Maxxxassholesxxxim magazine has named their "Five Unsexiest Women Alive" list, Sarah Jessica Parker being at the top. I don't even want to repeat some of what they wrote, it's such a hostile mix of mean magazine list-writing gone nuts/male gaze woman-hating/the stuff you hope guys don't say in locker rooms but they do and it's so much worse than you think/casual postmodern misogyny/'hilarious' celeb-bashing and cannibalism of the very young female focused contemporary variety. Everyone in the list--whom I would guess all exist in the same 25-lb weight range--is too skinny or too fat, too horsey, whatever. Amy Winehouse's skin is "openly hemorrhaging," Britney has 23 lbs of "Funyun pudge," Madonna is "Willem Dafoe with hot flashes," Parker is a "Barbaro-faced broad"; "pull down your skirt, Secretariat."

Fuck them. What possible virtue can there be in eviscerating womens' looks like that? From a godly distance like that? There is a snideness, a meanness, a personalized exasperation to the tone of the piece--God, stop shoving these ugly women in our face--that is begging to be whipcracked into place. It takes my breath away.

In some ways, though, this list is no different than their very popular 100 Hottest list. Nobody wants to admit it, because it makes our ogling seem mean and excluding, but it is. This is how that list is built, these are the exclusions that "shouldn't" have slipped through into fame. You could even say that Hottest 100 list is not the 'cream of the cream' these days but the zero sum 100, period (this sounds kinda nuts, but it feels right). Good-looking women are all just variations of these famous people.

In another way? (this sounds bad) I understand the feel of that list. Especially because as a fat woman, I basically don't see anybody like some of the people I really think are beautiful out there in fame-land, and so yes: among the women they tackle are people whom I always have thrust in my face as beautiful whom I would not necessarily call so (although the point is that's true of all the people they talk about). Either way I understand better than most, as someone who doesn't qualify at all, what the rules are about how to fit the (very very narrow) beauty ideal. I could write a meaner list than Maxxxim. People wouldn't think so, they'd think I don't "get" it, but that is not the problem.

In some ways too this about earning fame and having fame these days without a studio system for protection, yet with much increased marketing and guessing at what the public wants. In some ways this is about how images are created through photography, not recorded. In yet another way this is sort of about the clash of women's fashion ideals vs. men's sexual ones. Women like Parker for being such a style icon, yet most women out there chafe under the insane fashion demands and trip in the high-heels from Sex in da City. And on the other hand, the most conventional babe is aging out of the boy shorts from Muxxim shoots as we speak... Ah, real women. Where do we fit in all this.

Which is why this is still really about how MaaxxiM are pigs! Yich.