Sunday, April 19, 2009

Beautiful people in Argentina


Do beautiful people have an advantage in Argentina? Gonzalo Artelora thinks so. The self-declared feosexual (feo is Spanish for ugly) believes that growing up ugly gave him a disadvantage. His solution is to tax the beautiful, of which Argentina seems to have many, and give the money to the uglies. He thinks that former president and current First Man Nestor Kirchner should be sympathetic. He is, after all, a hook-nose who cares nothing for fashion. Artelora calls him a "comrade."

Artelora's tongue-in-ugly-cheek campaign is more than just a joke.
It's not about making yourself look beautiful, he says, but about coming to terms with and being positive about who you are and what nature has given you.
I was really disappointed by this feel-good message. Easy for Gonzo to say. Ugly people, especially ugly women, are treated terribly, all over the world, and always have been. For Artelora it's all well and good; he was an awkward teen and emerged from it relatively unscathed (he looks pretty normal in his adult pictures) and with a quirky sense of humor to boot. Chicks dig that. But don't expect President Fernandez to start letting herself go at any point. To put it simply, there are higher expectations for women. And beauty is one of them.

Speaking of beautiful women in Argentina, Metric's Emily Haines traveled to Buenos Aires to clear her mind and write new songs. While the problems of the beautiful and talented might seem silly compared to the problems of, say, workers struggling to keep their jobs and assert their rights, I do like her song.

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