There is a subreddit entitled “Pretty Girls Ugly Faces.” Thankfully for me, the person at Pleated-Jeans took a bunch of the photos from reddit (which I have no clue how to navigate) and posted them to tumblr.
….I think this is pretty awesome? Showing how beauty is a performance? Giving women the social space to discard this specific, enforced performance and adopt another one where they can have fun, be silly, and do different things with their body? (Definitely an overabundance of white women on it, though.)
Thoughts?
EDIT: I’m (trying to) think through my reaction in the comments.
In a black and white photo, a woman stands outside by a table, microphone in hand. She has shoulder length straight hair and glasses. She is wearing a dress and sandals. She is smiling.
She devoted lots of her time working as an advocate for the rights of people with disabilities; she worked part time as well as being heavily involved in volunteering.
She was denied a heart-lung transplant by the Stanford University School of Medicine in California because she had Down syndrome. She then (along with supporters) began a very public battle, gaining nationwide attention arguing that Down syndrome should not be enough to automatically deprive a patient of a chance to survive, this resulted in her receiving the transplant (1996).
She became the first person with Down Syndrome to ever receive a heart-lung transplant.
I’ll be over here in awe
I also found her obituary from 1997, which you can read here.
Jensen, an activist for disabled rights, served as president of a Sacramento disabled-rights group and was invited to watch then-President George Bush sign the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Despite her disabilities, Jensen lived on her own, graduating from high school and busing tables at the Capitol cafeteria.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information about her or her story online, but I did find this report, which is taken from NYT and US News articles.
What’s remarkable about all this is not that men and women have so much in common but that these commonalities persist despite relentless gender policing that usually involves quite a bit of shame. Men face ridicule if they’re perceived as having female-like levels of empathy and concern for their friends, and yet, according to the study, they overcome it. Women are routinely told there’s something wrong with them if they have “masculine” attitudes towards sex and men are emasculated if they aren’t horny all the time or if they desire intimacy alongside their sexual adventures, and yet both genders tend to have a mix of adventurousness and tenderness when it comes to sex. We’re constantly being put in gender silos, and yet, apparently, we keep escaping. (Go us!)
Feminist Philosophers 