Feb 02, 2014 11:27 PM GMT
http://jezebel.com/teens-are-having-a-racist-meltdown-over-lordes-ugly-1479815260
"Most of the tweets simply call Lowe ugly and/or express bewilderment at the coupling—Lowe and Lorde, it seems, don't "match" in a way that their brains can comprehend. I've mentioned before that I'm in a relationship with someone way more conventionally attractive than me, and the proprietary/borderline charitable way that conventionally attractive women interact with my boyfriend (like they'd be righting the balance of the universe by "taking" him from me) is astonishing. Our culture has a lot of social and literal capital tied up in the idea that conventional physical beauty is the defining factor in successful relationships. When couples like Lorde and Lowe violate that tacit social contract (by, you know, just liking each other a lot while being slightly different amounts of "hot"), the response is usually swift, bewildered, and thick with disgust.
Even the tweets that don't specifically mention Lowe's race, I suspect, are at least partially driven by our culture's nasty stereotyping of Asian men as unsexy and sexless."
***
Last part is salient. Her boyfriend is like a 3/10 IMO, but I suspect that if Lorde wasn't dating a geeky Asian hipster, but rather a geeky white hipster, (let's say Artie from Glee), it wouldn't have caused a shitstorm.
"Most of the tweets simply call Lowe ugly and/or express bewilderment at the coupling—Lowe and Lorde, it seems, don't "match" in a way that their brains can comprehend. I've mentioned before that I'm in a relationship with someone way more conventionally attractive than me, and the proprietary/borderline charitable way that conventionally attractive women interact with my boyfriend (like they'd be righting the balance of the universe by "taking" him from me) is astonishing. Our culture has a lot of social and literal capital tied up in the idea that conventional physical beauty is the defining factor in successful relationships. When couples like Lorde and Lowe violate that tacit social contract (by, you know, just liking each other a lot while being slightly different amounts of "hot"), the response is usually swift, bewildered, and thick with disgust.
Even the tweets that don't specifically mention Lowe's race, I suspect, are at least partially driven by our culture's nasty stereotyping of Asian men as unsexy and sexless."
***
Last part is salient. Her boyfriend is like a 3/10 IMO, but I suspect that if Lorde wasn't dating a geeky Asian hipster, but rather a geeky white hipster, (let's say Artie from Glee), it wouldn't have caused a shitstorm.
