There\u2019s this little voice that pipes up when I see certain things, one that tells me some asshole is going to do their best to destroy this lovely thing I\u2019m seeing.<\/p>\n
Many years ago I went to an afternoon movie by myself. I even remember the movie: The Ruling Class<\/i>, a dark comedy starring Peter O\u2019Toole.<\/p>\n
But although that movie made a deep impression on me itself, it was the short that preceded it that is important to this story. In it, a woman danced the tango.<\/p>\n
The moment the woman appeared on the screen, I knew the men (well, probably boys, given this was next to the University of Texas campus and an afternoon show) were going to laugh.<\/p>\n
And laugh they did.<\/p>\n
The woman who danced was not skinny. She wasn\u2019t fat, either, but she was buxom and curvy and in no way met the ideal of womanhood in the early 1970s or, in fact, in any part of my lifetime.<\/p>\n
I suspect she met the ideal of womanhood in the place where the short was filmed, but since I do not remember anything about the film except a fleeting image of the woman herself, I can\u2019t look that up.<\/p>\n
She was a very talented and skilled dancer, but that didn\u2019t matter. She wasn\u2019t beautiful enough for the pleasure of the young men in our society.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d been around long enough by then to know what they would and wouldn\u2019t find acceptable. It\u2019s one of those things you learn early on if you\u2019re raised female: how to predict what men will find attractive and what they\u2019ll laugh at.<\/p>\n
I felt the same thing when I saw the online clips of Lizzo playing the crystal flute from the Library of Congress collection. <\/p>\n
I saw the picture and actually clicked on the video \u2013 something I rarely do \u2013 because I was curious about how the flute sounded and what she would play on it.<\/p>\n
The flute had a lovely sound and it was very clear from the clip that Lizzo knew how to play flute very well. It turns out that she studied flute in college, meaning she was a serious flautist before she became a pop star.<\/p>\n
I was wowed. I\u2019m not up on current stars \u2013 I\u2019d heard of Lizzo but wasn\u2019t familiar with her music \u2013 but listening to her play made me want to find out more.<\/p>\n
At the same time, that little voice was saying to me \u201csome racist misogynist slug is going to say something nasty about this.\u201d Because Lizzo is Black and the flute was a gift to one of our enslaving presidents, who apparently didn\u2019t even bother to thank the person who made it for him and probably never even played it. And also because she is not skinny and makes no effort to dress to hide her size and therefore doesn\u2019t meet some definitions of beauty, though she is gorgeous.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t want to be right, but I was. It amazes me how many things the bigots and misogynists can find to be outraged about, but it saddens me that I almost always know when they\u2019re going to do it.<\/p>\n
It is a general rule that those who have an \u201cinferior\u201d social status always know much more about their \u201cbetters\u201d than the high status people know about them. It provides protection.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned earlier, I had absorbed as a girl what men found attractive. And though I am not Black, I grew up in a world of blatant racism while being taught that it was wrong, which gave me some skill at not just recognizing racism when I saw it, but also knowing when it was coming.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t suppose it would be useful to be innocent of this knowledge of either misogyny or racism, since that would imply a level of na\u00efvet\u00e9 that would not serve me well in the larger world.<\/p>\n
But it would still be nice if I could come to a beautiful person or performance or work of art without that strong awareness of the bigoted misogynist gaze.<\/p>\n
It always ruins it, at least a little.<\/p>\n