I actually take offense to this. She generalizes all men into thinking this way. I don’t think this, and I know many guys don’t either. I know kim kardashian wears makeup. I do like a natural look (and surprise surprise! I know what that means!) and that’s just my own personal preference and I shouldn’t be ridiculed or stereotyped as a dumbass (who has know fucking clue) for it.
I believe this is what hurts feminism because it alienates the people perpetrating misogyny.
I actually thought about that before reblogging this - I realize that not knowing that Kim Kardashian is wearing makeup is kind of an extreme example of someone not understanding just how much effort goes into the “natural look.” And I understand how on a personal level, it would be annoying and possibly offensive to hear a bunch of generalizations about what men think/ things men don’t understand, etc., when your reaction is ‘uh, that’s not true. I definitely know/understand those things.’ I agree with you that one of the downfalls of feminism is that it alienates a lot of people before they’ll hear its points.
BUT I do think it’s understood that in a lot of cases like this, when a woman makes a comment about men, saying ‘men are like this,’ ‘men seem to think this,’ etc., that they’re talking about men as a societal group as opposed to each individual man. It’s not a perfect way to address issues, so I get why it’s probably frustrating to hear, but I think it’s more acceptable than saying that women need to clarify and add lots of disclaimers (“now I’m not talking about all men, I completely understand that not *all* men are like this, but…”) before addressing a frustration about their general experience with men. I definitely agree that “ugh, men are such assholes!” is not an effective communication technique and is an unfair generalization. But I think that in this case, it’s less about making a mocking/unfair generalization about the nature of men and more about expressing frustration about the fact that a lot of men honestly do not understand what standards of beauty they’re holding women to. (Which I think is more the fault of the media than of the individual men who don’t know that stuff, but that’s a different issue.) Yes, there are men who *do* know more about this stuff. Good job. That is encouraging. But it doesn’t invalidate a woman’s frustration at the fact that so many men don’t.
Oh, and I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with men actually liking the natural look, and I doubt anyone else does either. I think the issue is when some people (I’ll say people, in my experience it’s mostly men because they tend to have less experience applying makeup) try to talk about how they ‘wish girls wouldn’t wear so much makeup/be so fake, how they look so much better without makeup, just all natural,’ without actually understanding what they’re saying and what kind of judgments they’re making. I kind of interpreted this complaint as part of that larger issue which most girls have probably encountered at some point, so this resonated with them. I understand that, isolated from that larger issue of guys not actually understanding what kind of things they’re expecting from women, this gifset may look more like it’s mocking guys for being clueless about makeup or whatever, and that’s frustrating on the end of the less clueless guys. But I don’t think that’s the intention. Hope that clears things up a little =)
The thing with a “main character”, is that the reader see the story/world from that characters point of view - we can often read the characters thoughts and feelings more than other characters in the story. You can also use the perspective to increase this “effect”.
You can use the eye-level to display the world seen from the main character. Look at the two pictures above, the characters have the same size on both pictures - the only difference I’ve made is to switch eye-level. And by just doing this, we switch between the adult and the kids point of view - even though they both look at the same thing.
So, when you are doing a perspective, FIRST decide the eye-level and after that start placing out all those annoying guidelines.
