So I went to this show at The Mint last night and, well I starting getting very angry and depressed. Now that I think back over it, I was PMS-ing, so that probably had a lot to do with my emotional overreaction.

There were so many beautiful white women there that I began to feel, well…

Imperfect.

Welcome to LA where image towers over substance and I began thinking, it really doesn’t matter how much substance you have or what you have to offer, if your image isn’t perfect, you don’t have a chance. And my image will never be perfect because I’m not white. I guess I’ve been doing too much work in the area of race lately, race and beauty:

Race Ethnicity and Beyond

I became consumed by this last night, and began having overly emotional intelligent discussions, which often degrade into me hating society’s expectations and my inability to meet them. I began to bandy about the term “pretty white girl.’ I guess I’m writing this because I feel slightly guilty about it. I didn’t realize that “pretty white girl” could be a derogatory statement, especially when that’s what I wanted for the longest time.

Or maybe subconsciously I recognized that it was a derogatory statement, and I used it inappropriately in a bully fashion to hype myself up. Either way, it was wrong.

I realize now that “pretty white girls” recognize their position as such and what that means in our culture. Yeah, postmodern self-reflexivity! Funny how most of the things we desire most, are the things that other people are desperate to be free of. I think maybe I was just intimidated by them.

It’s a shame too because I started to have a potentially amazing conversation with a smart, sexy woman, who happened to be white. I think I opened with a confrontational statement, but that was the Jagermeister talking [smile]. Hopefully she’ll forgive me because I’m terribly interested in the experience of the Other.

NOTE: The Other is a psychoanalytical term which states that the Other is not the Self, which can exist with respect to all aspects of identity including gender, race, sexuality, etc.

Definition of the Other