendships by sharing our most personal feelings. The (liberal) mantra, “Don’t bottle it up inside!” is a constant hammer to the floodgates. And so we hear: “I can’t be seen without my makeup!” “Why can’t my gray hair grow in evenly?” “I’m so fa-a-a-at!” Yet with all this sharing of body-oriented self-hatred, no one manages to make each other feel better.

If I say, “God, I talk loud on the phone,” or “Yuck, you can tell I had no time to brush my hair!” anyone who disagrees with the complaint can say so, and anyone who agrees can tease: “Eh, we’ve gotten used it.” If, deep down inside, my self-deprecation was a circuitous check to see if I really am that bad, I can consider if the teasing is a reason to try to change my habits. Life is, after all, about learning how to be both a happier and a more tolerable human being.

But bodies are different. Any choices we have about changing them are limited, and they are entangled in visceral feelings about our attractiveness. If I say, “Ugh, my dwarf cheekbones are so low!” or “My nose is so ugly!” no one should agree with me out loud. Even if silently they do. (I didn’t notice how low they were, but now that you point it out…) The only acceptable confirmation of these statements must come in the form of protesting praise: e.g. “I love your nose, it reminds me of [insert name of famous and attractive person here].” Otherwise, etiquette demands protesting the statement altogether: “No! Your cheekbones aren’t low at all!” This may or may not be a lie, but in any case, it supports the idea that low cheekbones are something to lament. Anyone who wouldn’t think the cheekbones in question are low because theirs are lower suddenly feels paranoid, if not miserable. So all this body trashing is an obstacle to honest sharing, rather than a path to it.

And to complicate matters more, some share their deepest body image issues with each other and then use them against each other when feeling competitive. (“I can’t believe he went for that fat/bony slob!”) Anyone who obsesses about her body secretly knows how harshly she herself judges the bodies of others in moments of weakness (“At least I don’t look like that!”) and fears that others judge her the same way. This is, of course, a chicken and egg scenario: maybe the self-hatred comes from judging others or maybe the judging others comes from self-hatred, but in any case, the only end to the cycle is to stop trashing bodies, both others’ and our own.

During my limb-lengthening procedures, my friends at the hospital would commiserate about all the things our bodies were going through. (“Are your legs getting hairy, too? The doctor says it’s because of the increased blood-flow caused by the healing.” “Can you see inside your leg when they remove a pin?” “Would you have your torso lengthened if you could? I wonder how that would work…”) But our complaints never touched on our looks. Even in therapy group, all our venting was about pain, nausea, restrictions on movement, living away from home, dependency on others, or the procedure taking longer than it was supposed to. All our jealousy was directed at those who had less pain or a quicker recovery. Perhaps it was because we had enough to worry about trying to reach our physical therapy goals, keeping infections at bay, forcing ourselves to eat, and constantly trying to get comfortable. Or perhaps it was because so many of us were pre-pubescent kids not yet initiated into the adult world of body competition. Or perhaps beauty standards are automatically less restrictive for groups with true body diversity. In any case, the woman in my surgeon’s office—who looked to be anywhere between 30 and 45—was the first patient I heard complain about what the procedure did to her looks.

We all want to be attractive, but the only way to avoid insulting others is to expunge everything that makes beauty a competition. The editors at Offbeat Bride ban all discussions about weight loss or body insecurity on the forum, and I don’t think anyone has suffered as a result. Celebrating more progressive, inclusive and creative beauty standards can be helpful—more on that next week—but minimizing the attention and importance we afford our lookist insecurities should be a goal, if anything because all this self-scrutiny is fantastically vain. As Peggy Orenstein has said, mainstream girlie-girl culture too often mistakes self-absorption for self-confidence. The most self-confident women I know obsess over their bodies at about the same low frequency self-confident men do. And like the men, they don’t bristle or burst into tears at any form of affectionate teasing.

A healthy ego owns its fears instead of demanding others allay them. Pointing out our own supposed imperfections can be constructive as long as it’s intended to elicit nothing but giggles, with no hint of fishing for compliments, of shaky self-esteem, or of competition. In our high school yearbook, a friend listed under his Wishes For The Future, “Smaller ears, bigger teeth.” And so I threw “Tiny Teeth!” back at him whenever he would shake his head at me and sigh, “Once again, you smile and your eyes get all thin and pointy!” The harder I laughed at him, the pointier they got.

As said before, when we tell our loved ones how beautiful they are, it’s a testament to the sum of their parts, to the combination of their perfections and imperfections. When we’re mad about someone—not just attracted to them, but truly mad about them—their beauty makes them entrancingly divine and their flaws make them adorably human. Perfect lips enveloping crooked teeth create the tension and contrast that makes the human body a work of art.

Two moments in the Wonderful World of Healthy Relationships:

ONE: A friend is leading a seminar about American immigration and heritage. “People from Scandinavia tend to be blond-haired and light-skinned, but they tan. People from the British Isles are so pale, they look like they just crawled out from under a rock.” She smiles at me. “You’re British, aren’t you?” My laughter is drowned out by my classmates’.

TWO: A friend was told by her fiancé: “You have such huge eyes and a round face. It’s like Thomas the Tank Engine.” She prints out a photo of the train and mails it to him while he’s away on a business trip, so that he won’t forget her.

Tags: Beauty Standards, Bio-Ethics, Dwarfism, Feminism, Limb-Lengthening, Lookism, Personal Choice, The Body Image Series

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Categories Most Read, Scars & Appearance, Scars & Psychology

Body Image Part II: The Rules for Snark

10 Jun

Last week I went after talking about others’ bodies for the sake of analyzing what you can’t be attracted to. Today I’m going after talking about others’ bodies for the sake of musing, or amusement…

Anyone who insists they never make fun of others behind their back is lying. We all do it, and to the extent that snark is now rivaling porn as the Internet’s raison d’être. Every bit of our outward appearance—our fashion choices, our speaking styles, our assertiveness or timidity—it’s all out there for others’ scrutiny and all of us pick targets when we’re in the mood, sometimes at random, sometimes with a purpose. Just take the example of weddings. I bet there’s at least one wedding you’ve seen that looked ridiculous to you. Alternative brides think, Wear an expensive dress if that’s what you’ve always wanted, but it’s still vulgar materialism. And the mainstream brides think, Don’t wear a white dress if you don’t want it, but you just want attention for being anti-everything. While others simply think, Purple. Yuck. Or something to that effect.

In wedding planning as in our everyday fashion, what we choose is a comment on what we don’t. No one’s choice is in isolation of everyone else’s. To dress like a punk or to dress like a cowboy, to speak a local dialect or to speak like a newsreader, to try to fit in or to try to stand out are all decisions we make that usually reflect both our tastes and our beliefs. We give others’ decisions either the thumbs up or thumbs down accordingly. As I’ve said before, it’s fair game when beliefs are targeted, because we should all take responsibility for our beliefs. But too many of us make no distinction between the elements of someone’s appearance that reflect their beliefs, and the elements that reflect their biology.

Many of my friends and family, along with most commenters on TV or online, see little difference between making assumptions about others’ clothes and making assumptions about the bodies they cover. Just as they’ll assume the slick suit must belong to a businessman and the lady in shorts and sneakers is American, they’ll assume the particularly skinny woman must be anorexic, that the man whose hands shake must be an alcoholic, that the young woman who collapsed must be either diabetic or pregnant, that the large child over there getting his breast milk is obviously too old for that, that chubby guy over there is certainly overweight and should lose a few pounds, that the poor kid with acne isn’t using the right medicine. Sometimes these flimsy diagnoses are voiced as expressions of sympathy or intellectual exercises à la Sherlock Holmes, sometimes they are dripping with self-aggrandizing pity or snarky complacency. They are always unjust because, unlike quips about clothes or tattoos or cell phone ringtones, comments about another’s body have little to do with choices anyone has made.

As someone who’s undergone limb-lengthening, I can of course attest that there are a few choices we make about our appearance. But while I chose to try to add as many inches as possible to my height, I didn’t have much of a choice about how many inches I could go for. (I gave all I could in physical therapy, but in the end, my ticked-off muscles stiffened and decided the limit for me.) Nor did I have much of a choice about my anterior tibialis tendons severing on both legs, which now makes me stumble on average every few weeks and makes dismounting from a bicycle dangerous. (After two surgeries to repair the tendons and three years of physical therapy, they remain weak.) Nor have I ever had any choice about my hips swaying when I walk because the ball-and-socket hip joint in achondroplastic people is shaped like an egg-and-socket. Skinny friends with hypoglycemia, heavy friends with slow metabolism, and friends with diastrophic dwarfism—whose growth plates do not respond to limb-lengthening—can also attest that any choices we make about our bodies are always limited. Discussing these choices is important, but strangers’ assumptions about them are usually way, way off.

It is because I know so many kind, loving people who analyze strangers’ bodies that I wasn’t at all surprised by the nasty ruminations over her “puffy” appearance that Ashley Judd so awesomely bucked in Newsweek earlier this year. And I’m only half-surprised by the website Too Big For Stroller, where people post street photos of children who appear to have outgrown the transport and smirk about what idiotic parents they must have. In his essay, “Broken Phantoms,” Robert Rummel-Hudson writes beautifully, harrowingly about the unfair judgment strangers often heap on individuals with rare disabilities whose symptoms are less visible. He went after the Too Big For Stroller crowd and summarized their defense arguments thusly:

However many kids with invisible disabilities might be made fun of or hurt by that site, they are acceptable collateral damage, because some of them are probably lazy kids with weak parents, and they must be judged.

“Acceptable collateral damage” is the word I’ve been searching for my whole life. It’s how Jason Webley downplayed the rights of “the few conjoined twins in the world” in light of his Evelyn Evelyn project. It’s how so many minorities are dismissed as annoyances in our majority-rules society by the vacuous, relativist claim, “Everyone’s going to be offended by something.” Which is another way of saying, “We can’t consider everyone’s rights.”

All of us make automatic, silent assumptions about others’ bodies, often trying to figure out how we ourselves measure up, because we are all insecure about our bodies to some degree. But the ubiquity of these thought patterns and the rate at which they are voiced is the problem, not the excuse. There’s probably a list of catty things I’ve said the length of a toilet roll, but I try to stop myself from diagnosing strangers’ bodies, if anything out of awareness of my own vulnerability to inaccurate assumptions. A few years spent in and out of hospitals also taught me what the hell do I know about where they’re coming from, and we all think enough unproductive thoughts about others’ physical appearance as it is. In an essay about me and my scars, Arthur W. Frank writes that when we see someone who looks either unattractive or pitiful to us, our first thought is, “I’m glad that’s not me.” And our second thought is, “But if it were me, I’d get that fixed.”

This is, of course, more than anything ahope. We hope we would be different in the same situation. But we’re afraid we may not be, and this fear causes us to quickly deflect the problem onto someone else. Why not the person who just upset our delusions of normalcy? So we and our supposedly meritocratic society nurture this idea—“I wouldn’t be like that”—as a justification for being judgmental. Whether or not we voice these assumptions is indeed a choice we make, and whether or not we add any hint of judgment is yet another. Whether or not this is fair is often debated on a case-by-case basis, but anytime anyone insults someone else’s body, it is a demonstration of their own insecurities. Period.

We’re all constantly judging one another and judging ourselves in comparison to one another. This can be fair game when we stick to focusing on the mundane decisions we all make. There is a world of a difference between quipping about fashion choices with head-shaking amusement—Sorry, Eddie Izzard, but sometimes you do not know how to put on makeup—and allowing our personal insecurities to fuel pity or disdain for others’ apparent physical imperfections. There is no fair way to trash someone else’s body because, for the most part, your own biology is neither your fault nor your achievement.

Tags: Ableism, Beauty Standards, Bio-Ethics, Disability, Dwarf, Dwarfism, Elective Surgery, Limb-Lengthening, Lookism, Personal Choice, Pop Culture, The Body Image Series

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Categories Most Read, Scars & Appearance, Scars & Physical Ability

Body Image Part I: The Ick Factor of Certain Bodies

2 Jun

(Image by Luca Rossato used under CC via)

“Did you do it to function better or to look normal?”

This is Number One question about limb-lengthening for people with dwarfism, and it opens the Pandora’s box of Body Image, a topic that, no matter who you are, lends itself to resolution no more easily than does Religion. But as I begin a series on the depths of our own feelings about our bodies, I want to first tackle the biggest influence of our self-worth: i.e., others’ opinion. After all, if we were fully convinced that no one else cared one bit what we looked like, how much would we care?

The answer to that may not be easy, but the Number One reason why any of us care what others think about our looks certainly is. It’s all about Dating. Getting laid. Finding a mate. Every parent of a child with dwarfism is warned at Little People of America meetings that whatever ostracizing goes on in elementary school will be outdone by the perils of puberty. The mainstream often dismisses this as an unfortunately natural stage of development, but people designated as minorities by the mainstream know that it is merely an introduction to what lies beyond adolescence. Too often the adult world dodges any responsibility it bears for the lookism young people embrace.

Whether following conventional or unconventional beauty standards, adults obsess over unattractiveness. We are simply less blunt than teenagers, but therein all the more insidious, disguising our trashing of others as the (pseudo-)philosophy of having a “type”:

“I just need a really well-built man. I can’t get into skinny guys.”

“I mean, I don’t want to be taller than my man. No one does.”

“I’d honestly be grossed out if I found out my date was transsexual.”

“I do not like hairy bodies.”

Whatever. We all do it, but we do it way too much. Most of us can see patterns to our attractions, but the more we talk about it, the more we cultivate it in our minds, convincing ourselves that it’s what we need in order to be turned on. Which at best really does nothing—does it really help to weed out people in a crowd based on their bodies before we even talk to them? is there some efficiency to dating that you get points for?—and at worse, limits our experiences and nurtures the dangerous misconception that beauty standards are immovable objects.

A coworker of mine once claimed, “I’m not racist, but I’m just not attracted to black girls.” Dude. Forgetting for a moment that starting any sentence with “I’m not a racist, but—” is possibly one of the least convincing ways to exonerate yourself, are you sure of this because you’ve never been attracted to black girls before? By that logic, I’m just not attracted to Slovakian guys. Or Sri Lankan guys. Or Cornish guys. Or Oklahoman guys. Or… wait a minute, this could go on for a while. Even if you are set in your ways and for some reason believe this helps you, what good does it do to voice it?

Granted faces and bodies evoke visceral feelings that transcend reason. Attraction itself is never a choice. But history has proven that disgust at the idea of interracial or international relationships is the result of social conditioning, and likewise homophobia, transphobia, lookism and ableism thrive thanks to the open support they are given in the media and in everyday conversation.

The battle against lookism is too often dismissed as hopeless by the simplified assertion that “people like to look at pretty people, end of story.” Yes, we do. But the definition of “pretty” is too often assumed to be universal, somehow rooted in our biological urge to choose a mate whose genes are resilient. Studies of history and across cultures prove the definition is socially constructed. Pale has been considered at times beautiful and at other times sickly. Tan has been sometimes seen as gorgeous and other times derided on racist grounds. Round and curvy is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Skinny is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Our supposedly “natural” repulsion at signs of unhealthiness is as random as fashion itself, often disenfranchising disabled individuals while simultaneously promoting faces injected with poison, lungs too constricted to breathe properly, bodies too lacking in fat to menstruate, not to mention blue and green eyelids. Mentioning our repulsion at others’ natural physical features can be so unproductive, so paranoia-inducing, so ultimately responsible for others’ self-hatred. This why I admire anyone who fights whatever temptation they have to describe what they dislike by instead describing what they love.

When we tell our loved ones what exquisite hair or adorable hands or gorgeous eyes they have, it’s more a display of affection than a statement of what we require to be intrigued. When we tell someone, “You are so beautiful,” it’s a testament to the sum of their parts, the combination of their perfections and imperfections. And there’s nothing wrong with discussing styles or personas one finds attractive. Gentle voices, deep voices, explosive laughter, sly eyes, short hair, long hair, a graceful step, a firm step, an assertive look, a cool stance; understanding why any of this draws one in leads to more awareness of one’s own character. It also sparks dialogue that challenges the bland beauty standards of the day.

But someone’s physical traits alone are superficial—not to mention transient—and placing any real value on them is shallow. We all have our shallow sides, but we should be embarrassed to advertise them too openly, the way sitcom directors should be embarrassed to have the audience squeal when two characters kiss.

Tags: Beauty Standards, Dwarfism, Limb-Lengthening, Lookism, Racism, The Body Image Series

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Categories Most Read, Scars & Appearance, Scars & Sexuality

Pfingsten

26 May

It’s Memorial Day weekend in the U.S., Pentecost weekend here in Germany, and seeing as I have now gone way longer in broadcasting consecutive new material without a single re-run than The Simpsons ever has, I’m taking the day off and leaving you with the above revelation. Till next week!

Tags: Beauty Standards, Feminism, Lookism, Misandry, Misogyny, Sexism

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Categories Scars & Appearance, Scars & Gender

The Gender Police

5 May

Last Sunday, Pastor Sean Harris of the Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina gave a sermon on gender:

So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is 4 years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.

Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign [sic] her in. And you say, ‘Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.’

Harris used the sermon to voice support for an upcoming proposed amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. North Carolina law already prohibits same-sex marriage. The constitutional amendment would simply make it ever more so, as well as ban same-sex civil unions. Update on 9 May: The amendment passed.

The hostility Harris invoked is one of the absolute best arguments for the opposition. Play his sermon on a loop next to the 2010 study finding American children of lesbian parents report the lowest rate of abuse and repeat: Who’s advocating happy, loving families here? But it should concern not only those who believe in same-sex marriage or non-violent childcare, but anyone who believes in equality and a non-threatening approach to character development. Because, unfortunately, Harris was merely saying directly what children, teens and adults are told stealthily almost every day.

In the 2007 documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, religious scholars and sociologists conclude that the reason socially conservative religious groups target same-sex marriage so passionately is because it disrupts patriarchy. Indeed, Harris’s rant embodies the two most arbitrary, constricting rules for heterosexual women and men in dating that endure today. That is, nothing is worse for a guy than seeming effeminate, and nothing is worse for a woman than being ugly.

Most readers may agree that these rules exist but certainly not to the extreme that Harris advocates. Rarely does Western society openly invoke the violent, threatening imagery he did. But these rules take various forms, often masquerading as indisputable facts about innate gender differences, and are reinforced in films and magazines, and as mantras in everyday conversation. Many of the following probably sound familiar to you:

1) Women constantly want to constantly shop the way guys constantly want to get laid.

2) A woman should ultimately let the guy pursue her lest she emasculate him and, in any case, she should want to be pursued. Because every woman is a princess and every guy is a hunter.

3) Guys can’t be sexually assaulted by women. They can only be grossed out by the advances of ugly women.

4) She can play sports or join the army, but she needs some makeup to be attractive and should always take care of her looks more than a guy should.

5) But she shouldn’t wear heels if it makes her taller than her man.

6) While many men can expect conventionally attractive women to overlook their gray hair, baldness, wrinkles, and/or chubbiness for their success or sense of humor, a woman cannot expect a conventionally attractive man to do the same for her. Beauty and the Beast was about the woman seeing past her lover’s looks, not the guy!

7) Guys don’t cry, but women do. A lot. Because guys use assertiveness to get what they want, while women show their vulnerability to get what they want.

8) Guys don’t cuddle with each other. That’s gay. But women cuddling is either sweet or hot.

9) He’s castrated if she asked him out, she’s physically stronger than he is, he earns less than she does, he takes her surname, or she talks more than he does at parties.

10) And he’s gay if he’s interested in dresses, skirts or makeup.

11) Or if he enjoys books or films about women’s experiences.

What silliness. Exiling the very real horrors of LGBT persecution to the peripheries for just a split second, how many of you nearly choked yourself laughing at Harris’s order to “get outside and dig a ditch because that’s what boys do”?

Nothing should be off-limits to anyone unless they honestly, independently have no interest in it. Most of us are probably disinterested in or uncomfortable with some of the aforementioned behaviors, but the disinterest should arise from self-awareness, not authoritative training. And I’ve met enough self-aware, self-confident individuals to know that these behaviors do not fall along gender lines, but personalities.

My neighbor loves ponies as much as she loves repairing cars. My husband’s buddy plays rugby and knits. My guyfriend loves arranging flowers and wearing skirts as much as he loves target-shooting and watching Formula One. I love arguing politics and watching figure skating with my mom and dad as much as I cringe at discussing shoes or watching football. All of us are encouraged by our partners, demonstrating that our fears of persecution for such gender-bender are usually reinforced not by the opposite sex but, as Ashely Judd so eloquently pointed out last month, by our peers.

Many men try to talk their girlfriends out of wearing makeup, while many women are supportive of—and often intrigued to the point of being attracted to—men who adopt traditionally feminine activities. (If it weren’t the case, “Too bad he’s gay!” wouldn’t be the famous expression it is.) Despite this, women thrust ludicrous beauty standards upon themselves, making catty comments about each other’s supposed failures, while men police one another with gay slurs. That these cultural rules bear so much repeating signifies that they are indeed rules, not facts. A glance at history and across cultures demonstrates that they are fashions. That enforcing them requires scare tactics—“You’ll never get laid!” “You’ll never land a man!”—should land the final blow to their credibility.

Tags: Beauty Standards, Feminism, Gender Fluid, Genderqueer, Homophobia, LGBT rights, Lookism, Misandry, Misogyny, Personal Choice, Pop Culture, Sexism, Transphobia

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Categories Scars & Appearance, Scars & Gender, Scars & Sexuality

Today’s Princesses: Teaching Them “That Self-Absorption Is The Same As Self-Confidence”

10 Mar

When I was growing up, I had a hard time remembering that McDonald’s and Disney were not the same company. I still have a hard time remembering that. Both aggressively market products few can spend their entire lives resisting because their advertising budgets are unrivaled and because they have mastered the recipes for broad appeal. Both are aggressively exported to other countries, representing all that is optimistic, colorful, unsubtle and indulgent about America. Both are harmless in small doses but unhealthy when they attain the monopoly on a child’s life they’ve been aiming for.

I’ve just finished Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein. Like Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, Orenstein examines a corner of our culture that does not take constructive criticism well. It is because of the magnitude of the pink princess deluge driven by Disney and their ilk combined with their defensive refusal to admit any fault or responsibility—“It’s what every girl wants!”—that her work deserves such a warm welcome.

For any of her failures to perfectly repair the girlie-girl culture in 200 pages, Orenstein offers several impeccable articulations of the problems. Princess packages are problematic when they impose rote scripts and must-have shopping lists, stifling rather than encouraging creativity. Sexualization is problematic when the implied goal is not to attain pleasure but to please a man in exchange for being approved of as pretty. Social networking online is problematic when “the self becomes a brand to be marketed to others rather than developed from within.” And the Muppets are problematic when, for all their ingenuity, they still can’t come up with more than two female Muppets. I think I’m going to end up quoting her a lot.

The New York Times praised her book while emphasizing that it is little cause for alarm seeing as most girls outgrow the pink princess phase. As a former Snow White wannabe, I know this can be true, but I had kick-ass feminists in my life to help me along the way, including a dad who sewed my costumes. I hesitate to agree with the Times’s assertion that “most” move on. Orenstein provides depressing figures on the rise of female eating disorders, the recent drop in computer science degrees, the persistent problem of young women equating “feeling good” with “looking hot.” Even as I tend to surround myself with self-confident, intellectual women who define themselves as much more than their prettiness and their purchases, I regularly encounter those who fit into Orenstein’s figures. They are the ones whose fathers only gave them credit cards, never engaging them in intellectual discussion, and who now avoid debate like an ugly outfit. They are the ones who know that appearing pretty means non-threatening, so self-confidence is tossed out for coyness, self-assertion is abandoned for pouting, and wit is relinquished for fawning giggles in the presence of men. They are the ones who torture themselves over their looks—“I’m so ugly! I’m so fat!”—in order to land a man and then keep him from cheating, spending more of their day unhappy than any other people I know. They are the ones who have not left the princess phase because they do not know how to.

Too often criticism of the princess culture is misconstrued as bitter resentment by those who just don’t have what it takes to wow the guys or woo the pageant judges. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is sincere concern inspired by the hard evidence of the very real dangers that motivates critics like Orenstein:

There is… ample evidence that the more mainstream media girls consume, the more importance they place on being pretty and sexy. And a ream of studies shows that teenage girls and college students who hold conventional beliefs about femininity—especially those that emphasize beauty and pleasing behavior—are less ambitious and more likely to be depressed than their peers. They are also less likely to report that they enjoy sex or insist that their partners wear condoms.

Depression, eating disorders, STDs, and unwanted pregnancy are nothing to sneeze at. Meanwhile, a stud y conducted at the University of Houston found women who identify as feminists demonstrate less hostility toward men than women who don’t. A Rutgers University study found they are also more likely to be in a relationship and their partners report more satisfaction with their sex lives. Isn’t that the happily ever after every parent wants for their daughter?

Sometimes Orenstein’s feminist alternatives to the pink princesses sound soft compared to the roar of her reprimands. Focusing only on the (admittedly daunting) price of the dolls, she misses a major opportunity to understand the educational, multi-cultural brilliance of the American Girl history series. Disney’s The Princess and The Frog promotes independence, battles lookism and exemplifies egalitarian romance in all the ways Beauty and the Beast failed to, yet Orenstein’s review of the film was as weak as its box office performance. Princess Fiona of Shrek is bad-ass and the third film in the series parodies princesses better than anything else it takes a jab at. However, I wonder how necessary any model of romance—feminist or traditional—is for the preschool set.

Indeed, it is important to distinguish between the pre-pubescent girls and the post-pubescent ladies in books and toy stores, and on the screen. Sparkles and daisies are innocuous. Unrealistic beauty standards and boy-crazy storylines are not. The original Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite were not the cleverest female role models, but they acted their age and thus appropriately for their target audience. Their cadres of friends were coed. They regularly outwitted male villains—proving that girls’ problems aren’t limited to cat fights—and the reward was always a happier world, either more colorful or fruit-filled. Like Hello Kitty, Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite demonstrated that to be cute is to be round and childlike, not dangerously busty-yet-skinny like Barbie and the Disney Princesses. But both Rainbow Brite and Strawberry Shortcake have since been redesigned to at least suggest adolescence:

Characters that were not invented first and foremost to sell dolls and costumes are usually a safer bet. Lilo and her sister Nani of Lilo and Stitch are two of the best female characters in cinema history, let alone the Disney canon. Meanwhile, Pippi Longstocking is worshipped in Northern Europe by boys and girls alike. Indeed, wouldn’t a more pro-active welcoming of boys into the princess culture dilute a lot of its sexism? How about dads reading The American Girls to their sons as often as moms read Harry Potter to their daughters? Orenstein does recognize the potential for that revolution, citing a Creighton University study that showed half of boys aged 5 to 13 chose to play with “girls’ toys” as often as “boys’ toys,” but only after they were promised that their fathers wouldn’t find out about it.

Like the families relying on fast-food several times a week, many parents find it difficult to resist the pink marketers’ schemes and the peer pressure foisted upon their daughters in play groups. There is nothing wrong with the occasional indulgence, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with the color pink. But just as we have demanded healthier Happy Meals and more farmers’ markets, we should demand more varied toys, activities and role models for our children, refusing any monochrome model of girlhood.

Tags: Activism, Beauty Standards, Disney, Fairy Tales, Feminism, Lookism, Parenting, Peggy Orenstein, Personal Choice, Pop Culture, Sexism, Transphobia

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Categories Scars & Appearance, Scars & Gender, Scars & Psychology, Scars & Sexuality

The Make-Believe Dwarfs of My Childhood

3 Mar

(Image by Paul Bailey used under CC license via)

Though it often can be the best way to get a message across, art complicates politics because it mixes matters of taste with matters of justice. One lends itself to reason, the other doesn’t. Too often sentimental feelings about a film or song with offensive elements will result in fans denying the offense altogether. “Little House on the Prairie isn’t racist! I grew up on it and I turned out fine!” Maybe you did thanks to your innate curiosity about the experiences of others or inspiring teachers in your life, but you didn’t learn anything valuable about civil rights from that book. I grew up on Dumbo and I think it is an artistically brilliant film with many good messages, one of which is the problem of lookism. However, getting a white actor to put on his best black voice to play a character named “Jim Crow” in the heyday of the minstrel shows was a supremely stupid idea. We shouldn’t deny ourselves our personal tastes, but that shouldn’t preclude calling out the artists’ mistakes.

Likewise, we shouldn’t cry wolf over artwork that simply doesn’t match our tastes. I’m one of the few people on earth who doesn’t enjoy The Lord of the Rings—I saw it for the first time in my twenties and fell asleep—but that’s primarily because I get bored by fantasy epics that are predominantly serious. (I’m not wild about The Chronicles of Narnia either. If there’s going to be magic, I prefer the tongue-in-cheek tone maintained in the worlds of Roald Dahl, L. Frank Baum or the Pirates of the Caribbean.) It is sometimes difficult to divorce my dislike of the style from my annoyance that the Lord of the Rings definition of a dwarf receives more attention in almost every corner of our culture than the one based on reality. Google “dwarf” right now in the image search and see how long you have to wait until a real human being is featured. But neither Peter Jackson nor J. R. R. Tolkien is solely responsible for this; the latter of course drew this definition from the fantasy tradition. And the use of dwarfs in fantasy is not always problematic.

Peter Dinklage has demonstrated that dwarfism is no more important than skin color or foot size in Game of Thrones. And while I couldn’t sit through Lord of the Rings as an adult, I have a special place in my heart for the 1988 film Willow, which was panned by almost every critic I respect. Perhaps my nostalgia and childhood crush on Warwick Davis blinds me to the film’s artistic faults, but my enjoyment of it was rooted in politics before I even knew the word “politics.” Because for once a dwarf was the main character. And he looked like a real dwarf; he wasn’t wearing any pointed ears or goblin nose or orange face-paint. And I wanted to be Sorsha, the bad-ass warrior princess. Yes, she’s a damsel in distress during the final battle, but it’s 3′ 6″ Warwick Davis who wins that battle for her, not buff Val Kilmer.

While I’m uncomfortable with fantasy’s tradition of insisting that dwarfs are a separate race and thus, in many cases, non-human, I loved Willow for giving both the dwarf-sized people and the average-sized people names free of connotation (“nelwyns” and “dakinis”). They are neutral words that demonstrate one of the advantages of neologisms. (Though I’ll admit the film’s line “Stupid dakini!” has echoed in my head at various points in my life.) The film also uses the fictional word “peck” as the thinly veiled equivalent to “midget,” an insult the eponymous character must endure from dakinis throughout the film, adding more gravitas to his saving the day and personal appeal to dwarf viewers like myself. Too often in fantasy, physical characteristics are indicative of personality traits. This is an occasionally racist, always lookist device that disenfranchises hideous hags, macho musclemen, dark demons, pretty princesses, and innocent invalids. Willow offers a welcome respite. As sappy and as simple as the message is—anyone can be a hero—it bears repeating.

Speaking of lookist, I also adored Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as a kid. I always played Snow White, of course—what child doesn’t imagine themselves as the attention-getting protagonist?—but I was also secretly proud that the first feature-length animated film, one of the most famous of the Grimms’ fairy tales, included dwarfs who weren’t ludicrously unrealistic. They were kind, they had no mysticism and, as much as I loved her and her poufy dress, they had far more personality than Snow White herself. For these reasons, I didn’t mind using them as an example when children asked me about my size. My mother once said, “We’ll write to Disney and tell them most dwarfs aren’t bashful or dopey at all!” I recall at the time wishing she wouldn’t put a damper on a film I loved so much, but now I am grateful to her for fostering such moral vigilance in me.

Because once I hit puberty, I instantly saw the problems. Like Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and scores of other films, Snow White asserts that male characters who are disabled or deformed can never hope to get the girl. Considered innocent, asexual people, they are doomed to the Friend Zone. And women with disabilities? There aren’t many fairy tales about them. The story emphasizes even in Snow White’s name that looks are everything.

My childhood in combination with my experience with dwarfism endowed me with a nostalgia for stories I nevertheless was forced to analyze critically as I grew up, so I cannot deny either. Everyone should keep a healthy distance between one’s understanding of the world and fairy tales. My partner and I used the above image of Snow White on our wedding invitations, although we changed the slogan to “Everyone Is Beautiful”—a lesson I did not learn from Snow White herself, but from learning how my dwarfism conflicted with her.

Tags: Ableism, Beauty Standards, Dwarf, Dwarfism, Fairy Tales, Fantasy, Lookism, Racism, Sexism

Comments 9 Comments
Categories Scars & Appearance, Scars & Gender, Scars & Physical Ability, Scars & Race, Ethnicity & Nationality, Scars & Sexuality

The Simpsons, Dwarfism & Getting It Almost Right For Once

12 Nov

(Image by Lubs Mary. used under Creative Commons license vi a)

Somewhere, among the many things cluttered in the back of my head, has long been the wonder as to whether The Simpsons would ever address dwarfism as a topic. Last night, I found out they did two years ago in the episode “Eeny Teeny Maya Moe” and I was shocked to see them decide against the freak show trope that our generation adores so dearly. Not only did they transcend the snickering, but they pounced upon it and deftly demonstrated how blurred are the lines between comfort and discomfort.

Of course it feels silly to be grateful upon seeing one’s difference portrayed respectfully and productively. But forgetting all the crappy media that take cheaps shots at dwarfs (James Bond, The Man Show, Celebrity Apprentice, Austin Powers), I’ve become quite used to good art reveling in the yuk-yuk fascination (Scrubs, This Is Spinal Tap, QI, Bob Dylan). Not to mention the fantasy genre’s long-held tradition (from The Wizard of Oz to The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) of utilizing dwarfism to denote either a separate race or mysticism (“It must be a fucking dream, there’s a fucking dwarf in it!“), which is not explicitly offensive, but also not particularly helpful in deconstructing prejudice and misconceptions. Across the genres, Hollywood usually contributes more to the list of names we get called (Oompa Loompas, Hobbits, Mini-Me, etc.) than to diversity awareness.

The Simpsons episode isn’t perfect – how does one deal with minority issues perfectly? – but I was quite pleased. The one moment that left a bitter taste in my mouth is the final line: “Who would have thought a woman so short could make me feel so big?” Little People of America and many of their supporters perpetuate this same, pathetic slogan of empowerment: physically short, but mentally/spiritually/emotionally huge. Short, but. Little, but. You’re well-meaning, but.

Little is not less. Little is not inferior. Little is not cute. Little is not submissive. Little is not weak. Little is not a Napoleon Complex. Little is little. Big is not greater. Big is not better. Big is not powerful. Big is not dominant. Big is not strong. Big is not a Gentle Giant. Big is big. To consider size as indicative of personality traits is as ludicrous as equating anything from freckles to elbow shape with personality traits. (Any attempt to compliment Oprah Winfrey or Alice Walker by saying, “She may have been dark-skinned, but she brought light to the lives of many” would be considered wholly idiotic and righftully so.) Having two x chromosomes does not impede my intelligence or independence or strength, and neither does having an autosomal dominant mutation in my fibroblast growth factor receptor gene 3.

If you want to praise an individual’s ability to overcome social obstacles, do not place blame for the obstacles on their genetics. Society’s incessant xenophobia and vanity are constantly let off the hook because a genetic difference is still seen as that which upsets normalcy, rather than that which is handicapped by our delusions of normalcy. It is all too often supported by the reasoning that if a majority is scared of a difference, then it must be a natural fear, and natural is practically synonymous with good. It will take quite a few more episodes like that on The Simpsons before the discourse changes and someone says, “Who would have a thought a woman so shat on by our culture’s omnipresent lookism could have the patience to deal with my own individual prejudices?”

Tags: Ableism, Beauty Standards, Comedy, Dwarfism, Freak Show, Language, Lookism, Pop Culture

Comments 7 Comments
Categories Scars & Appearance, Scars & Physical Ability

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Painting On Scars

Who Gets Stuck in the Friend Zone

Does This Feel Ableist To You?

Happy Halloween

Germany Rules on Male Circumcision

Pfingsten

The Gender Police

Today’s Princesses: Teaching Them “That Self-Absorption Is The Same As Self-Confidence”

The Make-Believe Dwarfs of My Childhood

The Simpsons, Dwarfism & Getting It Almost Right For Once

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