Rocks and Hard Places

Rarely has Pretty Lady felt so deeply conflicted.

She confesses that she has fallen passionately in love with a Prose Style. A Prose Style, plus Panache, plus inimitable Wit. So rare. So infinitely, sadly, desperately uncommon.

She is, however, broken-hearted. The author of said Prose Style, most regrettably, is a champion Whiner. At the least, a self-confessed, proud Blamer, which comes to the same thing.

Oh, but the Prose is Music:

You may imagine the difficulty one has, what with blue funk engulfing one’s tear ducts, in reading Stallings’ ardent, doxological views on the odiously misogynist Weight Watchers, which approbations she intersperses with such plug-and-play new-age nonsense as “losing this bit of weight has actually made me get back in touch with my body and its needs and given me a better sense of understanding myself.”

Yet I press on, past even the women’s mag-ish, pathos-evoking lament about having had to “sacrifice” a beloved pair of pants to her new figure (a pity that God hadn’t the decency to intervene on the unfortunate pants’ behalf, the way he did for Abraham and Isaac; a woman shouldn’t have to sacrifice innocent legwear to prove her love for either herself or, as the case may be, her patriarchy).

One cannot shake the sense that Stallings, in this earnest memoir of self-discovery through physical diminishment, has exerted every effort to convince the reader that in her quest for a reduced physique she was as careful as a redheaded stepchild tiptoeing past an alcoholic stepdad not to stir up the rumblings of the radfem bitchlords. For example, she distances herself from the patriarchy-infested Weight Watchers imams by “refusing” the dreaded weekly weigh-ins, not wanting to “fixate on a number.” But on the other hand she blames feminist dogma in the first place for having produced in her such a terror of ‘thinking about food” that she had become quite incapable of making rational decisions about how much daily bread to shovel in.

Those of you who know Pretty Lady well, know that she holds very few persons Beyond The Pale. She will not ostracize a person based upon their political alignments, religious beliefs or lack thereof, odiferousness, unfortunate personality traits, marital status, gender identity, or even blind raging hatred, so long as said blind raging hatred is not directed aggressively and privately toward herself.

But, sadly, the one sort of person Pretty Lady simply will not tolerate (beyond Malicious Lying Gossips, of course) is Whiners. Pretty Lady's position on Whiners is well-known, oft-stated, and impossible for her to repudiate. If Pretty Lady were to embrace Whining, she would not be Pretty Lady. QED.

Equally, she is certain that this self-identified Blamer shall not back down from her own, most wickedly articulated perspective. Indeed, Pretty Lady should think infinitely less of her if she did.

Pretty Lady, with hanging head, wearily points out to this gorgeously misguided creature the logical fallacies inherent in her position; she trots out the age-old Kathy Acker rebuttal, that defining oneself in opposition to an entity puts one, still, squarely within that system's frame of reference, and thus subsumed by it. She takes no joy in this pointing-out. She merely does so, in all intellectual honesty.

Pretty Lady and her love must, then, forever be parted. Begotten by Despair, upon Impossibility. Pretty Lady is off to drink herself into oblivion; she is even out of limes, and must make do with lemon in her tequila. Oh, cruel irony.