Good Evening,
Before we go to far, I recognize that I’m a white male who has very little interest in the well-being of Angelina Jolie’s breasts. Nor, to be honest, Angelina Jolie in general. I don’t care about her personal life, and her movies are shit. Wanted? That was fucking awful. Salt? Do you even know what I’m talking about.
Do you think there’s any chance of that movie originally existing as a buddy cop movie called Salt N Pepa with a black female co-star? Because I wish it had been.
The issue I have today is that people seem to feel that if we make fun of Angelina for doing it we’re somehow attacking womanhood.
And maybe some people are. I’m sure there’s some guy, maybe even guyS, out there who own Tomb Raider on DVD and feel that her breasts are the most important thing about her, or that a tribunal of sorts should have been called so that they could have been consulted in some way before this move was made. But like I said, those guys own Tomb Raider on DVD, so how seriously are we taking them?
Here’s my issue: At some point, noticing difference became racist, sexist, and not okay to joke about.
In a few months I will be thirty, and I’ll be wearing braces. I can choose to go through the whole thing being pissed off every time someone points this out, makes a joke, or asks a snarky question about it, but who is that helping? I could choose to make this a big deal. “What, I’m not a man just because I care about my oral health? I’m doing this for men everywhere!” But truly, I’m not. Men everywhere are idiots. Fuck them.
I give the same consideration to Angelina Jolie that I give myself, so the point is this: I have no issue with her being proactive about her health or changing her figure in a way that perhaps challenges what people traditionally think of as “womanly.” I don’t think it affects me in any way. However, it’s weird. By weird I mean unusual. Let’s be serious, how many people do you know who have elected to get a double mastectomy as a preventative measure?
Please note that I’m not making a value judgment in terms of right and wrong. Maybe she’s way ahead of her time. Maybe this will be the norm someday. Maybe we’ll have a healthcare system where this is a realistic option for the average person. But right now, it’s unusual, so I don’t really see the value in pretending it’s not kind of weird.
There’s a difference between Wrong and Weird. Beetlejuice was a weird movie. And great. Cyborg 2 was just wrong.
It’s the same way I feel about transexuality, for instance. I know that nobody’s looking for my approval, but I couldn’t care less whether you started a man or woman and what you ended up was. But let’s be serious, most of us have spent the majority of our lives prepared to meet someone who is a man or a woman. We’re a lot less practiced when it comes to meeting someone who is somewhere at a stage in between. So the novelty alone is enough to throw a person.
It doesn’t matter how much you tell yourself not to notice a difference, if you run into a person who represents less than 5% of the human population, it’s going to take a little getting used to.
When I smile, as a man of near thirty with braces, I see the look flash over people’s faces sometimes. You have to understand, it’s not hate, it’s not disapproval on any deep level. Your brain is a machine designed to complete patterns and fill in gaps. When it sees a man in his thirties about to smile, it doesn’t expect to see braces. So an adjustment happens. And it’s fine. Most people couldn’t care less, some people are assholes and I say Fuck Them and move on.
It’s a choice I made. A choice that I made for health, but part of that choice is accepting that people are going to have opinions on it. Part of what’s hard when making any big decision is the fear that never leaves: What if people laugh at me?
And you know, I’m not ready to revoke people’s right to laugh at me. If nobody gets a laugh out of these fucking braces, it’s going to be a long couple of years. So fuck it. I’d like to see us all agree that rather than trying to replace mocking with the idea that we pretend like everything is 100% normal, how about we take the baby step of saying that a little good-natured funny-making here and there is par for the course?
And if I may, it would really warm my heart if we were to pick our icons a little more carefully moving forward.
I know there’s always room to grow and change, but I know there are women out there who have done brave shit that haven’t also worn a vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around their necks. I know there are women who are proud and did not make…oh, fuck me. I just checked her IMDB and saw that Salt 2 has been announced.
Sometimes this world is so needlessly cruel that I can’t even understand it anymore.