Women Are So Silly

This kind of bullshit makes me nuts:

The majority of women would prefer to be slimmer than have a higher IQ, instant wealth or a date with the celebrity of their dreams.

Nineteen out of 20 of the female population say that they place a higher priority on having a smaller waist than on their intelligence.

From a wish list that included never having money worries again, dating the A-list star of their choice or a genius-level IQ score, 51 per cent of women still plumped for a slimmer figure, according to a survey for the website tescodiets.com.

Did you get that? A survey for the website TescoDiets.com, a joint online project between eDiets and Tesco, which is like the Wal-Mart of Britain. Was it a scientific survey funded by the website, or just some questionnaire that women who visited the website filled out? We have no idea, because the article doesn’t say. If it was the latter, which I seriously suspect considering that one of the options was “dating an A-list star,” then it’s not totally surprising that women visiting an online diet site were more concerned about their waistlines than anything else, is it?

Nonetheless, the article extrapolates from the results of the survey that “the majority of women” value slimness—not health, of course—over intelligence and financial security. (And I don’t want to forget dating the A-list star of their choice—an important consideration in every woman’s life.)

I’m not sure what irritates me more about this—that a newspaper misrepresented crap science (at best) as indicative of trends in the population at large, or that doing so seems to lack any useful purpose aside from casting women as vain idiots.

Recently, after a great post of Lauren’s, followed by The Happy Feminist, LeMew wrote a post on why he is a feminist, and was followed by his fellow LG&M contributor DJW. Articles like this piece of dreck are why I’m a feminist—because they’re continuously issued out there into the ether as if they’re saying something real. People read these articles uncritically, or just glance at the headline (“Most women would rather have a small waist than a big brain”) and another frustratingly destructive perception about women is carelessly reinforced. And, yes, it’s a problem because men who assume that women are intellectually inferior can chalk up another mark against us, but it has even further consequences among women. Women who do place a greater emphasis on beauty than brains have their skewed priorities justified, while women who struggle with their identities take another blow. And women who learn to hate other women because of the constant drumbeat of vapidity assigned to the female population have yet further reason to define themselves outwith feminine parameters. I’m a tomboy; all my friends are male; I don’t like girly things.

Part of the feminist paradigm has to be reclaiming the definition of what is “girly” (and womanly), and removing the inevitably pejorative connotations. Why is a pink frilly dress girly but video games aren’t? I know a lot more women who play video games than wear pink frilly dresses. But strong women with good minds are compelled to distance themselves from the feminine because of articles like the one referenced above, and their insistence on construing femininity with silliness and illogic.

Personally, I love my big brain and my big ass. I’m just pissed that has to be a revolutionary statement.