I am not a Lady Gaga fan. Not my style of music, and I see her as basically a minimally-talented attention seeker. I’m sure she doesn’t lie awake at night, obsessing about my opinion in between deciding what to spend her millions on, and anyway, why I am sharing this with you?
Because I love football, and I watched the Super Bowl and sort of watched Lady Gaga’s halftime performance. I thought it was more lights flashing and sparks flying and silly costumes than it was an actual musical performance, but obviously it wasn’t geared toward my style. (Does anyone just wear jeans and a t-shirt and sing their songs and let that be that anymore?)
I ended up scrolling through my Facebook feed to see how my friends were reacting to the Patriots being at the losing end of the game (at halftime, anyway). I stopped when I read a post a friend of mine had liked. A woman I don’t know had written “Lady Gaga needs a tummy tuck!” followed by “LOL” and some smiley faces.
I am so ripping, blazing, freaking sick of women being held up to be critiqued, insulted, torn apart, analyzed, and put down based exclusively on whether they are skin and bones enough for our dumbass society. What the hell did Lady Gaga’s tummy have to do with her performance? Hell, I didn’t even notice her tummy or any other specific body part, maybe because I’m a mature human being who was focused on the performance as a whole, whether I liked it or not, not itching to put down a woman based on absurd societal standards.
Can you tell it made me mad?
I don’t know the woman who posted that, but since she posted it publicly and it ended up on my feed because a so-called friend of mine liked it, I responded to her post by telling her that it’s fine if she didn’t like Lady Gaga’s performance, but critiquing and insulting her body as a form of cheap entertainment really should have been beneath her.
A funny thing happened. Before my comment, about 17 people liked her post, and of those, 15 were women. After my comment, suddenly people stopped liking it, as if it had to be pointed out to them that it was a childish and pointless post, or it just wasn’t cool to join in anymore.
The saddest part is, my friend who liked it struggles continually with her weight. It seems very hypocritical to like a nasty comment about someone else’s body. If someone told her she needed a tummy tuck, she’d burst into tears or flee to Facebook for comforting comments and reassurance, and everyone would slam whoever said it instead of liking it and making smiley faces to indicate how oh-so-humorous they thought it was.
Whether I like Lady Gaga or not, I have to admit, the performance required a lot of work, a lot of practice, a lot of coordination of a zillion moving parts all at once. When is our society ever going to focus on what a woman does instead of how she looks? I bet no one analyzed or critiqued how any of the football players looked last night, whether their uniform was looking a little tight, whether any of the guys might need some specific cosmetic procedure. No, they were allowed to come out, do a job, and be recognized for their performance, what they DO, not what they look like.
It’s high time…actually, way past time…that we pay women the same respect.
And really, what’s with 15 of the 17 likes being from women? What the hell is there to like about a bitchy comment about another woman’s body? Petty much? Did insulting Lady Gaga suddenly make them drop 20 pounds? What’s in it for them?
We women have a long, long battle ahead of us if we are still fighting other women. That’s beyond sad. That’s pathetic. I don’t give a free pass to the men who liked it, because they are jackasses too, but come on, ladies. Can we at least lead by example and not step on our own necks and each other, and call it humor or entertainment and anything except what it truly is, a mindless and spineless waste of time and childish, trifling, and shallow crap?
Sweat & Sparkle 