Eva Longoria is Not Pretty

Neither is Penelope Cruz. Neither is Julia Roberts. Neither is Kirsten Dunst. Tara Reid never was, even before her recent skankification. Mischa Barton makes me shuddder. Gwyneth Paltrow? Please--though I love Sliding Doors, it ain't because I'm smitten at the sight of her. Stop telling me that these women are beautiful, just because they're skinny. Have you actually looked at them? They're not attractive, and yet I'm being told--forcefully, insistently--that I ought to be sexually aroused by the very sight of them. I'm not, and stop it. Just because they weigh nothing does not mean they're hot. On the contrary, really. The perversity of such thinness is that it actually makes genuinely beautiful women--think Angelina Jolie about 4 years ago--look like life-models for Corpse Bride. (I've talked about this elsewhere, and won't rehash the point.)

There's been a long tradition in American popular culture of describing anyone who's female with zero body fat and a lack of obvious physical deformities and facial scars as "beautiful"--witness the fact that Jackie Kennedy was "beautiful"--a woman who, if she were working at the Dairy Queen, you'd only have looked at twice if she'd given you the wrong change. That goes double for the late, unmissed Princess Diana--a plain jane in $8 billion worth of clothes and jewelry. I'm not sure why this is so.

It's easy, of course, to blame High Fashion (and I do). But what I find fascinating is the degree to which we, the public, lap up the lie. I mean, if we're being appealed to at our most primal, back-of-the-brain level, how it possible that we're falling for this s***? Sex is hard-wired, isn't it? I mean, isn't this why you can't "cure" homosexuals? Have you ever tried to feed your dog something he doesn't like? He won't eat it. He knows what he wants--it's primal--and he can't be 'worked into' liking what he doesn't want. Men like flesh--sorry if I'm putting it crudely, but there it is--and yet we're being denied the very thing we actually want. And being told that we don't actually want it, we want...Lara Flynn Boyle. But we don't--dear God, we don't. We're being told to ignore the steak and just eat the breadstick. And yet somehow, despite the primal urge and the sane logic behind it--we're believing this. Why? I'm no fan of conspiracy theories--I spend the entire miserable 3 hours I spend reading The DaVinci Code muttering "Give me a f***ing break!"--but there's got to be one. Nothing else makes sense. Unless...

Unless. See, I read about how men are losing their minds over Jessica Alba--who thanks to looks and diet, appears to be about 12--and I worry--are we appealed to as potential pedophiles? Because that's what these women look like. When women get too skinny--when malnutrition reaches a certain point, the female body stops menstruating. It reverts back to pre-pubescence, the clock turned forcefully back to childhood. Is that what we're being subliminally sold? Women who are of legal age but illegal form? I worry that this is so--I worry that rather than being sold sex, we're being sold power--dominance of adult over child--in the form of sex. Because that dynamic, when it sinks into the heads of men who think that that's what they want, and women who think that that's how they have to look/act to get men--then, folks, this just can't lead anywhere good.

So, please. Please stop telling me that Sarah Jessica Parker is hot. She isn't--she looks, thanks to diet and surgery, exactly as she did when she was on Square Pegs back in the '80s (look it up on imdb, you 20-somethings.) And that means, if she's legitimately hot, then Humbert Humbert was just a man slightly ahead of his time. And that. Is scary.

Author's Note: The subject for this blog was not conceived by the blogger. Credit goes to a certain young woman who knows who she is and prefers to remain anonymous. But she gets a big 'thank you' from me, plus any other acts of gratitude she cares to name.