The only topic
This is a comment to a New York Times video by and about a woman with body dysmorphic disorder. The video, by Shaina Feinberg, is about how she, the daughter of a Jewish father and a gentile mother who fancies herself having resembled Grace Kelly in her youth (a condition one might be tempted to classify as shiksappeal dysmorphic disorder; she looks to have at one point been young and blonde, whereas she is now ye olde and blonde, and it is there that the connection ends), has always found her face terrible on account of resembling her dad. She also shares the story of a young French woman in New York whose Algerian father passed along a non-Grace-Kelly-like nose, which this rather stunning, tattooed Frenchwoman finds troubling, on account of Europe (like America, like everywhere) being kinda racist.
It’s an upsetting video, in part because you’d think that it’s 2023 and people no longer think like this. But it’s 2023 and people still do think like this. The key to why comes at the end of the video, where Feinberg’s mother takes out a school photo of her daughter, chuckling at its awfulness (it’s a normal photo of a child), and saying that she didn’t remember her as having been so “chubby.” And then let’s just say the pieces all fall into place.
There is, it would seem, a lot to unpack. Instead of using the comments section to do just that, the above-screenshotted commenter decided to complain that body dysmorphia is Actually a trans issue (and uh, not a racial or ethnic one; guess that concern had its fifteen minutes) and therefore… I’m not even clear on what’s being demanded here.
Is the problem that Feinberg didn’t profile any trans women, this in a video where she profiles exactly one person other than herself? Or! Is it that the video is by a cis woman, whereas what the Times really should have done is somehow unearthed a trans woman filmmaker who happened to have come up with this exact concept?
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