July 2011

Megan Fox Does or Doesn’t Use Botox!

The first words that come to my mind—and, I would hope, to most other people’s minds—are, who freakin’ cares? Megan Fox is an autonomous adult and free to do whatever she pleases with her body. I don’t care if she gets fake whiskers implanted into her face like the people of Panem do in The Hunger Games. It’s her choice.

So why is a discussion of whether or not she gets Botox an actual news headline?

Then, there is an even more problematic cultural sickness that comes from the fascination with Fox’s face. As Melissa McEwan pointed out over at Shakesville today, Megan cannot win. Either she gets Botox to stay youthful and beautiful as the status quo demands, or she doesn’t and her industry (and the media itself) shuns her. If she admits to it, she’s less than a human being; if she doesn’t, she is a worthless liar; and whatever she says is going to be debates, scrutinized, and refuted no matter what in the name of gossip.

And this all stems from our repulsive view of beauty in this country. And as McEwan also points out, Fox is an absolute, pardon the pun, fox—I wish she didn’t feel the need to make herself more beautiful because she’s already downright gorgeous, yet here it’s at least implied that she does. And if she doesn’t, captions like, “Megan Fox: Pretty, then sexy, now ‘done’” aren’t being remotely fair to her. The media already turned her into a sex symbol, and now they want to make her a beauty pariah.

Michele Bachmann Signs Racist, Homophobic Conservative Pledge

 

Michele Bachmann just signed a pledge illustrating her commitment to hating gay people and sexual freedom forever and ever, amen. It's a little confusing to parse, mostly because some of the language and allegories used will make you step back from your desk in horror/bewilderment/frustration. Seriously, I don't know who writes this stuff, or what candidates like Bachmann have to gain from signing it.

Take, for example, the claim that children born into slavery were better off than children born now in a single-parent household or worse, to gay parents. "Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President," the text reads. Yeah, it's that bad. Conservatives harp so hard on the "mother and father" point that they'll actually go so far as to claim that it's better to be a slave child with a mommy and daddy than it is to be a American child in the present with just one mother or two fathers. Pretty disgusting stuff, especially considering how often slave families were broken up as children or parents were sold to different households. Does anyone proofread this kind of stuff before it goes out? And how on earth do people still call foul on those who claim that the Tea Party harbors racists? What is going on? What year am I living in?