Real Women (and Men) vs. Intolerance and TV

Here's some recent silliness. Experimented with the timer on my camera and some Christmas lights the other night and wound up with some pretty fun shots. This one's my favourite.

It looks like I'm going to be appearing in Square Magazine this month as a poet -- I know, right? -- and I've been invited to be a feature at the magazine's launch/reading next month. Exciting stuff! Have been feeling appropriately creative lately, although not in a particularly useful way. Planning to hit the canvas sale at the Pen & Paper on pay day & busting out the acrylics this weekend. I'm having trouble communicating thought in a coherent way, so it looks like I'll be giving the non-fiction a rest and resorting to beat poetry and finger painting.

Hey, it's always worked before.

In other news, have gathered quotes for calendar, and although we could get a few printed reasonably cheaply, it would probably lose us money unless each and every one of them sold for more than £5, which I'm not willing to count on. So unless plans change within the next week, Babes With Brains will be published as a series on the website.

Keep you posted.

So I just saw on BBC News they interviewed some guy from InStyle about this German women's fashion magazine that's banned super-skinny supermodels, and he said something as to the effect of, "When women read fashion magazines they don't want to see real women, they want to see beautiful women." Excuse me? Did he say that real women aren't beautiful? And why does he care? It's not like he's seen one in recent memory. The reaction from the female anchor was priceless. I think she was going to rip him a new one before the male anchor laughed nervously and moved the conversation along, the interviewee laughing bashfully like he'd gotten away with something.

Interestingly enough, surveys have shown that average men prefer healthy women sizes 8 - 16(+) over their rail-thin counterparts. I'm not bashing skinny women here, I'm just pointing out that when women strive to be super thin, it's not for men. It's never for men; men don't like it, and any man worth his salt would prefer a healthy woman to a skeleton.

Really.

This whole "fattist" thing the western world seems to have launched upon itself makes me upset. At first it really pissed me off, and now it just makes me despair at the state of things. I hate the implication that what you look like is anybody's business but your own. I also find the "no fat chicks" mantra pretty rich coming from the kind of men brash enough to repeat it. Where are the "no redneck assholes" bumper stickers?

I just don't know where people get off interfering with other people's lives. It's not only "fat" people (and who says what's "fat" anyway? It's down to perception. ) -- it's the disabled, the desperate, the downtrodden, the mildly unattractive and the somewhat untalented. You only have to flip through the TV guide for a veritable parade of glorified freakshows. Fat Teens in Love makes me particularly angry. Of course there's also I Hate My Bald Head, Hairy Women, 3 Fat Brides, 1 Thin Dress, Octomom, More to Love, Freaky Eaters, and makeover programmes like The Swan, and it extends to watching people humiliate themselves on shows like American Idol, X-Factor, and now, Grease: The School Musical. This morbid fascination is a disease. These shows are patronising, insulting, transparent, and disposable; they do not provide entertainment and they are not human interest -- there's nothing human about them.

This weird hatred isn't limited to TV. I was walking to work today through the St David's shopping centre in Cardiff. I was walking behind this guy in a leather jacket and skinny jeans with a scarf in his gorgeous long black hair. Do I have your attention? Anyway, this random big guy (wearing rainbow from head to toe, no less) sees the guy in leather and starts barking insults at him until he ducked into a store to get away from him. What? What made that guy think he had the right to comment on this guy's appearance? Why do people think it's any of their goddamned business? How fucked up would you have to be to aggressively attack another person without provocation on the basis of something so superficial? There is clearly something wrong.

I'm not blaming the Media, Hollywood, or the Fashion Industry -- Media reflects the world, Hollywood polishes it, and the fashion industry gives it something to blow its money on -- but it's something much bigger and darker than that: it's self-hatred, jealousy, insecurity, intolerance, and all of the worst things from the darkest corners of human failure.

Thing is, it's not natural and it's not inevitable. I don't feel the need to humiliate people, and I'm sure you don't, either. If I saw somebody committing a heinous fashion crime, yeah, I'd notice, but I wouldn't dream of criticising them because a) it's cruel, b) it's subjective, and c) I don't care. Who does?

So what I'm trying to do with The Antagonist and the Babes with Brains is to provide an alternative entertainment source, to reassure you that not everybody on Earth is baying at quasi-celebrities, to embrace your inner freak, and to share our soap box with you when you feel like screaming at people.

Oh, and we also want to redefine the popular perception of beauty by taking pictures of people we think are really, really, terribly hot, regardless of size, age, gender, etc, etc, because it is not a style or a predetermined set of proportions that makes you a hottie.

It's your brain.