I know, I’m a little late to the party. But I, like every
human being with a stable internet connection, have seen and formed an opinion
on Hollaback’s video showing a woman being catcalled, harassed, and even
creepily followed by over 100 men while passively walking the streets of New
York. I think most of the responses to this video have been positive (mostly
women being like “YASSS FINALLY”), but there has been some negative backlash.
Since the video was posted, Republicans and angry, neck-bearded “Pick-Up
Artists” have been defending catcalling with statements like “Women should be
flattered!” and “These men are just telling you they think you’re attractive,
take a f**king compliment.”
Except the thing they don’t get is that when someone tells
you you’re attractive, it's not necessarily a compliment.
My mother’s favorite home video of me as a child is when I’m
about nine years old, at the peak of my tomboy phase. It was the day I sang a
solo in church. She curled and poofed my hair so that it was comically
disproportionate to my head and forced me into a velvet dress and abominable
sweater with fur around the collar. As I descended the stairs with a caustic
scowl on my face, Grandma exclaims, presumably with her hand over her frail heart,
“Bretty, you look so pretty!”
I cross my arms and scowl deeper. “I don’t want to be
pretty. I WANT TO BE TOUGH.”
Although in the past 14 years I’ve developed some more noble
aspirations than to be “tough,” I still understand where nine-year-old Brett
was coming from. “Tough” bears more fruit than pretty. Tough gets shit done.
Tough demands respect. Tough gets to the top. Tough protects you from
things and people that want to hurt you.
“Pretty” does none of those things. It does nothing. Pretty
is passive. Pretty is weak. Pretty invites misuse, even abuse. Pretty is
something one might use to describe a thing, not a person.
Fast-forward three years. I am twelve years old. I look in
the mirror one morning and all of a sudden I am unfamiliar to myself. There are
dark circles under my eyes. My skin looks pallid and my eyes look small. I have
started breaking out on my chin and forehead.
“I’M UGLY!!!” I cry from the bathroom. Mom whisks me
upstairs and opens up her cavern of war paint. She puts concealer under my
eyes, blush on my cheeks, mascara on my eyelashes, shimmery eyeshadow on my
lids, gloss on my lips. My face feels sticky and heavy.
When she is finished, I peek in the mirror again. “Am I
pretty now?” *
*”Pretty” being relative here. I was still an ugly-ass
12-year-old by all accounts
I had no idea I was actually a decently attractive human
being until my late teens. In addition to being among the most exotic-looking
people at my high school (I know, not a lot of genetic variability in Bountiful,
Utah), I had terrible acne, terrible self-esteem, and got zero attention from
boys. None. Nobody ever even looked at me. I was legitimately surprised that I
got asked to prom, and even then assumed that he was just a noble white knight
whose mom felt sorry for me and made him ask me.
By the time I got to college, I had (mostly) grown into my
facial features, and my defiantly un-feminine physique started vaguely
resembling that of a woman. Boys started paying attention to me and it wigged
me the eff out. I was completely unreceptive to any advances because it didn’t
occur to me that they might have actually been attracted to me. It took several
guys literally grabbing me by the shoulders and yelling “YOU ARE PRETTY” in my
face before it finally clicked and I was like, “Oh. I am genetically suitable
for men to want to copulate with. Awesome.”
I didn’t feel like I deserved the attention. And moreover, I
didn’t want it. I won a genetic lottery. Two attractive people* decided to
reproduce, and my body was the result of a completely random, statistically
improbable combination of genes. I literally did nothing to deserve pretty.
Pretty was, and is, an accident.
*Shout-out to Matt and Andra for being attractive and then
being attractive together. That was a good decision.
I don’t want to appear ungrateful. It would be unforgivable
for me to not to acknowledge the privileges of moderate attractiveness in this
totally imbalanced and backwards world. Attractive people are, on average, more
successful than their less attractive counterparts. They are more likely to
find love, get married, and make healthy babies. But that doesn’t mean my soul
is not wrecked over the fact that society values something we can’t control
over our individual merits. I see my mom, who is smokin' hot for 54, busting
her ass at the gym, shelling out for botox and eyelash extensions in an attempt
to cling to a hologram of pretty. She is strong, healthy, talented, smart,
funny, and compassionate, but she honestly believes her worth varies inversely
to the lines on her face. Pretty does nothing, but the idea of pretty threatens to destroy amazing women like my mother.
When a woman is walking down the street, trying to get from
A to B, and a man she doesn’t know tells her she’s beautiful, or hot, or sexy,
or “pretty,” it is not a compliment. We are not our bodies. At times, we don’t
even identify with our bodies at all. Bodies are just the meat-ships the better
parts of us move around in. Catcalls have no more meaning to us than, “some shapes
are round” or “there is cheese.”
When someone tells me I’m pretty, I don’t just “take a
f**king compliment.” I don’t say thank you. When someone tells me I’m pretty, I
always say, “You know…I’m some other things too.”
If you really want to give a woman a compliment, for the
love of God, don’t start with telling her she’s pretty. Tell her you admire her wit and intellect. Tell her she’s a good listener. Tell her her smile lights up a room
or that her laugh is contagious. Tell her how she makes you feel when she talks
about the things she’s passionate about. Tell her she is beautiful, not because
of her face or her boobs, but because she is a human being and human beings are
inherently beautiful.
XOXO betches,
An ugly girl in a “pretty” girl’s body
