“This Felon Is Hot”

In what is apparently now news, a felon is considered hot on the internet. For some people, this is a Big Deal that is evidence that the people who think he is hot are Very Bad People because they find someone who did a bad thing aesthetically pleasing.

So first and foremost can we just get out of the way the fact that calling someone attractive is not even remotely the same as calling them good or condoning their behavior, and the elision of goodness and beauty into one element is a shitty thing that needs to stop happening. It is in fact possible to point out a positive (ish?) thing about someone (I’m not even sure “good looking” qualifies as a positive character trait) and understand that they’ve done shitty things and are most likely a not very good person. It doesn’t mean condoning all the good things about that person.

Additionally, someone’s appearance has exactly 0 bearing on their morality. I can’t believe we still have to reiterate that fact. This is something that even popular media has figured out for the most part (see: Lucius Malfoy, among others). You can even (gasp) be actively attracted to someone who is a bad person, be aware that they’re a shitty person, not condone their nasty behavior, and choose not to act on your attraction because you know what kind of a person you are (all while still being able to honestly say that they’re hot). Contrary to popular belief, attraction is not a get out of jail free card for the person  you’re attracted to.

There are so many things wrong with the idea that this is a problem. I’m so sick of the idea that we can judge someone’s character based on their body (fat shaming anyone?), that feeling attraction requires an action (rape culture anyone?) and that women in particular should feel shitty about being attracted to someone (purity culture anyone?).

But perhaps my least favorite thing about this has to do with race. The man in question is black, and many of the women who expressed attraction are black. Color me surprised. How out of place for women of color to be shamed for their attraction and sexuality. How out of place for black men to be viewed as a negative influence on the people around them. How out of place for white people to cast judgment on black people for things that make absolutely no sense and are really just another way of connecting black people with crime.

Yeah, the guy is good looking, but I bet if I had been the one saying it no one would have batted an eyelash.

Dichotomies: How to Brag and How to Sad Brag

I was reading a post earlier about labels, and how we often feel ok with labeling ourselves descriptively (atheist, female, etc) but not in a complimentary manner (hero, humanitarian, etc). While I feel like this is true, I wonder why. What is so wrong with noticing when we’ve done good things and labeling it ourselves? I feel that one of the problems that many people have is that they feel they can’t own the good things they do: they feel they have to wait for outside recognition because it’s considered bragging to talk about it and label it themselves. Well I’m going to be honest: I think we could all use a little more self-validation. While sometimes bragging can lead to comparisons and competition, I think if we stopped waiting so long to see when OTHER people notice that we’ve done good things and just said “I did a good thing” to ourselves, we might actually see a reduction in how competitive we are. We don’t need to one-up people in order to be noticed: we can notice ourselves.

So I’m going to take this moment to pat myself on the back for things that have been going really well for me lately, not because I want you all to feel jealous or compare yourselves to me, but because I’m genuinely excited and happy, would like to share, and want to be able to say that I feel GOOD about myself in a few areas. I have two job interviews in the next two days and one of them is for a job that I’m actually really interested in. I’m actually making enough money right now that I can put things away for retirement. It has been over a week since I self-harmed and I am going to continue that streak for AT LEAST three more weeks because I want to be cut free when I go to California. I have been in a bad job situation for 3 months now, and I have not crashed and burned. I have managed to deal with it, to brainstorm solutions, to find ways to tolerate the distress. There have been slipups certainly, but I am doing better than I have in YEARS. HOLY SHIT I AM AWESOME. When things go like this for me, I often look like the featured pic.

However despite being able to say all of this, and despite the fact that I can recognize that I have done some things quite well in recent history, I think the ability to speak our successes always needs to be a dialectic. I am always a proponent of being OPEN, and I think that this is no exception: if we’re going to be able to recognize our own successes, we also have to be able to recognize our own struggles. And we can recognize that these things may be one and the same. We have to be able to hold “I did some amazing things” at the same time as we hold “I am struggling so hard right now” and recognize that both can be true. Now first of all this is incredibly difficult. At the same time as I recognize that I have some wonderful opportunities right now and that I’ve done some things very right, I can also recognize that I’ve done some things very wrong. I’ve been struggling in my relationships lately, especially with the amount of effort I’ve been putting in to just feel sane with myself. I HAVE slipped up while trying to deal with this job, and I’ve let my mindset fall backwards in many ways. It has been a very hard couple of months for me trying to navigate the waters of semi-adulthood, paying for my own apartment, figuring out how to feed myself, working a full time job.

This is more what I look like when I think about those things. But I have STILL done awesome things. I have started a personal blog, started blogging for CFI On Campus, started planning a (very tentative) conference with some friends…

So I would like to propose that we as human beings become more comfortable saying out loud our strengths and weaknesses. Not the namby pampy job interview version of this, but actually going to twitter and saying “I did something awesome. I’m proud of me”, and not feeling guilty about it. And then going to twitter five minutes later and saying “I’m still struggling. And I’m not guilty about that either”. Human beings are remarkably capable of being contradictory things at the same time. We are filled with dichotomies. It’s something I’ve been spending a lot of time with in my DBT therapy, and I think it’s something that all of us need to learn to be more comfortable with.

 

Written by Olivia