We’re All A Bunch of Fucking Liars.
Today, I found myself startled by a photo of a young celebrity on Facebook. When I say young, I mean in her early twenties. When I say celebrity, I mean she once was a child star, and now she’s not. Which is fine. But the photo caught my eye for a very specific reason. She’d… let’s say… grown a little since I’d last seen her. I’d last seen her a couple years ago, when she was probably nineteen or twenty. She was still the same height as she’d been then, if you catch what I’m trying to say. Now, in this new picture she’d become a little… well. Um. Geez. This is hard to say without being a dick.
I went to the comments, and the top comment saved me the trouble of finding the words: “Wow. She got fucking fat,” Edwardo had said. Edwardo had no profile picture, but that didn’t stop him from becoming the most popular guy in the thread. 82 little furious faces under his comment and a litany of replies from women telling him to STFU and GO FUCK YOURSELF and LETS SEE YOUR FUCKING FACE. Holy shit! I thought, as I tried to contain the grin that spread across my face. What a fucking asshole. Something tells me Edwardo got exactly the responses he was looking for.
The comments that followed were aplenty, and they were all women, and they were all kind. Well, not all. It was large, long periods of me scrolling through “She’s so beautiful!” and “I love her so much!” and “Her skin looks amazing” Until I reached another. “What the hell happened to her?”
The ones doing damage control were majority women, with the occasional XY providing a dash of empathetic testosterone to the cauldron of estrogen that was spilling over. The other side though, the mean ones, were exclusively - and they would certainly declare with enthusiasm - fucking men.
The truth tellers, I report sadly, were the same ones who pee standing up.
And though the women and their XY compatriots were exceptionally kind, their lack of testicular fortitude was also accompanied by a lack of honesty.
But then, now that I really think about it, I’ve got to retract the bit about kindness. Yes, fine, they were kind about the young actress - as they propped up an illusion and then stood guard and patrolled the perimeter to make sure that the illusion wasn’t broken, but as soon as the illusion was broken they became quite vicious. And not only that, but they were incredibly honest and cutting, which suggests to me that it’s not an issue of “we just can’t see the physical flaws that you can” or that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” as they say. No, they seemed to observe the flaws in the men they were arguing with in an exacting way that most of their offenders couldn’t dream of being capable of doing. They could point out the ugly very well.
All I will say is this - I don’t enjoy being mean for the sake of being mean. I don’t think that’s an admirable quality, but I also don’t like walking through the world wondering if I’m insane because no one is acknowledging the obvious, and they’re saying things that run contrary to what my eyes are telling me, and it’s not just to be nice that they’re doing it… it feels like they’re actually going for something larger. Because if it’s just to be nice, like say we encounter a special needs person, and we all watch what they do with excitement and clap and cheer, to encourage their own excitement and help them be happy - I understand that very well. But in the privacy of our own home, if I wish to express that the special needs person is not fit to run a company, and the charade continues, and the other end is argued with feigned pragmatism and pretend intellectualism, then I’m out. I’m out because that’s insane.
So the rift that seems to occur between supposed “nice” and supposed “mean.” And sometimes not supposed. Sometimes people assume the roles on either end with very real “mean” and very real “nice.” But the mean one is telling the truth, and reinforcing reality, and reality can be a much needed elixir. Mike Tyson said, and I’m paraphrasing: “I don’t want friends who tell me ‘oh you look so good, Mike. You don’t need to do anything, just sit on that couch.’ Because those are my enemy. They wanna keep me weak. I want friends who see me on the couch and say ‘Mike, you look like shit. You’re fat. You’re getting weak. Get the fuck off the couch. You’re better than this.’”
We don’t need to be liars, but we are, and it’d be appropriate if more of us faced it and accepted it. I lied two days ago when I said I’d be back tomorrow to write, and then I spaced, and came back today instead. Let’s all focus on getting our fucking shit together.
