Tag Archives: Little People of America

Who Should Think You’re Beautiful?

11 Oct

Goodnight(Image by Aphrodite used under CC 2.0 via)

From the Archives

 

Should beauty pageants stay or go?  The New York Times tackled this question during the 87th Miss America Pageant.  Amidst all the discussions about deferential giggles and zombie smiles, I find myself echoing the conventional wisdom that Let’s face it, it’s all about the swimsuit round, and Caitlin Moran’s wisdom that You can call it the ‘swimsuit round’ all you like, but it’s really the bra and panties round.

A decade ago Little People of America entertained the idea of holding an annual beauty pageant, but it was swiftly nixed by the vast majority of members.  The inherent problems were pretty obvious: Isn’t being judged by our looks the biggest problem dwarfs face?  Do we really want to set a standard for dwarf beauty?  And if so, which diagnosis gets to be the standard?  Achondroplasia or SED congenita?  Skeletal dysplasias or growth hormone deficiencies?  Ironically—or perhaps not—there was also a widespread fear that heightism would dominate the judging.

What I find most unsettling about beauty pageants is not the nondescript personality types on display—although I am very concerned about that, too—but the idea that it is perfectly normal and okay to want millions of strangers to love your looks above all else. This idea seeps into every corner of Western culture, not just beauty pageants and women’s magazines. 

If you’ve ever entered “body image” into a search engine, it won’t take you long to come across the phrase You’re beautiful!  It’s everywhere, and it’s usually geared at anyone, particularly anyone female, who believes they fall short of the beauty pageant prototype.  You’re beautiful! is part battle cry, part mantra – a meek attempt to broaden society’s beauty standards and an earnest attempt to bolster individual self-confidence.  Super-imposed over flowers and rain clouds and sunsets and cupped hands, it becomes hard to tell the online empowerment apart from the online valentines. And as much as I admire the intentions behind it, I’m tempted to question it. 

Making peace with our bodies is important.  Diversifying our criteria for human beauty is necessary.  But why should we need to hear that we’re beautiful from someone we don’t know?  Of course we can never hear it enough from friends and lovers.  (I’ve heard it three times in the last 24 hours and I’m not giving it up for anything!)  But basing self-confidence in strangers’ praise upholds the notion that it is bad to be thought of as ugly or plain by people who don’t know anything else about you. 

We all have our secret fantasies about being gorgeous rock stars and princesses and Olympic heroes with throngs of admirers dying to throw their arms around us.  But, to echo Jane Devin, if most men can go through life with no one but their lovers daring to praise their looks, why do women still demand so much attention? 

This past spring Scientific American revealed that, despite how much our culture suggests that most of us need to hear over and over how attractive we are before we even begin to believe it, the average person overestimates their appearance.  This shouldn’t be too surprising. The world’s largest empire isn’t called “Facebook” for nothing.  And as the Scientific author pointed out, the vast majority of us consider ourselves to be above-average in most respects, which is statistically impossible.  He explains: 

If you think that self-enhancement biases exist in other people and they do not apply to you, you are not alone. Most people state that they are more likely than others to provide accurate self-assessments…

Why do we have positively enhanced self-views? The adaptive nature of self-enhancement might be the answer. Conveying the information that one has desirable characteristics is beneficial in a social environment…  Since in self-enhancement people truly believe that they have desirable characteristics, they can promote themselves without having to lie. Self-enhancement also boosts confidence. Researchers have shown that confidence plays a role in determining whom people choose as leaders and romantic partners. Confident people are believed more and their advice is more likely to be followed.

So self-confidence is good and self-doubt is bad, both in love and in life.  And demanding strangers and acquaintances tell us that we’re beautiful is narcissism, not self-confidence.  In the words of Lizzie Velásquez, who was voted Ugliest Girl in the World on YouTube, “I don’t let other people define me.”

This is not to suggest a ban on praising anyone’s looks ever.  I still harbor adolescent crushes on a pantheon of celebrities, from George Harrison to Harriet Beecher Stowe.  But between the beauty pageants and the You’re beautiful! memes, it does seem that most of us still believe that having broad appeal is some sort of an achievement, as opposed to dumb luck.  And that for a woman, it’s an achievement worthy of mention on a résumé. 

In April, President Obama touted newly appointed Kamala Harris as “by far the best-looking attorney general.”  After dealing the president a well-deserved eye-roll, Irin Carmon at Salon suggested that before publicly praising someone’s looks, we should ask ourselves: Is it appropriate to tell this person and/or everyone else that I want to sleep with them?   

It’s an excellent point, though crucial to add that seeing beauty in someone is not always rooted in lust.  Love for friends and family usually renders them absolutely adorable or heroically handsome.  Whenever I overhear someone say, “You’re beautiful!” it will always register as an expression either of desire or affection.  (Neither of which, Mr. President, are ever appropriate in a professional context.)  

Yet plenty of us still envy Kamala Harris a little.  And too many of us seem to think being conventionally attractive is truly important because it corresponds directly to being successful in love.  This is perhaps the most dangerous myth of all. 

If I hear the phrase, “She was out of my league!” one more time, I’m going to swat the sad sack who says it.  My dating history is nothing to brag about, but I can brag—shamelessly—about being a trusted confidante to dozens upon dozens of different people with all sorts of dating histories.  And after a few decades of listening to them spill their hearts out, I’ll let you in on a little secret: When it comes to love and lust, everyone is wracked with self-doubt. 

And I mean everyone.  The athletes, the models, the geeks, the fashionistas, the bookworms, the jet-setters, the intellectuals, the rebels, the leaders, the housewives, the musicians, the Zen Buddhists, the life of the party.  That girl who can’t walk through a club or the office without being propositioned.  That guy known as a heartbreaker because he can bed anyone he wants to and does so.  That stoic who doesn’t seem to care about anything.  That wallflower so set on navel-gazing that she thinks she’s the only one who’s lonely.  Every single one of them has fretted to me at 2 am, sometimes sobbing, sometimes whispering, sometimes hollering, always shaking: “Why doesn’t he/she love me?!” 

This isn’t to say that it all evens out completely and no one handles it better than anyone else.  Outside of abusive relationships, those who obsessively compare dating scorecards and create rules and leagues for turning sex into a competition are invariably the most miserable.  Some people date a lot because they’re popular, others because they have low standards.  Some marry early because they’re easy to know and like, others because they’re terrified of being alone.  Just being able to easily land a date or get laid has never made anyone I know eternally happy.  Narcissism and self-pity come from thinking it can. 

We’d all like to be the fairest of them all, but what we want more than anything is to be devastatingly attractive to whomever it is we’ve fallen in love with.  And because only those who genuinely know us can genuinely love us, any beauty they see in us comprises our style, our charisma, our perfections and imperfections.  It is the driving force behind all the world’s great works of art we wish we were the subject of.  And unlike beauty pageants or Google’s image search, true art is constantly redefining and questioning and promoting beauty all at once.   

I will always tell certain people how gorgeous they are because I can’t help but think that about those I’m awe of.  (And I guarantee that my friends are prettier than yours.)  But for those of you out there who might feel tempted to rebut the compliment with that age-old line, “You’re just saying that because you’re my [friend/partner/family]!” consider that a compliment motivated by true love is hardly a bad thing. 

And that being desired by someone who doesn’t love you at all can get really creepy.  Really fast. 

 

 

Originally posted September 15, 2013

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High Schools Fight to Keep Midgets As Mascots

12 Jul

(Via)

 

Calling someone what they wish to be called should be a no-brainer but is often met with resistance. Asking someone else to change their name in deference to someone else, however, sometimes seems harder than limb-lengthening.

Little People of America is holding its annual national conference this week in St. Louis and has voiced their offense at the name of a local high school sports team across the river in Freeburg, Illinois. The school is one of several across the United States whose sports teams are named the Midgets and LPA would like this to change. Freeburg school superintendent Andrew Lehman does not expect to see the mascot altered any time soon.  “That term can be very subjective. What’s offensive to one person or group of people is going to have a very different meaning to other people,” he states.

You can sign the Little People of America petition here, or you can add your name to the list of 3,446+ supporters arguing to keep it. Author of the latter petition Jared Fricke explains:

It is time in America to stand up and say words do not create evil and if we allow a few short minded people to dictate what is right and wrong then we will live in a world full of fear. Freeburg is not a place of hate, and as Americans we have the right to use the Midgets as a mascot because it is the foundation of what it meant to come from Freeburg. We are a small town, but that does not stop us from achieving great things.

In 1997, the board of education at a high school in Dickinson, North Dakota voted to the drop their Midget mascot, but was met with such a punitive backlash—costing three board members their jobs—that it was swiftly reinstated.

The Dickinson name was given to the team by a sportswriter in the 1920s. The Freeburg superintendent claims their mascot originated in the 1930s. Bestowing nicknames based on supposed physiological shortcomings as a form of ribbing was common in the U.S. in those days. Major League Baseball abounded with players named “Red,” “Pudge,” “Curly,” “Pinky,” “Shorty,” and “Lefty.” In Fried Green Tomatoes, set in 1930s Alabama, the protagonist starts calling her nephew “Stump” after he loses his arm in an accident. The seven dwarfs in Disney’s 1937 film—Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Bashful and Doc—were the final names chosen out of a pool of suggestions that included Jumpy, Deafy, Dizzy, Hickey, Wheezy, Baldy, Gabby, Nifty, Sniffy, Swift, Lazy, Puffy, Stuffy, Tubby, Shorty and Burpy.

Caricaturing minorities in mascots and logos was also common on both sides of the Atlantic. Sam Greenspan at 11points has documented a handful of other jaw-dropping mascots that only recently underwent name changes, from the Frisco Coons to the Pekin Chinks. Those my age and older who grew up in the U.S. can easily recall the mammy origins of Aunt Jemima, while those who grew up in Finland are equally well acquainted with the first incarnation of Fazer black licorice. While some embarrassing examples endure, most of these corporate logos have been altered within my lifetime and with much greater ease than the sports mascots like the Washington Redskins, the Cleveland Indians, and the Freeburg Midgets. Why?

The corporate world is very invested in what other people think because their primary concern is the bottom line. The world of competitive team sports, however, both engenders and depends on a sense of community identity, the ultimate Us vs. Them mentality. Bowing to outside pressure is anathema to this, as one signatory of Fricke’s petition argues:

This group is not affected on a daily by our mastcot [sic] ever!!! They come to our area and are just looking for a reason to be in the news. It’s a source of pride in Freeburg and is something needs to stay as a part of our high school’s tradition. Midget Pride baby!

Let’s give the mascot’s supporters the benefit of the doubt for the moment and assume they only mean well by shouting “Midget Pride!” Let’s ignore the slur status of the M-word and consider whether Little People of America should not perhaps focus their indignation on more direct forms of de-humanization, like dwarf-tossing and rejection by family. What’s so bad about a small town thinking dwarfism is the perfect metaphor for their tiny-but-tough identity after all?

It’s an important question for high school students to ponder. I began this blog with a post about why I find the little-in-size-but-large-in-spirit slogan inherently demeaning. And small town students would only benefit from asking themselves, “Do we truly know what it’s like to be a real-life midget?” And from considering the issue of appropriation as it was summed up by a friend of mine: “If you actually wish you had a freak flag to wave, then you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about because you don’t know what it’s really like to be widely seen as a freak.”

Indeed, a very common phase in adolescence involves trying on different identities to figure out your own. Self-actualization relies on it. But after a certain age, stagnating in this phase becomes a sign of immaturity. I don’t fault teenagers who appropriate identities via shallow, melodramatic thinking—like mixing a love of the macabre with murder at Columbine, or thinking it’s touching instead of terrible to compete for Olympic gold to the tune of Schindler’s List—but I do fault any of their adult role models who do.

As a place of higher learning, I’d be most pleased to see the school resist the urge to stand united and firm against the PC police and instead encourage their student body to debate and reflect upon why those of us with dwarfism might not feel honored by their mascot. They should not agree with us right away. They should not mutter Whatever and begrudgingly bow to LPA’s request. But instead reflect on the many complex issues it brings up for us, in all seriousness and with sincerity.

 
 

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Why Do Names for Minorities Keep Changing?

14 Jun

midget not wanted(Image by CN used under CC 2.0 via)

I’ve been writing about the word “midget” more than usual this month, thanks to an Irish public service announcement and then GoogleTranslate. The taboo nature of the word in the dwarf community is almost amusing when we consider that the world’s largest dwarf advocacy organization, Little People of America, was originally named Midgets of America. No lie. (You can read about why I feel that the change was hardly an improvement here and why others do as well here.)

Minority names have been changing a lot throughout the last century. This social pattern has been dubbed the Euphemism Treadmill by psychologist Stephen Pinker. Toni Morrison has pointed out that it’s all about power: “The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.” But as names for minorities keep changing, many laypeople keep complaining about the seemingly convoluted nature of of it all:  

“Can’t they just stick to a name and be done with it?”

“Why should I have to be careful if they’re going to be so capricious about it?”

“It seems like they’re just looking for us to slip up so they can call us out!”

It’s not hard to understand where this frustration comes from. No one likes being accused of insensitivity for using a word they had thought was in fact accurate and innocuous. But rarely does anyone ask why the names change.

In 2010, President Obama signed Rosa’s Law, classifying “intellectually disabled” as the official government term to describe what in my childhood was referred to as “mentally retarded.” “Mentally challenged” and “mentally impaired” were other terms suggested and used in PC circles in the 1990s. Already I can sense a good number of my readers wondering whether these changes were truly necessary. I can also sense, however, that few would wonder whether it was necessary to abandon the terms “idiots,” “morons,” and “imbeciles” to refer to such people.

“Idiot,” “moron,” “imbecile,”  and “dumb” were all medical terms before they were insults, used by doctors and psychologists across the Anglophone world. But gradually laypeople started using them to disparage any sort of person they disagreed with. And now this is their only purpose. Instead of getting all of us to stop using these words as insults, the medical minorities have stopped accepting them as official names.

The names for psychiatric disorders and developmental disabilities are particularly prone to being re-appropriated by the mainstream to describe behaviors and tendencies that barely resemble the diagnoses. “Sorry, I wasn’t listening,” I once heard a colleague apologize. “I have such ADD today.”

“I think you’re becoming pretty OCD,” quipped a friend upon perusing my books, which are strictly organized by size.

“That movie kept going back and forth. It had no point! It was so schizophrenic.”

For over 10 years now, psychiatric researchers and patients have been working to abandon this last one. Using “schizophrenic” to describe anything that oscillates between two opposing views or behaviors can easily lead to widespread ignorance about the intricacies of the condition. “Psychosis susceptibility syndrome” is one proposed replacement, but the ubiquity of “psychotic” in common parlance may prove to be equally problematic. “Salience syndrome” was the term most preferred by patients participating in a survey at the University of Montreal and was published in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013.

This is the choice we have about labels for minorities: We either stop using minority labels to insult people, or get used to minorities asking us to use different labels to refer to them.

But if only it were that simple. Getting people to abandon marginalizing terms for minorities without fighting about it is as difficult as the word “political correctness” itself. There are two reactions all too common in any given conversation about political correctness and they both invariably botch the conversation:

  • Libertarian Outrage: “You can’t tell me what to say!  I can call anyone what I wanna call ’em and it’s their own fault if they’re upset!”
  • Liberal Outrage: “I’ll humiliate you for using an old-fashioned term because PC is all about competition and it feels cool to point out others’ faults.”

Both reactions are based on a refusal to listen and a readiness to assume the worst of the other side. Plenty of anti-PC outrage is fueled by the belief that any discussion about names and language is hot-headed and humorless, and plenty of liberal bullying is fueled by the belief that honest-to-goodness naiveté is as morally objectionable as outright hostility.

Political correctness is not a competition, and if it were, it would be one that no one could win. A human rights activist may be an LP with SAD who is LGBTQIA and know exactly what all those letters mean, but they may not know that “Lapland” and “Fräulein” are now considered offensive by the people once associated with them. And they are less likely they know about the taboo term in German for the former Czechoslovakia.

And as someone who’s spent her life having to decide how she feels about “midget” and “dwarf” and “little person,” I can tell you that attitudes are far more important than labels. Because even if the word often matches the sentiment, this is not always the case. There’s a difference between the stranger who told my father when I was a kid, “She’s an adorable little midget!” and the coworker who told my cousin recently, “The best thing about Game of Thrones is getting to laugh at that midget!” 

I will always prefer to have an in-depth discussion with someone about the meaning of dwarfism than to call someone out for using a certain word.  I will always prefer to hear someone earnestly ask me how I feel about a certain word than witness them humiliating someone else for uttering it.

Too often these discussions are diluted down into simple lists that start to look like fashion do’s and don’ts, and this is perhaps the gravest insult to the noble intentions of those who kick-started the PC movement. As one progressive blogger pointed out years ago in The Guardian, her lesbian parents are firm supporters of trans rights and, up until recently, used the word “tranny” without any idea that it is widely known among trans people as a pejorative. Too much sympathy for the couple’s ignorance could be harmful. When the mainstream insists that no one should be expected to know about newly taboo terms for minorities, it implies that no one should be expected to be listening to the human rights conversations that are going on about these groups. But conversely, too little sympathy for sheer ignorance is equally unproductive.

Because bigotry is not ignorance. As a wise man said, bigotry is the refusal to question our prejudices.   

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