pretend there is nothing outside this room

[lotesse]

I'm finally reading Elaine Scarry's "On Beauty and Being Just," - one of the ones I've been pretending to have read for years - and, idek, guys, I kind of hate it. Like, the prose is gorgeous, of course, hers always is, but I feel like she's strawmanning all over the place. I'll agree that extrapolating from feminist critiques of beauty to argue that, say, a vase is negatively reified when looked at is silly as anything. But similarly, I feel like extrapolating from a vase or a flower to human aesthetics is just as wrongheaded, and that's what she keeps doing. The feminist critique doesn't object to beauty qua beauty, it objects to the weaponization of beauty in the service of racism, classism, and misogyny. So I just. Don't know what to do with this book. And am frustrated.


some linkspamming:

oursin, 'Adequate' and 'competent' are not, in fact, pejoratives - this conversation was something I really needed to read. When I was in fifth grade, my parents convinced me that even top marks were meaningless, because all my As meant was that I was doing better than the other kids, not that I was working at my own maximum potential. So I just possibly have some issues.

Abigail Nussbaum reviews the Avengers - everything she said, please.

new Regina Spektor Album with streaming option!

eta: Garland Grey, Buffy Vs. The Beige Demon: Good Riddance to Riley Finn: Most modern television shows display their enlightenment by unleashing paper sexists at their heroine and allowing us to take the clobbering of these shadows as a triumph over sexism. Which, in the unscripted world, is too often not a douchebag saying “You can’t cuz you’re a girl” but is instead someone internalizing that belief and using their power to punish you for it. This scenario creates a false image in the culture of “What Sexism Looks Like” which men use to calibrate their understanding of misogyny. Which means anything less blatant than THAT is just the moaning of people who can’t compete AND once the show has labeled itself NOT SEXIST, it is free to deal in subtler, more insidious forms of sexism. Also with lovely Classic Trek exempla.

Comments

[sahiya]

I have some of the same issues leftover from a childhood in which I was told I had to give 110%, every single time, on every assignment. It took me years to learn that most people - including my teachers - could not tell the difference between my 110% and my 75%, and that 75% is actually sustainable. Perpetuating this is one of the things I'm most worried about when I think about being a parent - not only because I will, inevitably, want my kids to be scholastically successful, but also because it's the sort of mistake parents don't realize they're making. They think of it as helping their kids reach their potential, especially in cases where their potential is high, and so they don't see the harm it might be doing longterm. I've mostly managed to escape it, but I don't think my younger sister (who was never quite as good as I was in school) ever has.

[lotesse]

Right. You know, even now I have a strangely ambivalent response to my parents' tactics, because I work, and I work well, and I was pretty screwed up for a while as a teen. I'm tempted to argue that we exchange happiness/tranquility/freedom from crushing self-judgement for success, but also somehow leery of making that argument.

Applied to anyone else? I would never encourage setting your kid up to be this highstrung. But I also don't know if I'd be willing to risk what I might've lost if they hadn't pushed me so incredibly hard.

[idleleaves]

my parents convinced me that even top marks were meaningless, because all my As meant was that I was doing better than the other kids

And now I'm going off to read that, too, because my parents did the same. If I wasn't at the top of my class, I was an utter piece of shite, but even being at the top - even an 100% score - wasn't enough.

[lotesse]

I think in one way I was really lucky, because I was never punished or denigrated for academic underperformance. Instead, my parents would take it as an indicator that there was something wrong with my situation, something wrong with me, and the whole weight of their parenting energy would swing into action to fix things.

But they didn't always know how, and I wonder what answers I might have come to if they'd allowed me to just be the weird kid for a few years, instead of treating me like a ~project~.