The false notion that beauty determines worth and success

My Sunday movie was The Worst Ones, another movie from France. It is quite unusual. It’s a movie about making a movie. The film crew goes into the housing projects of a town in northern France to select four teens – Jessy, Lily, Maylis, and Ryan – to feature in the movie to be made. Using the local talent gives the movie gritty authenticity. The title comes from a comment someone else makes that it seems the director chose the worst ones to be in his film. What we see of the movie being made is minimal. Jessy and Lily do a sex scene (that doesn’t get past kissing). Ryan, barely a teen, is a kid with anger issues and is told he really needs to get angry during a fight with other boys. The rest of the time we see what being singled out to do a movie does to their lives. Ryan is facing custody issues because he’s not sure his mother has overcome her mental illness. Lily gets into a fight because she has a reputation of a slut. Gabriel the director has to counsel his charges. The scenes and their preparation are discussed with family and friends. Some of this feels invasive – the families sure put up with a lot to allow film crews to move in with them for the duration. It also feels tangential to making the movie. What’s really going on here? I very much enjoyed this one. If you are interested in unusual movies I recommend this one. Sandhya Dirks of NPR discussed affirmative action with Asian students starting college. Their opinions of it came down to two major points described by Rutvij Holay starting at Stanford University and Andrew Kang starting at Harvard. Dirks summarized:

Holay points to the personality portion of the admissions process at Harvard, where prospective students were rated. Asian Americans consistently scored lower than everyone else. They were seen as quiet, maybe even boring. In other words, they were racially stereotyped, Holay says. And this gets at how he understands racism. ... Kang doesn't think affirmative action was the use of racial stereotypes. He thinks it was an attempt to put a thumb on the scale for communities who have been historically marginalized to help combat the racism embedded in education. Without it, he thinks the system will do what it was set up to do - favor the white and the wealthy. And Kang fears that this is all part of something bigger - a war on diversity. ... Holay sees racism as rooted in stereotypes. For him, removing the use of race in admissions will remove the ability to use stereotypes, removing the racism. But Kang sees racism as reproducing through systems, limited access to generational wealth and education. Affirmative action opened up that access. Now those doors have again been closed. For these two students, the answer to the question of how to combat racism differs radically, based on how they define it.

Kos of Daily Kos discussed the situation in the schools of West Bonner County, Idaho. Yeah, nasty guy country. In the 2021 election they elected a far right school board (well, enough for a majority). They were overwhelmingly recalled last Tuesday. It seems they did what they were voted in to do. Some of those things: They lobbied for the defeat of a supplemental school funding levy and voters bought into it and rejected it. The district lost a third of its budget and improving anything with that size budget cut is impossible. The board hired superintendent Branden Durst who has no educational qualifications but plenty as a culture warrior. He was good at implementing a transphobic bathroom policy. Both candidates, while campaigning to keep their jobs, essentially said vote to keep me or the liberals and their woke agenda will take over again. And after their loss there was commentary was about the failures of the two members, not the MAGA ideology they pursued. And – we’re not at all surprised – there are claims the election was fraudulent with an attempt to overturn it. The whole thing comes down to the MAGA movement is supposed to hurt those people, not us. SemDem of the Kos community discussed beauty pageants. Not the ones we’re familiar with that feature women old enough to be in college (young adults), but teen, preteen, and categories down to infant. The parents of these tykes can get quite pushy and that push includes sexualizing the girls.

It’s also telling where these pageants are being held. The states that hold the most contests are Florida, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky. All of these states have passed anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including bans on adult drag shows, for the expressed reason that they are protecting children from “inappropriate sexualized conduct.” ... Child pageants are harmful, even for the children who want to participate, due to the oversexualized nature of these pageants. They are harmful in other ways, as well. Child pageants reinforce the false notion at a very young age that beauty is the primary determinant of worth and success, and children, particularly girls, are taught to prioritize external beauty over other qualities, leading to body image issues and low self-esteem.

Yet another problem: the sexualization of these girls attracts pedophiles. There are thousands of reported sexual abuse incidents each year. “Do you know where there hasn’t ever been a kidnapping or assault? A drag show.” Want to protect kids? Ban child beauty pageants. An antidote to, or maybe subversion of, child pageants is the movie Little Miss Sunshine. Clio2 wrote for the Kos LGBTQ Litarature series about the book Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam. It contains stories of people or groups that appear to fall between the genders before the time when the idea of transgender was known. Clio2 discussed six of them. Ahebi was assumed to be female when born about 1880 in what is now Nigeria. After growing up Ahebi became king (not queen) with all the male trappings of the role. That included multiple wives who would sleep with other men to bear children for him. During WWI some 20,000 British men of Germany ancestry were confined in internment camps at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man. A big thing was putting on plays for each other, with about a show a week, with over 1,500 shows by the end of their internment. Women’s roles were played by men. And some of them kept their female roles off the stage with devoted admirers. After the war they resumed their male identities and didn’t want reminders. In the early 1600s Mary Frith used gender nonconformity to facilitate petty crime and in general scandalize London. A millennium earlier in the late 600s in Medina on the Arabian peninsula was an individual called Tuways. This person led a group that was hired to provide music and “cheeky wit” for events. Tuways was categorized as male at birth but presented as female. They were seen as a third gender, neither male nor female. Around 1600 Thomasine Hall was christened in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Hall appears to have alternated genders through life. After accused of fornication there was an attempt to show that Hall was male or female. There was no consensus. In the late 1700s the Ktunaxa people lived along the Kootenay River near what is now the US-Canada border. One among them was born female, then took the name Kauxuma nupika to declare he was now a man with gender tied up with spiritual experience. He became a prophet though most of his prophesies were not welcome. After describing each person or group Clio2 then provides a bit of context (the book provides much more), which I won’t get into. Delving into the lives of people from other cultures reminds us that other cultures think about gender differently than we do, such as having different sorts of pronouns. Also, history tends to assume a person is cisgender until proven otherwise, and many records are sparse, which means queer lives, especially trans lives, tend to be erased.