Okay, I guess you're all lucky I didn't post this this morning, because I had a long ranting rant building up, but then I decided to work on homework instead, so now you get the watered down (but still long) rant, diluted by having spent the last bunch of hours doing math, and not getting pissed off about something I saw on the Today show.
So yeah, I watch the Today show every morning, because I am sort of freak. Every night before I go to sleep I even leave the tv on NBC so that when I wake up I can rewind the DVR up to an hour, in case I don't turn on the TV before 7. Total freak. But I'm obsessed with it (it's SO better than Good Morning America, which I watched when I lived in Berkeley and didn't get NBC), and I have my own love/hate (mostly love) relationship with everyone on it, and I have their commercial schedule all figured out and it's my show. It doesn't hurt that the lead anchor's name is Katie, either. Okay.
Katie Couric did a story this morning inspired by the Pink song "Stupid Girls", and how it's some big horrible thing now that stupid girls like Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Nicole Richie are role models for lots of girls. Okay, this is not about defending those people, but the only real evidence they had that those three are stupid was the Chicken of the Sea bit from Newlyweds, and a clip from the Simple Life where Nicole and Paris didn't know how to cash a check. Everything else was about how those three are really skinny and wear skimpy clothes and act like airheads a lot of the time. But are they stupid? Paris Hilton owns her own chain of nightclubs, Jessica Simpson has her own line of just about everything, and all three of them have managed to make a *ton* of money doing stuff they enjoy, and you've got to be kind of clever to do that. Wasn't it just big news how Jessica Simpson makes so much more money than her husband? And she's a stupid girl?
Well, maybe. But what's so special about Pink? I just downloaded her song, and she's singing about how she doesn't have to wear a push-up bra and be all stupid like that, or whatever. Well, let's share this picture of her, and try and reconcile everything. "Where oh where have all the smart people gone?" Are we to infer that Pink is one of those smart people? What evidence do we have of that? Calling other people stupid doesn't make you smart, and personally, as a girl/graduate student in math, I don't see that writing a couple catchy pop songs and putting a bunch of gel in your hair makes you smart, okay.
But really this isn't about Pink, because I really just assume that she's as stupid as anyone else. It's this high and mighty notion that any girls who want to be sexy and skinny and who are interested in boys and clothes are stupid. Katie Couric and the woman she had on from Seventeen magazine basically came out and equated anorexic with stupid. Like, god, all these 15 year old girls only have skinny people as role models, maybe they should have nuclear scientists as role models instead. What?
And now we segue into Katie Couric. This comes with perfect timing, as just yesterday I read this article in Slate, which also infuriated me. "Have we seen the last of Katie Couric's legs?" it begins, and goes on to talk about how she's wearing dark pantsuits now instead of more girly skirted outfits, now that she's gonna be a big primetime news anchor and needs to show that she has gravitas. In other words, now that she's going to be the first female nightly news anchor, she has to look and act more like a man. She sure is some role model.
My point, I guess, is that we need to stop equating "girly" with "stupid," and then maybe you won't see so many girls looking up to "stupid" girls. It's certainly not new that girls want to be pretty and sexy and skinny (in fact, later in the show Natalie Morales talked to the guy that made the diet for Celebrity Fit Club, and he said to her that she didn't need the diet, and she said thank you, of course implying that being skinny is a good and desirable thing). But now Katie Couric have decided that those things also mean stupid. Well, that's great. You know, I'm pretty smart, I think. But I want to be skinny and pretty. And I wear sparkly earrings and pink sweaters and write with sparkly gel pens just because their pretty, even though they're awful to take notes with, and I giggle a lot, and I love Hilary Duff, and I judge people on the basis of how they're dressed and how they look, and whatever. And I have a BA in mathematics from Berkeley and I'm working on a PhD and I have the highest grades in my classes, so fuck off Katie Couric and Seventeen Magazine and most of all Pink, because I'm probably smarter than all of you.
PS: The funniest thing I ever saw on the Today show involved a similar hypocrisy. They'd just done a bit about anorexia and body image and all that. And then next they had Katie Couric interviewing Meryl Streep, and Katie told Meryl that she looked really good, and she was wearing skinny jeans, or something like that. The interview had been taped before hand, so when they showed Katie live after that she was completely embarassed, and said something about how sorry she was for that, and how we really need to change conceptions and social norms or whatever. But she's not doing that, and that's the real problem.
Okaybye.
So yeah, I watch the Today show every morning, because I am sort of freak. Every night before I go to sleep I even leave the tv on NBC so that when I wake up I can rewind the DVR up to an hour, in case I don't turn on the TV before 7. Total freak. But I'm obsessed with it (it's SO better than Good Morning America, which I watched when I lived in Berkeley and didn't get NBC), and I have my own love/hate (mostly love) relationship with everyone on it, and I have their commercial schedule all figured out and it's my show. It doesn't hurt that the lead anchor's name is Katie, either. Okay.
Katie Couric did a story this morning inspired by the Pink song "Stupid Girls", and how it's some big horrible thing now that stupid girls like Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Nicole Richie are role models for lots of girls. Okay, this is not about defending those people, but the only real evidence they had that those three are stupid was the Chicken of the Sea bit from Newlyweds, and a clip from the Simple Life where Nicole and Paris didn't know how to cash a check. Everything else was about how those three are really skinny and wear skimpy clothes and act like airheads a lot of the time. But are they stupid? Paris Hilton owns her own chain of nightclubs, Jessica Simpson has her own line of just about everything, and all three of them have managed to make a *ton* of money doing stuff they enjoy, and you've got to be kind of clever to do that. Wasn't it just big news how Jessica Simpson makes so much more money than her husband? And she's a stupid girl?
Well, maybe. But what's so special about Pink? I just downloaded her song, and she's singing about how she doesn't have to wear a push-up bra and be all stupid like that, or whatever. Well, let's share this picture of her, and try and reconcile everything. "Where oh where have all the smart people gone?" Are we to infer that Pink is one of those smart people? What evidence do we have of that? Calling other people stupid doesn't make you smart, and personally, as a girl/graduate student in math, I don't see that writing a couple catchy pop songs and putting a bunch of gel in your hair makes you smart, okay.
But really this isn't about Pink, because I really just assume that she's as stupid as anyone else. It's this high and mighty notion that any girls who want to be sexy and skinny and who are interested in boys and clothes are stupid. Katie Couric and the woman she had on from Seventeen magazine basically came out and equated anorexic with stupid. Like, god, all these 15 year old girls only have skinny people as role models, maybe they should have nuclear scientists as role models instead. What?
And now we segue into Katie Couric. This comes with perfect timing, as just yesterday I read this article in Slate, which also infuriated me. "Have we seen the last of Katie Couric's legs?" it begins, and goes on to talk about how she's wearing dark pantsuits now instead of more girly skirted outfits, now that she's gonna be a big primetime news anchor and needs to show that she has gravitas. In other words, now that she's going to be the first female nightly news anchor, she has to look and act more like a man. She sure is some role model.
My point, I guess, is that we need to stop equating "girly" with "stupid," and then maybe you won't see so many girls looking up to "stupid" girls. It's certainly not new that girls want to be pretty and sexy and skinny (in fact, later in the show Natalie Morales talked to the guy that made the diet for Celebrity Fit Club, and he said to her that she didn't need the diet, and she said thank you, of course implying that being skinny is a good and desirable thing). But now Katie Couric have decided that those things also mean stupid. Well, that's great. You know, I'm pretty smart, I think. But I want to be skinny and pretty. And I wear sparkly earrings and pink sweaters and write with sparkly gel pens just because their pretty, even though they're awful to take notes with, and I giggle a lot, and I love Hilary Duff, and I judge people on the basis of how they're dressed and how they look, and whatever. And I have a BA in mathematics from Berkeley and I'm working on a PhD and I have the highest grades in my classes, so fuck off Katie Couric and Seventeen Magazine and most of all Pink, because I'm probably smarter than all of you.
PS: The funniest thing I ever saw on the Today show involved a similar hypocrisy. They'd just done a bit about anorexia and body image and all that. And then next they had Katie Couric interviewing Meryl Streep, and Katie told Meryl that she looked really good, and she was wearing skinny jeans, or something like that. The interview had been taped before hand, so when they showed Katie live after that she was completely embarassed, and said something about how sorry she was for that, and how we really need to change conceptions and social norms or whatever. But she's not doing that, and that's the real problem.
Okaybye.
posted by katiemoo at 5:27 PM
4 Comments:
*This* was the watered-down version?
See, you need to eat a cookie or something...
;-)
Well, the rage kind of came back to me as I typed. You're lucky you don't live with me. Just as I was finishing blogging, Cary got home, and since he doesn't read my blog I had to tell him all about the Katie!hate, and it went on for tens of minutes, and there was much voice raising, and by the end I was prepared to write an angry email in to the Today show, but then we got in bed and started to watch TV, so that all kind of dispersed.
One redeeming feature of Katie: she once called Al Roker an asshole on air.
You completely missed the message of the song, which leads me to believe you too have fallen into the trap of the glitz and glamour of being stupid. There are plenty examples of how these celebs are stupid. Jessica Simpson was QUOTED years ago saying that she pretended to act more stupid than she was because guys liked that. (That quote came out after the tuna debacle.) Also, you don't think making a sex tape is stupid? You don't think only being able to describe something as "hott" stupid? C'mon! No one is equating "girly" with "stupid." You thought up that conclusion all your own. There is certainly a dumbing down of girls these days because it's the cool thing to do. Just look at teenager girls today. Look at the what they are watching - Laguna Beach, My Sweet 16, etc. It's disgusting. What's the message? To get ahead - be beautiful, rich, and oh yeah, don't strive to be too intelligent. And at least Pink is doing something good with her fame... what has Paris Hilton done lately?
Wow, she has thrown down the glove. Okay.
1) Maybe I did miss the message of the song. I only listened to it once or twice. But like I said, I wasn't really talking about Pink, I was talking about the piece on Today.
2) If I had fallen into the trap of the glitz and glamour of being stupid, would I have devoted myself to doing math for the rest of my life? Or maybe I'm stupid for pursuing graduate studies in math (mostly I think I am. Or just crazy).
3) There may be lots of examples of aforementioned celebrities acting stupid on their television shows (although from what I've seen of The Simple Life, Paris and Nicole are acting more obnoxious and cosmopolitan than stupid), but I have seen no evidence that teenage girls idolize said celebrities *because* they are stupid. Instead I think it's more likely that girls may idolize them because they are beautiful or stylish.
4) Making a sex tape may be foolish, but it's at most tangentially related to intelligence. In Paris' case, making the tape was probably a very good move, in that it almost singlehandedly launched her entire career.
5) Calling everything "hott" may be annoying, or less than eloquent, but I don't think it's an indicator of intelligence.
6) Please allow me to cite your recent blog post on this topic. "To those wonderfully clueless, surgically enhanced broads out there". You put 'clueless' and 'surgically enhanced' right next to each other. I'm not a huge fan of plastic surgery, but it doesn't seem to have so much to do with intelligence as it does with vanity, beauty, or wealth. Maybe I misinterpreted you, but you seem to be indicating that women who get plastic surgery are clueless, which, to me, is equating one aspect of "girliness" with "stupid".
7) To be honest, I've never seen My Sweet 16, nor much of Laguna Beach, but I'm not convinced that they promote stupidity. I don't see anything *stupid* about wanting to be beautiful or rich or wanting a big fancy party. But again, you have equated wanting to be beautiful and rich with not wanting to be smart. Personally, I'd like to be all three.
8) What is Pink doing with her fame? Making a bunch of money by mocking others? Okay.
9) I don't know what Paris Hilton has done lately. But that surely doesn't make her stupid.
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