Google has a great doodle today, celebrating Saul Bass, the graphic designer whose animated credits sequences gave a distinctive look to many Hollywood films during the fifties and sixties. (The accompanying music is Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare dance" - good choice, Google doodle people.) I like the Google doodles; they've put me on to some good stuff, things I've never seen before.
http://www.google.com/doodles/finder/2013/All%20doodles
Reading the celebrity news. An article about an Indian movie star's "amazing weight loss" had me thinking. Why do we still believe that self-denial is praiseworthy, particularly when the person who is self-denying is a woman? Someone (who I don't remember) said that we have replaced Victorian sexual puritanism, where women were not allowed to enjoy sex, with a food puritanism; now women are not allowed to enjoy food. The woman who loses weight is praised for her self-control; the woman who gains weight is condemned for her self-indulgence. Meanwhile, men are allowed to do as they please. But this is changing; apparently more and more teenage boys are getting anorexia and steroid poisoning from body building. Not that this is a good thing, don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating young men damaging their health just out of a sense of getting-even-with-men. I just wish we could all forget about what people look like, and taking that as some sort of indicator of intrinsic worth or virtue. The idea that good people are beautiful and bad people are ugly seems hard-wired into our social consciousness. I blame fairy-tales. Was there ever an ugly princess or a homely prince?
And, if an ugly person appears in a fairy story they are either in disguise - or evil. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
ReplyDeleteIn real life, often the beautiful people are the evil ones; they use the equation of beauty=goodness to manipulate others.
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