Member Since: 8/13/2012
Posts: 32,832
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Caitlyn Jenner: Anti-Feminist?
Quote:
Long ago, Ms. Jenner was a hero, admired for dazzling athletic skills. Even on the Kardashian show, Bruce often distinguished himself as the voice of reason amid a circus of vanity and consumerism. But as Vanity Fair’s Caitlyn, Ms. Jenner has morphed into a consumable commodity — a strangely static, oddly youthful and elaborately adorned body that is, rather than does. This seems less the liberation of a true self than a reminder of the straitjacket requirements of acceptable, desirable womanhood.
That Ms. Jenner makes an excellent icon of fashion is unsurprising. Not only has she long lived within the corridors of Hollywood celebrity, but her physique — still the slim-hipped, sinewy body of a male Olympic athlete — actually lends itself (with a few tweaks) more easily to the female modelesque ideal than do most genetically female bodies. And certainly, very few transwomen could achieve this aesthetic ideal either, as the actress and transgender activist Laverne Cox has pointed out in a widely read Tumblr post.
What of the millions of other 65-year-old women, whether born female or trans, who deserve attention? The millions of women who become invisible with age and could never successfully mimic a Kardashian (and would not wish to)? They remain offstage and out of mind, their own accomplishments unknown to us.
To be admired in the public eye, to be seen, a woman must still conform to an astonishingly long, often contradictory list of physical demands — the most important being that she not visibly age.
While the fanfare around the emergence of Caitlyn may advance our acceptance of transgendered individuals, it does so, in this case, at a price: the perpetuation, even celebration, of narrow and dehumanizing strictures of womanhood sustained by the fashion and entertainment industries. True liberation of gender’s vast spectrum should ask more of us than that we simply exchange one uncomfortable, oppressive identity for another.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/op...s-heroism.html
Does trans liberation come at the price of even more woman victimization?
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I mean it is a big deal, but now It's just over the top.
