Heather Wilhelm writes for The Federalist website about pretty girls’ attempts to join the ranks of hapless victims.
“People Judge Me Because I’m Pretty,” college student Felicia Czochanski wrote last week in Cosmopolitan, bemoaning her “blonde hair, big hazel eyes, 34DDs, and toned calves.” Czochanski suffers, you see, because of her magnetic beauty, which apparently causes the world to stop each time she walks into a subway station or bagel shop. “Imagine how it feels to have heads turn and all eyes on you when you are simply trying to get to where you need to be…It makes me feel like there is something wrong with me. The scrutiny is never ending.”
After a few more paragraphs detailing the torment and oppression that comes from everyone looking at her all the time, the piece ends with a decision to ignore all the attention. This is followed, somewhat delightfully—and also incongruously—by an invitation to “Follow Felicia on Instagram.”
Next up, we have Blake Dodge, a student at the University of North Carolina, who published a real op-ed in an actual newspaper about her horrible first-world life and “the struggle to be taken seriously in the age of subtle sexism.” I had to read this one a few times to make sure it wasn’t satire; alas, it is not.
“I identify as female,” Dodge writes, and “I am apparently a conventionally attractive student-athlete at UNC-Chapel Hill…Writing this now, I feel my stomach drop. In a culture that regularly exploits sexuality, it’s ironically unacceptable when women openly acknowledge it themselves. But hear me. The following is a string of subtle and routine occurrences that make me feel less human and should take their rightful place among the larger narrative of sexism in contemporary America.”
Among Dodge’s thorny crosses to bear: chafing spandex, counting calories, “masculine-identifying friends” who engage in “a sort of masculine greeting ritual”—Dodge, needless to say, is studying sociology—people looking at her in the gym, a male colleague taking charge in a group project, a random classmate jokingly telling her she can’t be “pretty and smart,” her butt being “big for a white girl,” her chest being “small, given my butt,” and her dad suggesting that starting a nonprofit in her spare time might be a “bit much.” At the risk of supporting the patriarchy, given her current fragile mental state, and I have to say that Dad might be right on that one.
