the prettiest star

I hate this meme.

-The example of Marilyn Monroe is ironic, because she was not a happy person. She was gorgeous, but she took a lot of drugs and drank a lot of alcohol, and died from doing both of those things. We consistently criticize actresses who engage in self destructive behavior in order to be beautiful, but we expect them to, at all times, be beautiful.

-The bottom row of images are exclusively photos that were taken on the set of a photoshoot, which means that the women were being paid to have their photos taken, had consented to having their photos taken, and were aware that they were being photographed. The top row of images is entirely celebrity paparazzi photographs, which were most likely taken without any consent first having been derived from the women in them beforehand. The possible exception is Heidi Montag, who appears to be making a face for the camera, but we have no way of knowing if she was asked permission beforehand.

-I’m going to restate my point from above a little more concisely: Imagine you’re on vacation, or just taking the day off relaxing at the beach, and someone you’ve never met and will never meet comes up to you, takes photographs of you, and sells them to magazines and bloggers. Your photos are then cropped by someone on the internet and included in this meme. By going to the beach, you became a symbol to the internet of why women hate themselves. Which is not even something you are personally responsible for.

-Are Keira Knightley, Nicole Ritchie, Kirsten Dunst, and Heidi Montag supposed to care what you, the internet, think about their bodies? If your automatic response to that is “Yes”, isn’t that sick? You do not know those people. Why do you get to have a say in the way that their bodies look? Is it important that they meet certain baseline standards of hotness?

-There’s an underlying implication that the women in the top row look the way they look because they’re striving for that impossible-to-completely-define standard of sexiness. People are people, and they have different bodies. It is not for you to judge whether or not those people are healthy. It is not for you to judge whether or not they are universally attractive, as universal attractiveness is a myth that corporations use to sell you things, and doesn’t really exist.

Gender policing is never ever right. The problem isn’t that we’re policing incorrectly, the problem is that we’re policing AT ALL.

(Source: letswishuponastar, via isabelabrigit)