By Aimée Keeble
I recently watched an interview with Megan Fox and Diablo Cody where together they discussed Cody’s film Jennifer’s Body. The conversation steered to the topic of feminism, a major theme that had somehow been overlooked until the film’s more recent cult-like resurgence.
And Megan Fox, despite identifying as a feminist herself admitted that ‘feminists don’t want me a part of their group’. Her beautiful head, her sad vulpine eyes. This woman who is too far on the good looking dial even for Hollywood, fulfilling a trope that has been carved out of pop culture for women like her- and yet that role may as well be a rock in the middle of space, so marooned, is she.
I was reminded of a girl in high school, a senior when I was a freshman. Her face was too much, it became a starkness against the banality of pubescent features teenagers share- cheeks like puppies, a smoothness uninterrupted by years, lips glassy with gloss.
Her face was perfect to the point of alien- lines so symmetrical they could have been divinely measured as opposed to grown in typical organic chaos. She was so beautiful she wore a neon Band-Aid across her cheek once (to cover a pimple? A scratch?), so confident was she in her beauty, and so little did she need us to tell her or even to recognize it.
When the yearbook came out, I thumbed through the superlatives that only the seniors were nominated for. There was no way she could get anything other than Best Looking. And there she was, towards the end of the list, in a photograph with another boy, both of them leaning over a desk presenting flowers to the principal as he held his hands out comically, his teeth large and white in a big smile. Biggest Brown Noser.
I realized then, that an excess of beauty, twisted the other way to the wrong audience, can be a repeller. Her bones were a threat, this girl who all the boys slowed down for, the one that girls left out of conversations. And yet, are we not all assuring one another, that as women, we are feminists? Despite our appearance?
Is there then, an insidious part of our brain, reptilian and dead-eyed, that looks on too much beauty and says no, you are for the angels, you cannot suffer here with us and expect our allegiance. What is the archetype for a feminist? Because we can’t say there isn’t one if Megan Fox just announced she can’t join the club. That means there must be an unknown prejudice we didn’t even know we had that lurks deep.
When one is beautiful one is afforded more from life- this is the way things are. It is simple, things that are attractive are more favorable than things that are ugly. It is uncomplicated the way human beings are uncomplicated before you layer them with more existential baggage.
Are we punishing Megan Fox because she, already physically blessed and therefore elevated, and in our punishment saving our own selves from the ills she is facing, the ills that all women face? Is it her face that condemns her or our own unspoken or unrecognized insecurities?
Can we all be feminists? Or are we to judge by the proverbial ugly stick before we take each other’s cries seriously?
Why does Megan Fox feel like she can’t call herself a feminist when she feels like one? This question is rhetorical. What is that quality in her, mercurial, some sort of unicorn tone, that has alienated her from her sex? Are we to confront our darker nature in order to admit a fault, a lack of empathy for one of our peers who seemingly has all the qualities we fear we do not?
Her admission suggests she will not be taken seriously, as a person within her gender pushing for equal rights. But can you imagine her, one eye missing, a pink scar shining diagonal across her face, her glowing hair all shorn, a limp.
And then she says, in a croak, her throat busted from some recent battle:
“There is no space in feminism for me.”
Megan, your angel bones have made some of us feel uncomfortable, just like the beautiful Brown Noser. But that’s on us to reconcile, our animal prejudices to temper. You are whatever you feel and whatever you want to be, despite whatever physical body your soul has decided to slosh around in for a lifetime. And whoever has felt excluded from anything, ever- high school is over, burn your yearbook, look upwards instead of at whatever bullshit is scribbled on your desk- it’s time to fly.
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