So over on Roosh Valizadeh’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Return of Kings blog a gentleman named Blair Naso has penned a weird paean to Barbie (the doll, not the Nazi war criminal), suggesting that she is a perfect “inspiration” for girls today.
I suppose it isn’t all that shocking that the kind of men who frequent Return of Kings would be fond of an imaginary woman who doesn’t talk and can’t defend herself.
Naso starts off his post by ridiculing feminists for criticizing Barbie. In his mind, they’re just jealous:
For feminists, what bothers them is that Barbie is beautiful. Feminism is an ugly ideology that overtly seeks to glorify both inner and outer ugliness. …To them, Barbie represents a vile standard of beauty.
In Naso’s mind, Barbie is both a Nietzschean Übermensch (no, really) and the embodiment of a Greek goddess.
Barbie is an over-man to little girls. She transcends reality and inspires admiration. Like Theseus for the ancients and Batman for today’s boys, Barbie goes beyond what a normal person can do. Barbie is not a standard; she is an ideal. She inspires aspiration, not imitation. Barbie is the modern Aphrodite.
Here’s a famous statue of Aphrodite from back in the day. Despite being, you know, a literal goddess, her proportions are a bit more human than Barbie’s.
Naso really seems to have a thing for Barbie:
If characters like Indiana Jones are the apex of masculinity, then Barbie is the same for femininity. She is beautiful, intelligent, domestic, social, gorgeous, hard-working, wealthy, attractive, outgoing, healthy, confident, pretty, talented, lovely, has great tits and hair, accomplished, alluring, charming, elegant, unblemished, graceful, and committed to only one man.
Apparently Naso, like Barbie herself, hasn’t caught on to the blindingly obvious fact that Ken is gay. Also, what about Allan, Brad, Curtis, Todd, Steven, Darren, Derek, Kurt and Ryan? Everyone knows that Barbie is riding the smooth flat crotch area carousel.
As Naso sees it, it’s men, not women, who are the real victims of our “fascist beauty standards.”
Men have to grow muscle, which is a journey that is painful, expensive, and filled with misinformation. And if he’s under six feet tall, his chances with women are drastically cut no matter what his other characteristics.
Women on the other hand have to buy an exercise video and keep their hair long. I suppose make-up can be time-consuming, but fashion is not nearly as expensive as women like to claim.
And if some women develop eating disorders trying to live up to the beauty ideal, well, they have no one but their own inferior female selves to blame.
It would be both mentally and physically unhealthy for a man to obsess about achieving the impossible body of Beowulf. So if Barbie and Aphrodite inspire women to turn to unhealthy practices (like eating disorders or fad diets) in a way that He-man doesn’t to men, then what does that say about women?
Either it is a lie that strict beauty standards cause women to obsess at the risk of their own health, or it is manifest that women are mentally and emotionally inferior to men.
Anyone who really wants to be a hottie needs to work for it.
Both anorexia and fat pride are shortcut cheats to beauty. Mature adults achieve what they want through hard work.
Naso does acknowledge that beauty standards are more “stringent” today. In a spectacularly ludicrous leap of logic — the intellectual equivalent of Evel Knievel’s famously failed jump over the Snake River canyon — he blames this on … ugly women.
My guess why beauty standards are a little more demanding today than they were 100 years ago is because today women are ugly. They are overweight, they have bad hair, they lack social grace, and they think hideous products are fashionable by sole virtue of their popularity. Women and little girls know this instinctually and over-correct through their fantasies.
Perhaps little girls love Barbie and Ariel so much because they see how frumpy mommy and their teachers at school are.
And it is the evil feminists who are keeping these little girls from living out their over-corrected fantasies dreams.
Women just want to be beautiful and have a beautiful life. Barbie gives them the inspiration to achieve their dreams. Then feminism sweeps along and tells them to remain stagnant.
In case anyone here needs inspiration, this song should help.
@Tracy:
In fairness to the king of douchebags, well… I strength train quite a lot in order to build muscle, and to really get your muscles to grow may be pretty hard unless you push yourself to a level where the exercises are a bit painful… For my own part at least, and I know I’m far from unique in this regard, I immediately put on a bit of muscle and grew stronger when I went from no exercise to regular strength exercise, but ended up on a plateau after a while, and in order to move further I had to push myself pretty hard.
Plus it’s often easier to build muscle all over at a gym – some muscle groups are easy to get at with body weight exercises, others are more difficult, and most people reach a point after a while where it’s difficult to find heavy enough exercises for a lot of muscle groups if you don’t use heavy weights.
STILL, with all this said and done, the “good pain” you may feel at the gym because you simply push yourself to your pain threshold is just not… a problem, I think. You know it’s “good pain”. You know it’s constructive rather than destructive. It’s not in any way comparable to waging a war on your body by refusing to give it as much nutrition as it needs.
Plus, as many people has already pointed out, the latter problem is on the rise among men as well. They’re human too and increasingly subjected to the pressures from unrealistic beauty standards… I’ve mentioned this before, but my PT has said that zie sees more and more of male clients who don’t understand why they’re not putting on any muscle despite training hard, and it turns out they’re simply not eating enough calories, because they’re scared shitless of getting fat.
Hey howdy! I was just thinking of you this morning before I logged on, and here you are! And I am glad to see you…and gladder still to hear you’re doing better! Now to find a video of kitties doing a happydance…
Hugs and welcome back!
LBT!!! So happy to see you 🙂 That’s great news about your comics. *throws glitter, now we’ll never get rid of it*
@Dvärghundspossen I suppose that’s what I was thinking – it’s “good” pain (discomfort). I’d take the burn of a good heavy bbell squat over getting my eyebrows plucked or waxing my legs anyday (auuuuggghhhh oww).
I see, Tracy. 🙂
Glad you’re back, BTW!
Welcome back, everyone!
Thanks!
The pain from a good workout always seems like the pain from a good massage. A massage shouldn’t hurt while you’re getting it, but if you’re not a bit sore here and there the next day, one of two things is true: either you’re getting massages often enough*, or the massage wasn’t very intense. My husband and I used to get them several times a year – now it’s a Christmas or birthday present thing.
*This is very rarely the case.
Välkommen tillbaka, Dvärghundspossen 🙂
I thought you only needed to buy an exercise video?
More seriously, I recall Amanda Marcotte pointing out a few years ago that women (in US) tend to avoid effective health-maintaining exercise because they think it’ll make you instantly muscular, which again is totally not ladylike.
*hugs* I have missed you guys a lot. I’m so glad to have an opportunity to be here again.
RE: sparky
Oooh, that sounds cool.
If you’re curious, here’s the Alice Nobody tag of art and stuff so far! Sneak is pretty much doing the ideas and story work, and I’m toddling along behind zer helping with the legwork. It really is zer baby, and I’m excited to be doing it with zer. Good bonding!
RE: exercise
Actually, I have some other exciting exercise news! Me and hubby joined a gym not long after our Mammoth hiatus. This was a pretty big deal, since some of you might recall I’d been dealing with an eating disorder.
Anyway, it’s been four months now, and it’s been great! For the first time, I feel like I’m exercising in a healthy, noncompulsive way. I’ve built a little muscle, gotten to see my performance slowly improve in all the things I’m doing… it’s really great! I’ve never actually had FUN working out before; it was always this kinda panicked “I MUST DO THIS” thing.
It’s really made me realize the difference between good and bad pain. (In the past, I would sometimes exercise to the point that I would whimper with pain for days afterward whenever I tried to sit or stand.)
Really? Barbie is *realistic* and young girls should strive to have bodies like hers? I guess what I read about someone with Barbie’s proportions dying of malnutrition because she wouldn’t have enough room for her intestines is a lie perpetrated by jealous feminists. Every woman is capable of being a size zero! /sarcasm
On childbirth, I think it’s *still* one of the leading causes of death for women and girls.
As to Barbie, I always kind of thought her proportions were like that so she’d look better in her clothes. Not sure if any of you had/remember Maxi (or her Mattel counterpart, Jazzy), but those
came out when I was younger
Stupid phone
Anyway, Maxi and Jazzy were supposed to be proportioned like real women and they always ended up looking like formless tubes of plastic with heads when wearing most clothes. Maybe like “reality is unrealistic “TV tropes?
@Skye
Pretty two of the biggest threats to women are being murdered by men and childbirth.
But, you know, men are the disposable gender.
I was curious about childbirth as a cause of death, but I wasn’t finding a lot of information.
There’s a cool interactive graph here, but it isn’t broken down by gender and it only goes back to 1900. Still, childbirth complications (puerperal conditions) barely show up, so it appears that deaths by childbirth probably weren’t one of the very top killers of women.
Violence doesn’t show up as a cause at all, which makes me wonder if they’re leaving out war deaths.
Yeah, I was gonna say, I figured DISEASE would’ve been up at the top, especially since this would’ve been pre-antibiotics.
…seconding disease.
Plagues were things. Even non plague conditions… well, yeeps.
There are so many diseases that are out to get us. Like, I’d be dead if I lived 100 years ago, because I had an appendix that went kablooey when I was 11. My theoretical future kiddos totally would have never even had a chance to kill me.
Maybe if you attempted to control for factors that killed men and women pretty indiscriminately and just looked at causes of death that were significantly different between genders…
… even then, there’d be a lot of noise in the data.
@Katz Re childbirth, there’s been a bit of a discussion in Sweden lately (or, at least on the internet, hasn’t seen it touched by old media) about how various chronic vagina problems are pretty common after childbirth. However, it’s doubtful whether any reliable statistics even exist, since doctors and midwives tend to brush off everything as compleeeeetely normal when it comes to women having trouble with their vaginas. Sweden has pretty much the best statistics regarding death in childbirth, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not risky…
@Mnemosyne: Barbie isn’t even a size zero. Size zero women are simply very thin all over. Barbie has, for instance, this absurd mismatch between her boobs (and not just boobs, her entire ribcage) and waist. That pic someone posted up-thread of a woman photo-shopped to have Barbie’s proportions looks nothing like a real-life size zero woman…
@LBT: I’m glad you’re having a good time at the gym! I love the feeling of “wow, I’m a bit stronger today that I was last week!”. 😀