R.B. O'Brien's Blog, page 8

Eating with a Conscious Conscience

​Today I ponder what we eat.

How many among us are moving towards a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle? Why is that? Why do many of us still eat meat? Is it simply because it tastes good? Is it a way to get the most nutrients and proteins as easily and quickly as possible? Do we HAVE to eat meat because of our diet restrictions as some of my friends tell me? Where do you fall into this spectrum? And why?

My thoughts stem from a conversation that started with a “friend” of mine who used the word “fat” to describe someone at an environmentally-conscious-eating-healthy-and-organically event for lack of clearer description. When he used it, the whole table hushed. It was as if the word fat was a swear word, that to use it was offensive, insensitive. I remember as a child my mom saying once when watching a dance recital video back of mine that she couldn’t attend: “Who’s the fat one?” She didn’t care how graceful or perfected her form was…ballet dancers aren’t supposed to look like THAT. I’m not sure our perceptions have changed all that much. ​ This friend (really friend of a friend) said it matter-of-factly, and people, after the hush, started to berate him as being judgmental, that he was being discriminatory against a group of people. He quickly rose to defend himself. He argued that being fat was a sign of unhealth. That it was a choice one makes. That “his taxes” were paying for "their" ailments. As the discussion got more heated (it’s a wonder, really, we all stayed seated at the table), we got onto other topics, topics of poverty and how our country makes it a luxury to be healthy. The impoverished communities having to rely on fast-food and cheap eats, and the rise of inner-city co-ops, which are a great idea, but which aren’t sustaining themselves, sadly. (at least not near me). That organic food is damn expensive. That eating healthy costs bucks. That THAT is the issue… The discussion progressed, morphed, spiraled, and it really made me think.

This event I went to was all about gardening co-ops, healthy lifestyles, vegetarian eating and the alkaline charts, and living naturally with and on this Earth...and I heard a child ask: “But Mom, aren’t we killing plants too? Then what will we eat?” I stopped dead in my tracks as I often think about that too. The flowers in my vase, the many living things we kill for our aesthetics. But I thought on it and wondered how the mother might have answered. When we kill an animal to eat, that’s it. We take their life, and still, in some instances, in brutal, slaughterhouse, disgusting fashion. That's not about affordability. That's about greed. And we have evolved enough to know the intelligence and feeling capabilities of our warm-blooded friends. The pig. The cow. They cuddle. They think. They love. They feel. They are “sentient” beings. Plants are not, and science backs this. But further, some of our plant friends can bear us fruit year after year if we tend to them. That peach, for instance, grows back for us every year. The apple orchards, if tended,  produce and continue to bear us fruit. And that rose oil can still bring us health benefits from afar as long as they are tended, preened, and fed.

​It’s harmonious…and that, if it were my child, would have been my answer. Besides all the health benefits of going towards a more vegetarian life, it’s the ethical ones that have guided me towards my goals. I’m not hear to judge or have a contentious debate…I’m here to live my own life with my own conscience. And I ask you to think about yours consciously…after all, we're all here to grow. 

Do Orgasms Beget More Masturbation?

I asked a question on my new author page: R.B. O’Brien: Up Close and Personal last week, and now I pose it to you: Do you think orgasms beget the desire for more orgasms, like sugar or carbs, like a craving, especially in the form of masturbation, or is the opposite true—that the more orgasms we have the more we can go in between without having them and therefore, crave them less?  What say you? What has been your experience in regards to this? But that’s not all I'm asking, so please, continue reading. I tried to see if I could find any evidence one way or the other, more than anecdotal, to answer this question, and sadly, I found out something I didn’t know, never being able to answer the question I was searching for.

We all know orgasm-“ing”

IGNORANCE is no Excuse: Stop Supporting Indie Author Cheaters

Do you think money-making is the new morality? Or am I naïve to think that this is something new, that in fact, it has always been this way? Are humans, by our very nature, good or bad intrinsically? Do we need to fight our urges constantly? I have no idea the answers to these questions. I like to think I’m good, not perfect, far from, but ‘good.’ That my conscience tells me right from wrong. But I ask again: Is that simply naïve? Is there no such thing but only what we’ve learned from birth onward? Our environment and upbringing shaping us? Or is it a combo of genes and environment?

I’m an indie author by choice, but lately, I’ve been rethinking this. Lately, I’m disgusted. And lately, I think I’ve had enough. Let me tell you something. If you think supporting cheaters and liars and piss-poor writers is a good thing, I neither need or want your friendship. But perhaps you don’t know what you’re doing, so I give you the benefit of the doubt and, at this point,  feel it a duty to tell you.
If you haven’t heard, there are several authors (okay MORE than several) who have been cheating the Amazon system. I’ve been hearing about this for weeks. I try to keep my nose clean. Stay out of things that don’t affect me, e.g. MIND MY OWN BUSINESS, do what makes my heart sing and my soul soar! Fuck what everyone else is doing. I’ve got books to write. Poems to bleed. Friends to support.

But I can no longer remain silent. Part of being that “good” person I spoke of above is doing the right thing. And the right thing is saying something about this. I will not be a passive supporter of this crap anymore. I kept silent because I knew not of the truth or fabrication of accusations. I’m not a torch blazing witch hunter. I need facts. I do research. I’m not a bandwagoner. If you know me at all, you know this already. But now I know. Some (I’m sure not all) of this BS is 100% true. What am I speaking of? It’s complicated to those who may not understand the system.

Here it is simplistically: An indie author who chooses to enroll their books into an Amazon program called Kindle Unlimited gets paid not only from book sales but from page reads. This means, a writer who has readers enrolled in this program get paid for every page a reader swipes across with eager fingers to get to that much-anticipated ending (I am a reader as well as a writer and pay for this myself to read thousands of books a year). Following so far? More simple: For every page a reader swipes past, we writers get paid.

Seems pretty great, right? I used to think so. Sadly, some authors are abusing this system. They are “stuffing” the beginning of their books so that readers have to swipe furiously to get to the “new” material. We’re talking CHAPTERS upon CHAPTERS of material before they even get to what they are trying to read.

But it gets even worse. Some authors even put GIVEWAWAYS or FREE things but only by SWIPING to the end to get there. And so, as you’ve deduced, the more swipes, the more the author gets paid. Again…seems pretty great for everyone, right? Wrong! And here’s why.
This affects me. This affects you. For every swipe and read, Amazon calculates our “rank” and our selling “status.” The higher our rank, the more visibility you, the reader, will see of authors at a higher rank when you shop or turn on your kindle.
What does this mean?

It means indie books are rising to the top, not because of merit or quality, but because of mere tom-foolery, chicanery, trickery…I.E. CHEATING the system.This means you may never get a chance to see quality writing from hard-working indie artists.This means for every cheater usually comes shitty writing.
And with shitty writing comes a shitty perception of what it means to be an indie author. It equates over and over and over that indie writers are not “good” writers. And I’m here to tell you: The only thing it shows is that some people have class and morals and standards and some are just greedy manipulators who will do anything to make a buck. I equate it with my students who cheat. I can’t change it. They have lost their moral fiber and compass, maybe never having one at all. No one wins. We just get dumber. And EVERYONE—you, me, society-- pays in the long run.

Please stop supporting this as a reader. If you open a book to find this nefarious practice, don’t be a part of it. Don’t do it. Shame on you if you do it knowingly. But as a wise man once said: Ignorance is no excuse. And now, you can’t even claim that.

Is Social Media Slowly Destroying Our Lives?

Is social media killing our interpersonal skills? Our flesh and blood lives? Are we spending too much time on the virtual rather than the real? 

It seems more and more of my friends are making decisions to leave Social Media (SM), or at the very least, put it waaaay in the background of their lives. As a writer, and a published writer trying to sell books, it’s hardly an option for me to leave altogether. Or is that a lie I’m telling myself? If I were to leave it, would my sales suffer or remain the same? So I ask myself: What am I getting out of SM and is it worth it to stick around?

By the very nature of the term--Social Media—it seems just that, a place to socialize, which is fine. New ones are popping up, like MeWe, but from all accounts, that is very “social” and perhaps just another time-suck void, a place to "pick up" someone. I'm not interested in that.

And what of those of us who use a penname of sorts, completely separate life from our non-virtual world, filled with a completely different set of friends and acquaintances, another universe entirely? Where do we draw the line? If SM means to use “media” to be “social,” where do we distinguish our “real” lives from the ones in cyberspace? How “real” is this virtual world and are we living in a place that doesn’t really exist? Are we creating a fantasy existence we simply don’t have in the outside, flesh and blood world, living our lives here, as if in a dream we can create? Do the lonely need social media the most? Lost in the real world? Unfulfilled? We sure do get caught up in it. We spend an inordinate amount of time here, scrolling, liking, commenting, posting…only to look up at the time and think: Well, where the hell did THAT go? People run the gamut from falling in love to backstabbing on the daily.

It’s like living in a video game I think somedays, where we feel more alive and real 'there' than 'here.' My circle of friends are primarily writers (and of course readers—I hope—or this whole thing becomes Theatre of the Absurd). Is that why we like it here so much? Because we are creating, the very fiber of what being a writer is? Are we, then, writing our own stories in essence? Maybe the story we want to have? Isn’t that what a writer does? Write stories?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I’m asking them. I’m watching it destroy people while lift and free others. Where do I fit in? Is it slowly killing me or is it helping me to live a life of creative freedom, one I may not have otherwise? Or is it like any addiction where we ask the same questions: Is it affecting my real life? Is it ruining parts of my life? Am I ignoring things that should not and cannot be ignored?

But then without it, addiction or otherwise, I would ask: Is this the place I NEED to spend time to write, to create, to live out fantasies? Is that just the curse of being a creative being and that this modern-day venue, almost a romantic throwback to a time of love letters and waiting for the touch of someone while basking in it at the same time, is actually a gift to stay alive? There is something so paradoxical about it, isn’t it? It’s so modern and so evasive but is it really any different than old—school paper and pen? Our letters we write to the world? Is social media really just that for writers? Our journals? Our stories? Our poems? Us? I guess I must really answer these things, for me, personally, and through the lens of my existence as a writer. But I will end with this. Either we want to share our work as writers or we don’t. It’s really that simple. If we want to write for only ourselves, there is absolutely no reason to stay on social media. None, except to be "social." And I fear too many writers are using it for only that. But even as I write that, I almost disagree and could argue that social media has made writers of us all…for every post we write is a form of just that, writing. We are human. We want to be heard. But is our quest of wanting to be “liked” slowly destroying our humanity, our true capabilities to love one another? Is it a false love? A façade? A meaningless void of nothingness?

I’ve said it before: I write. Therefore I am. If I cease to write for others, will I, myself, cease to exist? I will exist just as sure as I'm watching the clouds scroll across the sky right the way I'm scrolling my words to you right now. But I think I'd be dead.

Is BDSM just another word for consensual abuse?

My post today comes from a conversation I had with an old ‘friend’ from my past the other day. I wasn’t going to write about it, but it’s gnawing away at me, so I must. You know when you think you know how you feel about something or what you believe and then someone challenges that, and you may change your mind or at least THINK about things differently? Yes. That.
BDSM. What is it? Where/how did we come to like certain things in the bedroom and beyond? I'm not going to use this post to explain what the acronym means or all the varied nuances of BDSM. It's too varied and that's not my point here. My advice is : If you don't know? Do some research. But it used to be a long-held misconception that something “bad” must have happened to us or “traumatic,” and this is the “why” of why we like certain things, sexually or otherwise. I don’t doubt our pasts shape our present in so many ways (and our future). But must it be traumatic? No. It might be the evolution of discovery. Our journey. Someone may have asked: Hey, wanna try x, y, or z? And you say: Um…Okay. And then you discover you may like something (or not).

The BDSM community spends an awful lot of time talking about consent. And it’s confusing when there are books and movies and dark romances that thrive on non-consent or dubious consent—usually, in these tales, the person “victimized” secretly likes it though, wants it, and just needs to discover it…so is there really any non-consent at all? It’s quite confusing in a world of “no means no,” isn’t it? It turns some of us on. And even in real life. It’s not always just fantasy. And,  “So what?” I often said. Who cares? It’s not my business what turns on another. But maybe I’m wrong. That friend said to me: “BDSM is nothing more than consent to abuse. Period.” What? I screamed. No. You just don’t understand it. And he paused, let me rant, and then picked right back up. He said: “You misunderstand me. I’m not judging. I’m just stating the obvious. It’s EXACTLY like an abusive relationship. But with consent. You slap someone around. Or you emotionally destroy them. Or you take away their power. And then you give them pleasure after. And then comfort. The only difference is you don’t apologize for the abuse, because it’s consensual. But it’s the same, exact cycle.” (I’m paraphrasing here).

For anyone who’s ever been in an abusive relationship, physical or emotional, you know the pattern. You fight. Maybe hit. Get ignored. Or “punished.” Then the “abuser” apologizes, maybe on knees, brings flowers, begs, and then, sometimes, the make-up sex is out of this world, blinding orgasm and bliss may ensue, and a time of calm enters…until…it happens all over again. Damn it. Does my friend have a point? I don’t agree with my friend. I don’t think. But then again, he does use the word consent. Is that what matters? I’m not sure. It’s why I’m writing this. I’m working through it. Some argue BDSM can be equated to being gay. It’s not a choice. It’s our make-up, something we’re born with.  Maybe that is true. Or maybe it really is formed from our pasts. Or maybe it’s a combo. When the BDSM community talks loudly about consent, it makes me wonder about some of the stories I like to read (and write) and my turn-ons. It also makes me think of the BDSM Library (if you’re familiar), where most of those stories, dear god, are anything but consensual, and yet, it’s called the BDSM Library. (Not my cup of tea.) And yes, I cannot end this post without mentioning 50 Shades, and all those who call it abuse. I don’t follow that train of thought on that. But, if my friend is right, that much of BDSM is just consensual abuse, the oxymoron, suddenly may make some sense. And damn it, here I am, full-circle ending, thinking...

Karma

Do you believe in Karma?
​
Whenever I get up to my lake house after a school year ends so I can exhale among the stars, my mind often goes to philosophical ideas. It’s hard not to when surrounded by the beauty up there and the quietude. There’s just so much about the universe we don’t understand, CAN’T understand. And why do we have to? There’s so much written about being in the moment, but of course we can’t just BE in the moment, because it’s too fleeting. The next moment has already started before we can be in it and ends before we can take our next breath and so it goes, over and over.
But we can be MINDFUL in moments. We can be mindful in what we eat. How we treat ourselves and others. How we speak to ourselves. How we temper judgement. How we pause to think before we speak.

I sit on the beach and try to do just that. I look around me, and I see so much beauty, this moment of sun on water that seemed as if I had faked the photograph, the glitter on the water so surreal it looked like a trick of the camera. It’s hard not to pause at moments like that. It’s funny how at that moment I snapped the picture, I was battling with a persistent spider, none too large, I might add, and I know most would squish it…but I didn’t and rarely can. So what? It’s a spider and tiny and who cares, right? But it lives. As do all insects, the mosquito the only one I wage war with. And so, I let it be and marvel at its tenacity and strength as I will a few minutes later with the industrious ants whose homes will soon be destroyed by summer laughter and excitement in dancing feet.
I don’t know where or why I’ve grown to treat these infinitesimal creatures as if they’re human. I have a memory of a childhood friend’s mother who taught me about nature, who espoused often: “Spiders are our friends,” and I hear myself echoing that. No one had ever talked to me about those kinds of things before in my household. No one seemed much to care about that. Of course, there will be casualties, but my knee-jerk reaction isn’t to kill them. We need them more than they need us. For we are all connected with pollination and plants and oxygen and the whole lot of it.

But I don’t do it out of some great cause or a belief in karma or fear that I might be a spider in my next life. No. And herein lies my question I posed at the beginning. Do you? Do you believe in karma? And does it only apply to humans in your view? I hear so much about karma. That what you do will come back 3x to us, as if that will somehow even the score and give us the motivation to do the “right” thing, to be kind. What a lovely thought to think, that if I just do right, good things are inevitable and even deserved.

You can imagine, knowing me, what I think. I think it’s a load of rubbish. I don’t beat down those who believe that. Just as I don’t beat down those who believe in god or gods or whatever they have come to accept as true. But what I don’t like is that it presumes that when BAD things happen to people that it must be deserved. That’s the problem I have with these belief systems. They are so heavily unbalanced that it makes little sense to me. Certainly, the atrocities of the pasts, the Holocaust for example, tells us this simply is not so. And it bothers me. It bothers me a great deal, because people have tried to use those excuses to explain evil, even applying it in that case. And we’re better than that.
​I don’t care if there’s karma or a god or not. I live a life that feels right in my soul, in my conscience, in the pit of my stomach, my gut, whatever you want to call it. Whether I’m rewarded or not is of little consequence to me. I am not here to say I’m perfect. Please. Who is? But what I do believe is that there is intrinsic good that exists, outside of anything we can possibly understand, just as there is bad, not because of laws, but because it just IS. It has no beginning and it has no end. I feel it. And that’s all I need. I don’t care to understand or have answers to the rest. Instead, I think I’ll just be quiet, and continue to let this moment--head back, mind open, and face to the sun--be enough.

Symbolism in Color: The Color Red Is More Than Just A Color Preference

Yesterday in The Nu Romantics, I asked a question about the color red. It went something like: Look wherever you are and find the closest thing to you that is red. What is it? And what does it say about you?​ and I discussed my red bag and its "baggage," both literal and figurative. It was fascinating to read everyone's responses, and those of us who embrace red; and those of us who do not. It says a lot more about us than we think. (Join our Facebook page to read everyone's responses).

And at first, I thought it might be a fun activity, just to see what kinds of things people have around them, the small, the big, the deep and the superficial. And really, it sort of turned into a philosophical idea for me. In an earlier post this year, I wrote about the color pink (See Post Here), in the sense of breaking the stereotype about pink, that pink is not necessarily a “girlie” color, and that even if it were, what’s wrong with being a girl or feminine and embracing all those traits that come with it, like empathy and sensitivity for instance? And then, after I conducted the exercise in The Nu Romantics, I began to ponder the very fact that I own a lot of red accessories. ​Yes. I love fashion. If you’ve been following my new page and Fashion Fridays, you know that already. And I own a ton of scarves and shoes and funky jewelry so that any outfit can suddenly become spectacular, even when it isn’t. But I’m realizing something else about this. It’s really not that at all. Like pink, red comes with its own symbolic value. While pink equates to love and feminine traits by all accounts, red equates with a vibrant energy, one that is tied to sexuality and even lust. Read more on color and symbolism. I am a very sexual person –what was it I wrote in a poem the other day? I have a "broadhead’s sexuality"? (My poetry page)…and perhaps that is partly why I like the color red on my body in the form of clothing, but not so loud that it overtakes me. It’s just a "pop of color," right? Perhaps, too, that is why I love to wear lipstick in all shades of red, even naming my first poetry collection Ruin My Lipstick for goodness sake! I used to think it was because “it looked good with my complexion.”

But really, doesn’t it simply match what swollen lips look like after a night of passionate kissing, our cheeks the same rosy hue during and after the heat of love-making? So okay. Red is a sexual color. And I am a sexual, passionate person. But why then only a pop? Why not go all out? We know why. I have repression issues.

Death and Closure: Grey Is a Beautiful Color

I think of all the years
she protected me
and to be kneeling now,
taking the flowers out of my hair
to plant in front of the soil
of her grave,
I worry the stone’s shade
can’t protect them 
for long.
Tears and sweat mix
to blur my eyes
from fully being 
able 
to read 
the engravement:
Loving mother, wife, and Nana.
I look up and watch a cloud,
like my mood, 
move to the left 
to cover the sun,
and the weight of my
sadness
imprints deeper
into the earth.
But then I think:
Maybe she’s
just trying 
to protect
her flowers now.
I smile.
That would be just like her. Call today's post my closure on my mom’s death, something I think I had been avoiding…but have somehow found this weekend in a cloud. Yup. A cloud. All kidding aside. Nature does that to me. It speaks to me in this very strange way. I’m not sure if it’s because I stare a lot at it--a tree, the sky, the earth--but my mind goes “limp” in a way. It relaxes, like being in a hypnotist’s chair and being told to stare at a spot or a dot on a paper. It serves the same purpose, but it’s more organic. It’s us reflected in IT. I somehow have come to believe that. Maybe Emerson’s “Transparent Eyeball” really does exist. I certainly felt that way this weekend, and that poem came out above.

I’m sure there’s not one of us here who hasn’t lost someone to that crabby and persistent dude called Death. It’s really just a fact of life. Like light and dark and good and evil and pleasure and pain and any other opposite, so too, we have life and death.

But here’s the thing. Are they opposites really? What happened with my cloud was supposed to be a bad thing, but talk about opposite! Do you think death is a bad thing? A sad thing? It hurts, because we’re living still, especially if we loved that person, and they’re not. It’s almost a selfish thing when I think about it.  That’s where the pain is. In our void. That we still have to live without them. We also don’t like to talk about death, and yet we must. We must plan for it. For everything else we plan for--retirement, saving money, etc.--death is really the only sure thing. Have you thought about what you’d like your funeral to be? Do you want to be buried? Cremated? I know. Morbid. But why does it have to be? I realized something about my mother’s death this weekend. I hadn’t dealt with it. Not the way I thought I had. In fact, I realized I hadn’t really gone through the proper stages of grief at all. It wasn’t denial. That is not it…it was just so compartmentalized that I didn’t deny it, I just didn’t want to look at it, face it, think about it in any way. If you read my share last week about my mom, you know why.: The topsy-turvy relationship between mother-daughter, between traditionalist and free-spirt, between stoic and emotional, between proper and wild.
​
But I also realized something else. My mother planned everything. Her plot was bought, funeral paid for, her spot on my dad’s stone just waiting to be engraved, also planned. Everything was a blur, as if my body went through all the motions in a dream I watched from a safe distance, but wasn’t really happening, not to me. I hadn’t really had to do anything but show up and cater it…(that’s not entirely true, I realize, I did), and as I stood in front of her grave this past weekend, planting flowers, I finally saw her death and I somehow let go of so much guilt and resentment and fear and what-ifs. I exhaled it. Quite literally. Right out into the air. And now, I finally have the closure and peace of mind I’ve been searching for these last couple years. It's okay. We must learn to forgive ourselves. Life isn't a game of villains and heroes. It's much more real than that. And grey and all its shades, as my cloud taught me, can be a beautiful color too.

Do You Believe Dreams Have Meaning?

We all dream. That much is a fact. But do you remember your dreams? Do you write them down after? Do you think there is anything to them? Is it our subconscious surfacing, or as Freud said, our unconscious minds, that are giving us our deepest answers to our true selves? Or is it complete imagination that has no bearing on, or connection to, our ‘real” existence? Is it actually an alternate universe, where we live for as many hours a day as we allow ourselves to sleep? And what of nightmares, the ones where you wake up in a cold sweat, struggling for air and breath, remembering and not remembering? What the hell are they?
​
As a child, I always had the same recurring nightmare until I outgrew earaches. Gruesome and frightening nightmares, I’d rather not talk about. And last night, I woke, panicked, to believe that my significant other was having an affair with…wait for it…Britney Spears’s sister, a la Zoey 101. Gasp! It felt so real, so true, I woke, breathless, ready to give him a piece of my mind, until I began to howl in laughter. Really? Zoey 101? What the hell goes on during slumber? We all know the childhood urban legends about falling in our sleep, that we’ll die if we crash and actually hit the ground. Or the grandmother who told us that guilt is the cause of vivid dreaming and nightmares. Or the dream dictionaries that have specific meanings attributed to specific things, like if your teeth are falling out in your dreams, x, y, and z are true. Or even more difficult to swallow, that perhaps we live out our past lives in our dream world, which then, of course, would beg the question of whether or not you believe in past lives.
​
In an article from Psychology Today, it states that basically all this talk, from ancient Egyptian beliefs of mystical revelations to Freud and Jung espousing the secrets of ‘self’ to today’s ‘online dream dictionaries,’ has been deemed very unlikely, that while we think we can unlock “secret codes” to glean meaning into our dreams, essentially there is NO secret code, but instead that dreaming is rather random. What do I think? Like many things, I’m content to say I don’t know. I’m not ashamed either. When my mind really goes down the path to make sense of it, I start envisioning Richard Bach’s novel One, of myriad alternate lives we’re leading, each choice, a new path. Or I begin to think that we live two lives and do not know it, the one that is me right now, and the one in slumber. Or that we don’t exist at all really, but that we’re just energy with no beginning and no end. And then, my brain just hurts.
​
What is wrong with just saying: I haven’t a fucking clue? And in admitting that, I can find a semblance of peace…just as long as I never have to dream about Jamie Spears again.

Are We A Society in Body Image Denialism?

Today I ponder looks and body image in today’s society and ask: Do you believe body image and looks matter less and less, that we are finally starting to see people and souls and energies behind the masks, or do you think it’s worse than it has ever been? Do people put too much stock into the way they look?  Do you?
 
I don’t know about you, but I think we all have body issues. Find me one person who is completely satisfied with the way they look, and I’ll eat crow. Perhaps it was something one person said a long time ago in childhood, or worse, during those awkward stages of braces or acne. For me, it’s always been my legs, that they aren’t dancer legs, long and lean, but instead, shorter and more defined. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to accept my perceived flaws a bit more. It’s a beautiful thing when you find love, and where those things you once dreaded or hated about yourself, say freckles for instance, have now become the focal point of affection, and suddenly, you’re quite proud you have them. And in a society where the Kardashians are “news” (gag), and where people watch this show like a religion to see what styles they will don now or what weight they will lose or what color their hair may be or what latest plastic surgery they can get to alter their looks, it’s hard to think we’ve come that far. Never mind all the book covers we see daily with perfect women or sculpted, perfect male abs. Heaven forbid a woman (or man) may not buy our books unless someone’s pectoral muscles are front and center. Show me a man in glasses reading a book, and I’m more likely to buy your book! But I know, I’m in the minority. I’m not naïve to think otherwise. Sometimes on social media, I find it to be a breath of fresh air in that many of us don’t know what each other fully looks like, and so, we base our decisions of “likability,” or as Facebook likes to call it, “friendship,” on not looks but instead, personality or work or behavior. A student made me rethink even that though. She proposed a thesis that stated: "Too many people base their self-esteem on the number of likes they get on social media apps where they can change their appearance to look different than what they are. I believe those false filters should be stated up front or banned altogether."

I never really thought about that. I don’t have Snapchat and I only just started on Instagram, but I guess most people use it to show pictures of themselves and alter them, that the app allows that, to make prettier faces, cute bunny noses, hip sunglasses, and on and on. Still, I stuck to my guns regarding why people may “like” another. It’s their heart or soul, you know, that proverbial: “It’s the-inside-not -the-outside-that-counts mantra.
 
After reading her thesis, I was reminded of when I went to see The Black Panther, and a promo teaser for the movie "I Feel Pretty" came on, and I wondered, as I watched it, if there would be backlash about it (of course, there is). I'm a huge fan of Amy Schumer --I must admit--and found myself laughing at the trailer and quite impressed with her candor to strip and show herself naked, with all her imperfections, unfiltered and unedited, that maybe we were getting somewhere, that maybe at long last, the quest to be the perfect size or to emulate the perfect look is a thing of the past. But in a NY Times article, it stated that the premise and message of the movie, that “looks don’t matter” is utter bullshit, a lie the media is trying to stuff down our throats, that looks matter more than ever, especially for women, today. Amanda Hess writes in the article: "The reality is that expectations for female appearances have never been higher. It’s just become taboo to admit that…This new beauty-standard denialism is all around us. It courses through cosmetics ads, fitness instructor monologues, Instagram captions and, increasingly, pop feminist principles. In the forthcoming book ‘Perfect Me,’ Heather Widdows, a philosophy professor at the University of Birmingham, England, convincingly argues that the pressures on women to appear thinner, younger and firmer are stronger than ever...Along with YouTube makeup tutorials and Instagram fashion influencers, beauty-standard denialism has exploded online...."

So I ask you: Is female appearance higher than ever as this article espouses? Or are the Dove-type commercials, and the like, slowly changing that stereotype? The NY Times article says no. Me? I’m not quite sure. Everything I wrote above could, very well, what Ms. Hess has written in her article as “denialism.”
 
You can read it in full here: Article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/movies/i-feel-pretty-amy-schumer-beauty.html