This post is completely vapid yet deeply necessary.
This avclub blog entry has alerted me to the disturbing fact that there are people--a LOT of people, apparently--who find Maggie Gyllenhaal unattractive. Okay, so you need only look at our government to realize that there are a lot of people in this country with very poor judgment, but if you need a final piece of evidence that there is something deeply diseased about our national psyche, here it is. At the least, it becomes obvious that there is something very fucked up about our standards of beauty.
I mean SERIOUSLY people:
How is she not the most adorable creature you have ever laid eyes on?
I mean SERIOUSLY people:
How is she not the most adorable creature you have ever laid eyes on?
posted by GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. at 5:31 PM
Don't shoot the messenger; I think she's very cute, but she does have a deep philtrum. Maybe that's part of it.
She once said something that should be construed as left-wing. This means that a lot of loud and stupid people will contend to their deaths that she's the most hideous thing since Momma got thrown from the train.
I think it's understandable for any individual person to not be sexually attracted to her. There are any number of attractive people who just don't do anything for me, and I doubt I'm that unusual.
What bugs me are the people who make proclamations, not "Sorry, I'm just not into her," but rather "Ew, she's fugly." I think the latter demonstrates something very, very wrong about the speaker -- very bad taste at a minimum, and a nasty personality at a maximum.
You make a sensible point, and it's true that by asserting the objectivity of Ms. Gyllenhaal's hotness, I'm as guilty of solipsism as anyone claiming the opposite (in spite of which, I will forever maintain it to be objectively true--things like this short-circuit your so-called rational thought).
Still, the real issue is the really disturbing nature of a lot of the comments quoted in that thread, by people who appear not only to not find her to their taste, but who feel personally affronted by this fact, and in some cases jokingly (ha ha!) suggest inflicting violence on her. Seriously, what the fuck is WRONG with such people? Sure, there are plenty of allegedly hawt people who don't do it for me, but I don't feel the compulsion to unleash my inner dickhead over it.
I mean seriously, I know that the primary purpose of the internet is to allow people to be morons'n'assholes with no repercussions, but this still seems a bit MUCH.