Theresa Basile

[This was originally published at Feminspire.]

I’m not always good at accepting compliments.

If someone tells me that I’m smart, I can quietly agree and think, “Yes, yes, I am. How intelligent you are for noticing my equal intellectual aptitude. We would both be sorted into Ravenclaw, I’d wager.”

If someone tells me that I’m funny, I eat it up with a spoon. “Oh, no, don’t go on – except do go on, because I literally cannot hear that enough. Tell me, what do you think was the wittiest thing I said in the last few minutes?”

But if someone tells me that I’m pretty, my body turns rigid and I feel defensive. “I’m not pretty. YOU’RE pretty. Your mom’s pretty! What do you want from me? SHUT UP.”

It’s not that I think I’m unattractive. I can easily rattle off a list of things about my appearance that I like, don’t like, and feel ambivalent about.

No, I’m not unattractive. I’ll look in the mirror and like what I see. But it’s when I hear “you’re beautiful” that I feel suspicious.

I’m twenty-eight years old, and I still don’t react well when someone compliments me on my physical appearance. On Halloween night of 2011, the night of the best first date I’ve ever had, I was dressed in a costume that was sexy, yet still existed well within my personal comfort zone – and my date told me I looked beautiful. I blushed, looked down at my leopard-printed pants, and turned away, unable to hold his gaze. (Never mind that I had made the first move outside of a crowded bar and we had boldly kissed on every street corner from the East to the West Village – being complimented, that’s what made my face flush.)

He paused and said, “You’re not used to being told that, are you?”

No. No, I wasn’t.

Growing up, no one outside of my family told me that I was beautiful, and as every teenager knows, the opinions of your own parents don’t count when you have to face seven hours of unrelenting judgment from other insecure seventh-graders – especially when one of them tells you, in the middle of class, that you’re so ugly that you should kill yourself.

Never mind that the boy who shared this charming sentiment with the rest of the class was a greasy-haired turd whose opinion didn’t matter to me. No one likes to hear that s/he’s so repulsive to look at that s/he’s better off dead.

And the mix of uproarious laughter, awkward titters, and uncomfortable silences, without a single person standing up for me, only confirmed my worst suspicion: that I was, in fact, ugly. The greasy-haired turd had a handful of slightly less obnoxious friends, but he wasn’t so popular that another kid couldn’t have contradicted him without fear of retaliation.

That was the year I started obscuring my body. I pulled my hair into messy ponytails, wore my dorkiest glasses, and dressed in an assortment of ugly sweatpants and sweatshirts – the fashion disaster version of the middle finger in the face of beauty standards. No one could call me “ugly” and expect it to sting if I wasn’t trying to look good, if I looked like I didn’t care about that stuff.

That phase didn’t last long. I grew out of my (physically) awkward phase by the time high school rolled around. With my braces removed, contact lenses replacing my glasses, and a set of semi-flattering jeans in place of magenta sweatpants, I was no longer the “ugly” girl.

But I still wasn’t pretty. The ugly duckling hadn’t transformed into a swan, and all of the other reindeer didn’t suddenly let me join in all their reindeer games. Making fun of my looks had lost its appeal, so they switched to making fun of my opinionated nature or the “weird” things I said.

Those comments didn’t sting as much. The Chief Turd of the Guild of Douchebags was no longer in my classes, and I had the grades, and the appreciative chuckles from my more evolved classmates, as proof that I was smart and funny, no matter what the teasers said.

But pretty, I was not. Years of dateless nights passed me by, my best friend lost her virginity before I had my first kiss, and “beautiful” wasn’t a word associated with my name.

It took me until the age of twenty to hear “you’re pretty” without bristling, where the words were music to my ears instead of words that were not to be trusted, because they were coming from the right person. A boy I was attracted to was attracted to me right back for the first time in my adult life.

So relieved was I that love wasn’t a myth that I brushed off the signs that the “right person” wasn’t so right for me after all. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter that “you’re so beautiful” was almost always followed by a qualifier.

“You’re so beautiful. Why do you have to wear purple? I hate purple.”

“You’re so beautiful. Why do you still dress like you’re from New Jersey?” (Whatever that means.)

“You’re so beautiful. And I don’t think it’s too much to expect that my girlfriend wears something other than sweats and T-shirts when I come home from work. Why can’t you buy sexier nightgowns?”

I was beautiful – except when I wore the wrong thing, the wrong color, or dressed for comfort instead of for his visual and sexual pleasure.

Beauty was no longer an unattainable goal for me. Instead, it was something I possessed in spades, except I was continually failing to live up to my potential.

Being sexually desirable – that, too, was unfamiliar territory. As a teen, I was the girl no boy wanted to touch. In my early twenties, one man wanted me so badly, so consistently, that saying my “no” at any time, for whatever reason, resulted in arguments that could last for hours. Because he had needs, and he didn’t have to be with me, and was a young single man who could be going out and meeting as many girls as he liked, and not being in the mood must mean that I didn’t love him enough.

It was a full year after the relationship finally ended that I saw that behavior as abusive and not a mere issue of sexual incompatibility. And it was even longer before I could recognize the irony that being considered beautiful by the wrong person was even more damaging to my self-esteem than being called ugly. (Though I doubt I would have stayed in that relationship for the first half of my twenties if those years of teasing and loneliness hadn’t convinced me that this was my only chance at love.)

“You’re beautiful” was once a sentence said to me so rarely that I immediately discounted the opinion of the person who said it and pretended it was a joke. Now, “you’re beautiful” carries an implied threat.

“You’re beautiful” now means “I might hurt you, and you would be unwise to trust me.”

Like all women, I grew up in a culture that objectifies us and communicates every day that beauty and sexiness are the most important things we can offer the world. As an “ugly girl,” I could only survive if I nurtured other talents, such as kindness, a sense of humor, and intellectual curiosity.

A part of me is glad that I didn’t grow up as a “pretty girl.” I’m happy that I wasn’t brought up to think that physical beauty was the most important thing about me. I’m grateful that I was encouraged to be kind and compassionate, to emphasize my intelligence, and sharpen my wit instead.

I’m not happy that I’m twenty-eight years old and I still wince when someone tells me that I’m beautiful.

[This article originally appeared on Bitch Flicks.]

In my umpteenth viewing of episodes from season four of The Simpsons, I noticed something that never occurred to me in my first viewings of the show: Bart Simpson has a feminine side.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. An episode in the eighth season, “Homer’s Phobia,” shows Bart becoming appreciative of gay culture (much to Homer’s dismay) after the family befriends a delightful gay man named John. The episode has an important lesson where Homer learns a lesson about acceptance, but Bart’s development isn’t explored in detail, as his appreciation of gay culture is just a catalyst for Homer’s (temporary) growth as a person.

Earlier (and later) episodes, though, show that Bart’s feminine side is more than just a passing trend. It’s a trait that appears sporadically during the series, and is amusing every time.

In “Lisa the Beauty Queen,” Bart shows his little sister how to walk in heels for the competition. When Lisa asks Bart if he really thinks she could win, he strikes a pose and says, “Hey, I’m starting to think I could win!”

In “Marge in Chains,” Bart shares his plan to break his mother out of prison: “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll bust you out of there as soon as I get a cocktail dress and a crowbar.” Then we see Bart’s dream sequence of dancing with the warden, who says, “Oh, Bartina — before I met you, I was a lonely man.”

[This was originally posted on Bitch Flicks.]

Much has been said about the gratuitous nudity on Game of Thrones. Several feminist critics (such as yours truly) have written about the objectification of the female characters, and how the writers use naked women as objects for male fantasy or to develop male characters.

Challenging the use of nudity in a TV show or film will predictably result in accusations of prudishness and pearl-clutching, as though feminist critics are nothing but live-action versions of Helen Lovejoy.

It’s easy to assume that critics are ranting because they’re too squeamish and repressed to look at pictures of naked women without feeling embarrassed. Leaping to that conclusion is much more comfortable than acknowledging the problematic aspects of using naked female bodies as decoration and masturbatory fodder.

[This piece originally appeared at Bitch Flicks.]

Joss Whedon’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is soaked in sex, languidness, and alcohol, as any decent adaptation of a Shakespeare comedy should be. It’s not a “wedding movie” in the traditional sense: there are no Bridezilla jokes, montages of wedding planning going hilariously wrong, or subplots about in-laws fighting each other.

But Much Ado About Nothing does have more than one wedding scene, and the film does employ the classic “left at the alatr” plot point. Claudio (Fran Kranz), in love with Hero (Jillian Morgese), abandons her on their wedding day. What follows is not the typical “wacky wedding hijinx” story, but a story that exposes the true nature of the characters involved in the ceremony, where several male characters reveal disturbing attitudes toward women, and one surprises us by being a little more enlightened than we expected.

Claudio doesn’t have cold feet because he’s nervous about marriage. At the beginning of the film, there’s nothing he wants more than to go to the chapel and get ma-a-a-a-aried. In fact, he wants to marry Hero the day after she accepts his proposal, prompting her father Leonato (Clark Gregg) to tell him to put on the brakes because he’s not quite ready to transfer ownership of his daughter to a husband…I mean, er, “watch his little girl grow up.”

[This post was originally published at Bitch Flicks.]

The Wizard of Oz is my favorite movie. There are movies that are more artistically accomplished, movies that are more sophisticated, and funnier films that make me laugh my butt off, but no film I’ve seen has the same sentimental, emotional effect on me as The Wizard of Oz.

I love this movie as I love no other movie. And I hate the ending.

Let me explain.

The plot of the movie is fairly straightforward. Dorothy and her three male companions go on the same quest: to meet the Wizard of Oz. Each member of the original Fab Four has a different reason to meet the Wizard. The Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Man wants a heart, the Cowardly Lion wants courage, and Dorothy wants to go home to her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry in Kansas.

In the end, their quests prove to be unnecessary, and not just because the Wizard is a charlatan who cannot give the characters what they desire. As it turns out, each character already possesses the quality he or she was seeking. The Scarecrow doesn’t need a brain — he’s already the smartest person in the group, a quick thinker and problem-solver who comes up with the plans to break into the Wicked Witch’s castle. The Tin Man doesn’t need a heart — he’s already emotional, crying whenever his friends are in trouble. The Lion doesn’t need someone to give him courage — he already steps up to every challenge that’s presented to him, even when it scares him. And Dorothy doesn’t need to go home — she’s been there the whole time, because the entire colorized section of The Wizard of Oz was all just a dream!

BOOOOO. (Just to make myself perfectly clear, I am, in fact, saying “Boooo!” and not “Boo-urns!”)

I hate “it was just a dream!” endings on principle, because if the entire conflict takes place in the main character’s head, there’s no real urgency, nothing really at stake.