We live in a fucked up culture.

Okay, so most everybody who reads this probably is saying to themselves, "Uh, duh" right now, but I just needed to put it out there again, because DAMN! We live in such a fucked up culture!

First off, our ideas of self worth are hardcore crayzay. We're only worthy if we're blond, or big-breasted, or thin, or athletic, or making bucketloads of money, or living in a sprawling mansion, or willing to give blow jobs, or wearing some designer's name in gold flake on our asses, or giving to X or Y prominent charity, or holding a piece of paper that says some dudes in suits filled our heads with what they wanted us to know for four years and then put a rubber stamp on us, or drive the latest car, or have a nifty gadget stuck in our pocket that will allow us to be leashed to a little screen even when we're not watching TV at home or a computer at work. And all this insanity is just so we continue believing that we deserve to breathe? That is so fucked up!

But let me pick one particular strain of fucked-up to rant about today. Let's talk about sex and relationships and self worth. (And obviously, I am drastically oversimplifying a rather complex set of interconnected social dynamics, for the purpose of a good rant.)

Let's talk about this unspoken heirarchy of hotness, and what a crock that is. The idea is that everyone falls into a scale of attractiveness - everyone below me should automatically be attracted to me....everyone above me, I should automatically find attractive. And, on the rare occasion that someone above me on the scale finds me attractive, I get to move up a peg or two. The higher on the scale, the more people who are theoretically attracted to me, and the more power I have over my fellow humans.

This is why dudes will have stupid competitions about whose biceps are bigger, and why chicks will have stupid conversations about whose ass is smaller. Everybody's trying to establish where in the pecking order they fall.

What's totally crackheaded is that everybody carries around a different heirarchy in their heads. Because (with the exception of adolescent websites where people rank other people as if they were best-selling books) there is no One Great List where it is determined by democracy who falls where. We each construct our own lists....not even based on other people's *actual* opinions, but based on what WE THINK they are. So, as it happens, we sort ourselves into the mix based on our assumptions about what other people find attractive, which is often tied to what we think other people find unattractive about ourselves.

Okay, that logical clusterfuck may, in fact, have blown my mind.

The point I guess I'm trying to make is that it's not really a pecking order based on hotness so much as insecurity. If you believe you're at the top, you probably are....which is why there are all kinds of "fugly" people with all kinds of "hot" people, and why there is no rhyme or reason to attraction. Even closer to the point, though, is that attractiveness is not the same fucking thing as worth. Value is not in how many dudes I can bag or dollar signs or any other one particular trait. Value exists independently of other poeople - there aren't rankings of who's more valuable or less, either. People are worthy, people are beautiful, people all have value, regardless of their choices or circumstances or appearances or health status or financial status or any damn thing else.

Of course, the world does not tell us this. Marketers encourage (if not manipulate) us to believe that we have to have this or that to be worthy of love or admiration or sex or whatever else it is they're using to brainwash us. If we're constnatly in a state of trying to improve ourselves, we'll constantly be buying crap. If we suddenly realized that we could be happy without diet pills and prepackaged food and shoes that made our asses look perky and machines to hold all the information we'd rather not have cluttering up our brains....if we realized that we have the freedom to choose based on our own desires, well, capitalism would probably fall down around our collective ears like the horrible (greed-supporting, world-killing, inequity-sustaining) failure it is.

But that's not happening overnight, obviously. Dammit.

I have officially given up on NaNoWriMo. I tried, and I learned that they're not joking when they say all your friends will wonder where the hell you've gone....'cause I cannot imagine winning that damn thing while simultaneously working a day job and having a life.

Good lesson.

Recent entries...
03 January 2008: Welcome to 2008: some tidbits and a nice, long rant!
27 December 2007: 2007: Finis.
17 December 2007: A ruse, a rant, and a poem. It's short.
11 December 2007: Music & falling....story of my life.
08 December 2007: Briefly...ish.