Every day, I swear, I find out something new that "the Left" wants "you" to think or say or do that is completely new to me . Largely because it is something made up by conservatives trying to get their outrage on. For example, yesterday, I found out that we want to take away "your" penis and also that we want "you" to be unattractive. For reasons. Nefarious ones, probably.
That second one was addressed by Ben Shapiro's little sister Abby in a YouTube video earlier this week. Abby Shapiro has been trying for some time now to follow in her brother's footsteps by becoming not just an "influencer" but a conservative influencer. She calls herself "Classically Abby" and exhorts young women to dress modestly and be conservative and embrace traditional gender roles. How is she doing at that? Most of her videos have under 20K views, so I'm gonna guess "not great."
The video is titled "Conservatives Want You To Look YOUR BEST. The Left DOESN'T. Here's why."
It should not shock you that at absolutely no point does Shapiro actually explain what our endgame here is supposed to be. Mostly she just goes on about how, actually, beauty standards are good and we should all do our best to live up to them — even though the left says they are bad .
There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to look your best and feel your best. No one would discourage that! What should be discouraged, however, is the pursuit of generally unattainable beauty standards and the misery caused by putting pressure on oneself to reach them, along with the conflation of those beauty standards with one's worth as a person. What should be discouraged is making people feel bad for not attaining those beauty standards. Because that is a shitty thing to do.
Shapiro opens up this talk with a story about her experience dressing only sort of modestly at her all girls high school — with skirts all the way up to the middle of her knees and shirts with short sleeves sometimes showing her collarbone! And she noticed that the boys she liked didn't like her as much as they liked her more modestly dressed friends, even though they actually weren't as religiously observant as she was in other ways.
CLASSICALLY ABBY: I remember going to a Jewish event and being confused as to why the men I was interested in didn't seem to be interested in me. They were more interested in my other friends who did, in fact, dress more modestly than I did.
Here's the interesting thing: These friends that dressed more modestly were actually less observant in other areas of their lives. Religious Judaism has laws for behavior that cover every part of life. I was keeping other laws more stringently, while they were not. But our clothing told a different story.
The conclusion she drew was that the boys she was interested in weren't interested in her because her whore elbows blinded them from seeing how observant she was. Of course, it may have been something else entirely, like maybe her friends were not assholes who made mean, judgy faces.
She then explains what this has to do with left-right politics, explaining that "good" conservatives are happy to accept standards and adhere to them ...
CLASSICALLY ABBY: But here's where being a conservative fits in with all of this. A core part of our worldview is that we accept reality for what it is and take responsibility for doing something about it. We understand that even though you may not like that you have to dress in a certain way to get a certain response, that doesn't change the facts. The way that you dress can and will affect the interactions that you have with people. And can, if you work with that reality, raise the chances of getting you what you want.
While "bad" liberals want to cruelly take away those standards and say it's bad to judge people for how they look.
CLASSICALLY ABBY: The left will decry that we judge people by the way that they look, dress and carry themselves, as if they can stop people from doing it with enough complaints. But ultimately, the importance of appearance is inevitable and a very important part of being human.
Having standards is normal, natural and useful. But as with anything, there can be bad standards. There can be standards that we can try and change. If, for example, extremely underweight women were considered the ideal figure, and young women were encouraged to engage in self-harming behaviors, that's a bad standard.
Oh, like the way things were until very, very recently? Because I barely know any women who haven't, for at least some part of their lives, had an eating disorder of some kind — and that includes women on the Left . The only reason that is starting to change is because, after years of torture and "oh if you don't have a thigh gap, which is actually dependent on the structure of your skeleton, men will projectile vomit all over you," and "Guess what? You have to do 'vajazzling now' and pay someone money to stick rhinestones on your hoo-ha," we said all said enough .
CLASSICALLY ABBY: But the Left conflates all standards with bad standards. To them the existence of standards at all is bad and we should get rid of them.
The idea that someone is more attractive when they put effort into their appearance rather than when they haven't tried at all is a good standard. It encourages people to take care of themselves, physically and mentally. It encourages people to respect others by bringing an elevated version of themselves to the table.
Way to conflate "don't be horrible to people because of the way they look" and the extremely old saying "don't judge a book by its cover" with "go around looking like a slob all of the time!"
CLASSICALLY ABBY: Despite the importance of standards that encourage the best of people, out of respect for themselves and for others, the left still rails against all standards.
Leftists love the narrative of accepting who we are, where we are at, and not improving. They believe that you don't need to change to fit societal pressures, because their entire narrative is that our current society is evil, and its standards are terrible, and that's why they have a right to tear it down and start again.
In their eyes, all societal pressures can do is oppress and harm people. The Left says this because it wants the moral authority and mandate to take control of everything and remake it all in its own image.
Yes, "don't feel horrible about yourself" really is a cartoon villain move.
The fact is, our standards have been terrible. They've been cruel and they've often been impossible to achieve without surgery.Classically Abbylikely would not have been able to perfectly achieve 1990s/2000s beauty standards without surgery.
Those standards also meant it was actually impossible for those who did not fit those standards perfectly to even be able to buy clothes that looked good on them. If you were overweight, you were relegated to hideous clothes that weren't on trend and were often covered in terrible prints. Hell, I worked at a store that barely sold anything over a size six . If you were tall, you couldn't find pants or jeans that were long enough. If you had large breasts that weren't fake and were otherwise small, you could not actually purchase a bra that fit and provided any support until about 2005/2006 — and even then they were extremely expensive and had to be imported from Europe. Ironically for Shapiro, our fight against oppressive beauty standards is the very reason everyone can now buy clothes that look good on them and that they feel good in.
It's pretty clear this isn't just about Abby Shapiro's apparent belief that everyone needs to be walking around wearing 45 layers of foundation at all times (I also watched her 10-minute make-up tutorial and this is barely an exaggeration), but rather some culture war shit.
CLASSICALLY ABBY: Just one small part of this philosophy is the attempt to say that standards for your appearance, just like standards for anything else, are created by society and oppressive. In reality, people are visual and will immediately judge you for your appearance, and that's not a bad thing! Judgment is natural and necessary!
And we should never, ever question it! Even if these standards are relatively arbitrary and change over time and are often misogynistic as hell.
It's not that conservatives "want" people to look good, it's that they want to be able to make people feel bad about how they look and not have other people think they are jerks for doing that.
Look how upset Candace Owens is over fat people existing. Saying things like "When I see a fat person modeling on Instagram and saying 'fat acceptance,' that makes me angry," and "Why can't you come out and say I don't believe that people should be fat?"
Why would anyone want to say that in the first place? That is a bizarre thing to want.
There is no need to ever make anyone feel bad about how they look. It's not necessary. The only purpose it serves is making the person who says it feel good about themselves, if that person is an asshole. I'm not even going to get into the fact that losing weight is incredibly difficult and not actually achievable for many people , because we are not assholes here so we already know that.
Shapiro's actual "beauty advice," by the time she gets to it, is beyond basic. It's pretty much just "whiten your teeth and dress modestly in clothes that are flattering to your figure." The whole monologue was just a way of trying to follow in her brother's footsteps by trying to make stupid people think "the left" is out to get them.
And that is even sadder than wearing 45 layers of foundation when you don't even have bad skin.
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Ben Shapiro's Sister DESTROYS Leftist Plan To Make America Unattractive
She's kinda weird looking on the outside. Creepy, imo.
Yvonne McGruder hit that. Of course she had a concussion and kept calling him Norman.