Look, I don't like the term "special snowflake." It's all too often used by people who are scolding others for whining about their problems. And I whine about my life all too often, here and on other social media forums. In fact, most people whine about their lives on social media. I believe this is partially because they feel like they sound whiny if they say it out loud (which really, it depends on the circumstance) and partially because it's a way of letting ALL of the people know that something has happened to them; it's a plea for attention. I say this because frankly, I use social media for that very thing. The only people who ask "how are you doing?" anymore are my family, my adorable roommates, and the people in my Russian class. (And you can't complain about your life in Russian if you don't KNOW how to complain about it in Russian; the most I can do is say "normaina" or "herasho" or "ploha" (which mean okay, good, and bad respectively and you say them phonetically I promise).)
Anyway, I really am going to talk about something. It's this concept that kind of involves the Byronic hero/heroine and the main character of every chick flick ever (except maybe Pride and Prejudice and any/all varieties of that book or movie, including but not limited to the "pink" version, the Bollywood version, The Shop Around The Corner, and You've Got Mail).
Okay. So here we go.
WHY ARE MAIN CHARACTERS WRITTEN AS THIS CONTRADICTORY COMPROMISE BETWEEN DESIRABLE, SEXY, AND AWESOME, AND STANDOFFISH, ANTI-SOCIAL, AND RUDE?
No, really. I mean it.
For a prime example of what I mean, take the book Jane Eyre. I absolutely adore Jane Eyre. But you have to admit that Jane, the (admittedly biased) narrator of the story, talks about how plain she is several times, and how she prefers to be alone sometimes and how she likes to draw and read and she speaks really good French. And yet, at least two characters find her at least a little bit attractive: Mr. Rochester, who thinks that she's adorable AND super smart AND just an awesome person, which she is; and St. John Rivers, who doesn't care so much about the adorable and just values her for her intelligence and personality- but let's be real here, I think that St. John Rivers probably had to find Jane at least a little bit physically pretty.
My question relates to this in this way: why couldn't Jane have thought she was pretty?
Why can't we have female characters who think they are pretty, who acknowledge their own awesomeness, their own attractiveness, their own intelligence- WITHOUT denying some other aspect of their personality? Is it because women are socialized to be modest? Is it because women are naturally modest? Is it because women write characters who reflect their own insecurities about themselves? Is it because men write characters who reflect what they hear women saying about themselves? Is it because both men and women write characters that reflect the messages they hear the media pushing onto women, that they are already "not good enough" and therefore need extra help from their soap, their acne cream, their diet pills, their exercise equipment?
Or is it because there are not enough real women who acknowledge that they are awesome or attractive or intelligent?
I think it's mostly because of this last one.
One afternoon in the fourth grade, I was riding on the bus home and a friend of mine told me that I needed to start washing my hair more, because I had little white speckles falling onto my dark-blue jacket and dandruff was gross. I went home and talked to my mother about it and she bought me dandruff shampoo and I began to shower every day.
Just a year later, in fifth grade, I experienced two separate occasions where I was told, by my peers, that I was not "good enough." The first occasion was also when I was on the bus home, and a girl who lived in my neighborhood and who I didn't particularly like told me, to my face, in these exact words, that I "could use a makeover." I was kind of hurt and I went home and cried about it to my teddy bears, but not my mother.
The second occurred in the spring. It was finally warm enough to wear shorts, and my mother had bought me a cute pair of plaid shorts and a matching shirt with a collar. I was so excited to wear them. The first day I wore them, I stood up and gave a report on the state of Wyoming for my class. While I was speaking in class, I noticed that there were some girls in the back of the room giggling at me. I didn't know what it was. I didn't smell- my mother had caught that train before anyone at school could, and I was religiously applying deodorant every day. Was it my hair? I had showered the night before. After my presentation was done, I sat down, hurt and bewildered, almost entirely certain that they were giggling at the lace on my socks. That had to be it! I was too old to wear socks with lace on them!
And then my friend came up to me at recess, the one who had kindly told me about the dandruff problem, and said gently that the girls had been laughing because I had hair on my legs.
I was ten years old. I hadn't even gotten my period yet.
But I went to my mother and asked how to get rid of the hair on my legs, and she bought me a cheap plastic razor and showed me how to shave my legs and under my arms, and after that I did not appear in public with exposed and unshaven legs- at least, not until college.
I was ten when I realized that people were starting to believe that there was something wrong with them. Girls began to shave their legs and put on as much makeup as their mother allowed- which at the time was lip gloss. I was taller and broader in the shoulders than a lot of girls at the time, and I kind of just hunched over and dealt with my pimples and stared at the ground a lot. In sixth grade, there was a very cute boy who lived in my neighborhood and rode my bus and was placed in the "advanced" reading group with my friends and I- the five of us or so read the hardest books in the class and were generally considered the smartest ones. And I thought he was unbearably cute. But we were maybe eleven, and I watched as he tried out his powers on prettier girls. And because he didn't pay any attention to me outside of academic work, I felt like I was not pretty.
Why did I need him to feel pretty? Why did I need the validation of those cute little puffball girls in my fifth grade class who laughed at my perfectly natural body hair? Why did I care so much about what they thought?
And at the time, going into junior high and realizing that secondary education was a whole different ball game than elementary school, I thought I knew the answer. I reasoned with myself (with flawed logic, of course) that "Beautiful People Are In Charge Of The World." This made sense to me. I knew, of course, that the leaders in the government were a bunch of old dudes who were not at all pretty; but then they all dressed in suits every day and they were probably good-looking when they were younger. My teachers were not all pretty, but they also wore nice clothes, and they were all very smart. I then revised my theory to say that "Talented People Are In Charge Of The World." Whether that meant they were talented at being attractive or talented at being intelligent or talented at sports or music, it didn't matter. If you were talented, people liked you.
In high school, I became one of the talented people. I began playing the piano for choir. During my freshman year, everyone smiled at me and asked how long I had played and oohed and ahhed when they discovered that I was sort of, a little bit, better than the girl who was a senior and had been playing the piano for the choir for a while. They all liked her, too, because she was pretty and sassy and funny.
And then in my sophomore year, one of my friends joined me at the piano for choir. And because I was a terrible human being and still am, I noticed, primarily, that she was a lot prettier than I was. Like, she was a freaking bombshell. She had perfect long legs and a cute little heart-shaped face and perfect hair and boy did she know how to dress, because no matter what she wore, she looked perfect. She could have worn a burlap sack to school, and every heterosexual male would have drooled about it.
And suddenly, even though I had been there for a whole year, it was like I had suddenly come up in second place. People talked about my friend who was so good at the piano and so pretty and everything, and I sat next to her and felt utterly invisible because I had horrible acne and ugly glasses and unfashionable clothes and I was kind of chubby. And we did a lot of the same things together- marching band and musical and orchestra and various choirs and so on- but I was always invisible. I never came out first, except for one shining moment of my junior year when I played a technically brilliant piece for the Tri-M concert and everyone told me that I did a great job and my band director placed me last on the program and told me, right before I went on, that he put me last because my selection was so weird and I had been working so hard on it. For that one moment, I shone.
And all this time, running under my theory of "Talented People Are In Charge Of The World," I felt second-rate and invisible, doomed to die alone. Give me a break; I was a melodramatic teenager. I knew that there was something wrong with this feeling of invisibility that I had, but I didn't know what it was. All I knew that was I was not AS pretty or AS talented or AS intelligent as other people, and it made me feel like a pathetic, earth-crawling piece of scum.
And then I got to college, and I went through two years of LDS culture where dating was supposed to be prominent in my life but never was, and I went through the feelings of falling in love and heartbreak and betrayal like every other human being ever, and I went through depression and am still going through depression occasionally, and it was not until I was fully in the midst of this depression thing that I began to have ideas about something that I hadn't noticed until now.
In the middle of the worst part of my depression, which was about in mid-March and all of April, I had times where I cared so little about my life that I didn't get out of bed to go to class. One day I slept for an entire day through and when I woke up I was still tired. And when I went to class, I would just throw on the cleanest pair of jeans I owned, a vaguely clean T-shirt, and a jacket. This was my usual standard of beauty, because with the exception of scrubbing my face vigorously every day to try and get rid of pimples, I had no desire to look nice. I didn't care at all. I didn't even care about caring. It was just this swamp of loneliness and sadness and vague annoyance that I actually had to do things and couldn't curl up and die because life demanded that I keep living. And in the middle of this, my brain asked myself, "Why do you still care about cleaning your face if you don't care about anything else?"
And mostly I went back to not caring about anything, until I had suicidal thoughts and started seeing a doctor and taking drugs that made me happy again. And then, after I became sort of happy again, I looked at myself objectively in the mirror one day and decided that I wanted to dye my hair darker brown.
Hair dye might not be great for your hair, but it was really, really good for my self-esteem. It made me look a whole lot better, and it helped that I had lost weight during depression and through the summer when I had a regular schedule of activities that I made myself go to every day. And I dyed my hair again, and began to take a mild interest in cosmetics, and just like a couple of weeks ago I got my ears pierced, and I've been building a better wardrobe, bit by bit. And one day I looked in the mirror again, rather recently, and I looked in shock and thought, "When did I become pretty?"
Because I was. I was pretty. It was totally shocking to me, to see myself and have positive feelings from the experience. I could still see all the things I didn't like- acne and its scars, stray hairs on my chin and between my eyebrows (thanks, genetics), the little rolls of fat that occurred occasionally around my back and neck and shoulders and waist, my enormous thighs. But then it occurred to me that the only reason I even looked this good was because I kept cleaning my face every day even when I wanted to stop existing.
I am a real human being who has experienced these real emotions. I have realized that I am pretty. I am not drop-dead-Emma-Watson-gorgeous, but I'm kind of adorable. I've learned how to dress and hide the things I don't like and emphasize the things I do like. I am not very, very intelligent at everything I do, but I am incredibly talented at a few things and reasonably good at pretty much anything I want to do because one of the things I am very, very good at is learning how to do things. I am not a very good or unselfish person, but I try my hardest to be kind and to listen when people need me to listen to them.
And it occurred to me today that in all kinds of literature we read, in all kinds of TV and movies we watch, in all kinds of media- we never really have women being confident in themselves, in their intelligence or beauty or talents. We see women who ARE beautiful or intelligent or talented or a combination of the three, but we never see these women acknowledge it, because to acknowledge it is insist that a woman does not need anything to validate her existence other than her own natural graces.
The female character is not allowed to admit that she is awesome, because if she is awesome, then she doesn't need anything- or anyone- to make her more awesome. This holds true in real life, and it makes me so, so sad. Even though I've figured this out, I still feel it. I've figured out that I'm pretty and smart and talented and when I acknowledge these things publicly, I still feel like I'm being stuck up, like I'm showing off and saying, "Wow, look at how great I am!" And in away, I am saying that. But I'm saying that because I want other women to understand that they can find greatness in themselves. I want girls like me to look in the mirror and be satisfied with what they see. I want women to be able to sleep soundly at night without having to worry whether they'll have a pimple the next day, because they know they'll still be pretty even with a pimple. I want women to be able to say simply that they are intelligent, without anyone to try and prove that they are not. I want women to be able to be confident in their abilities and talents, without feeling as though they are constantly being undercut by men, by other women, or even by themselves.
I'm so sick of the "special snowflake" characters. Can't a character be pretty and smart and talented and secure in that knowledge of herself? Can't any character be secure in their knowledge of themselves? Why can't any character, any man, any woman, feel as though they are great, awesome, fine, talented, amazing, beautiful, handsome, intelligent, kind, good, brilliant, and unique- without feeling like they don't deserve those things, or like it's just a passing phase?
Why can't anyone see that they are all of those things, all of the time, and it's just the world telling them not to be?
