Mar 20
the bugaboo of mine that perhaps sounds most like an overreaction at first blush, or at least a time capsule from 2010s pop feminist blogging:
i find it absolutely maddening that 'beautiful daughter' is so wellâ-âestablished as a collocation that it makes its way into the speech even of passionate feminists. i think it's the insidious tip of a whole conceptual iceberg: unobserved because subconscious, and all the more dangerous for it.
#like. to elaborate a little: you do not hear people talking about their beautiful or even handsome sons. ever.#it's exclusively 'and these are my beautiful daughtersâ [name] and [name].'#in a way that's *extremely* Girl = Beauty. Beauty = Girl.#and i think the casual pervasive reinforcement of that connection really sucks.#and i also think like. ubi sunt all the like. i guess ~90s-era cautions?#abt how it's damaging to praise children for something they AREâ that they have no control over#rather than something they DOâ that they've worked at.#anyway i think it's really easy to reproduce collocations our culture has instilled in usâ maybe especially jocularlyâ#like perhaps the one context in which i can personally imagine using the phrase is that i might call nefret cat my beautiful daughter#because of how clearly she is Not (my daughterâ that is. obviously i do think she's supremely beautifulâ bc i see with the eyes of love).#and so the incongruity feelsâis!âpleasingly humorous.#and yet. that would still be propagating the phraseâŚ#anyway like. clearly there are significantly bigger more urgent problems out there.#but this particular little collocation always feels to me likeâ idk. a rhizome in the soil waiting to sprout.#language#genderblogging#theory
