When the inside and outside match
Some years ago, Jack Black was cast in a comedy called “Shallow Hal”. The idea behind the movie was that Tim Robbins met him in an elevator and hypnotized him so that he would see someone’s inner beauty on the outside. He famously met Gwyneth Paltrow and saw who we normally see. In the movie, she was playing someone that was morbidly obese. One of the more interesting scenes had him viewing a woman that looked hideous to him, but to everyone else looked beautiful. They really didn’t explore that portion of the story that much. It seems that his altered perceptions went both ways.
The movie was a low budget comedy and wasn’t really meant to be a huge philosophical treatise on the world around us. It would seem that Kimberly Guilfoyle is beginning to look like that other woman in the film. There seems to come a time when what is on the inside and outside match. It is a fascinating thing for someone my age. She isn’t much older than me and I expect to see a number of women like her at my 30th high school reunion this summer.
If there’s ever a need for a warning about the long term effects of heavy drinking and drug use on a person’s face, this is it. pic.twitter.com/4Ll6Qq4noW
— Sgt Joker (@TheSGTJoker) June 2, 2023
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t enjoy this as much as it looks like I enjoy it. Schadenfreude is shameful as we noted in an earlier piece. There is the very real consideration that enjoying something like this too much makes you an ugly person on the inside. The whole point of the exercise is that the ugly on the inside eventually makes it to the outside. I typically enjoy these types of events because you get to catch up with people you liked in school but also get to take a look at the road not travelled. In my case, there were obvious road blocks on those roads so that a part of me enjoys seeing that life turned out better because I wasn’t allowed to travel down that road.
Guilfoyle has lived an interesting life. She was once married to Gavin Newsome, then became a very popular and appealing face on Fox News, and finally wound up with Donald Trump Jr. Obviously, that arc could be seen as pointed up or pointed down based on your perception of those events. I imagine most people here see that as a pointedly dissenting arc from the top shelf to something someone might kick into the dustpan of history.
So, I leave this with only a few jokes and comments. Someone wise once said a picture paints a 1000 words and far be it from to me add a ton of words to that picture. As people around here know far too well, I could write 1000 words about just about anything. So, I stop and leave this for everyone to enjoy.
Oh, Kimberley…
1Let your inner ugliness shine through.
2Best comment: “Was she under water?”
3She fits right in with all of the other Trump uglies. Has she discovered that her make-up and hair stylist hate her?
4Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, what you hide in the closet becomes the real YOU anyway, for all to see. I take solace in the fact that she is a very poorly aspected human being, unhappy and lonely in that mean looking box. Nothing I could do would make her any more miserable than she makes herself and my soul is clean of that sin.
5High school reunions are interesting. I’ve only gone to one, my 30th, in 1985. What I enjoyed was seeing classmates again who’d been kind of outsiders or not very popular or motivated but who had evolved into great people who were fun to talk to. I do remember, though, walking down the stairs to the reunion venue thinking “Who are all these gray-haired people??” lol
6Oops. Make that my 20th reunion in 1985. Math has never been my strong suit. Obviously.
7I wonder, if someone threw a bucket of water on her, would she melt?
8Hard to miss those Botox lips. Then not even slathering lipstick on will make them look normal.
9She should stay out of states that have declared war on drag. Although most of those ladies look better.
10Steve from Beaverton @ 9,
All of that lipstick would leave a red ring of shame after a blowjob.
11Eeek – I saw that pic while eating my lunch! Give people a warning!!!
12good thing this isn’t a progressive site, where this post and all the comments would be seen as appearance-shaming.
take the higher road, people.
13Joel. You’re right. Sorry. I feel bad for shaming someone who made part of her career shaming progressives as a mouthpiece for a shameful administration and that “news” network. What’s it called, right on the tip of my tongue? Starts with an f-word. Just got sued for billions for lies.
14I’m sorry Grandma, I’ll keep that in mind next time…
You have a good point Joel and that is why it took me a few days to throw it up. I honestly don’t enjoy it nearly as much as it might seem.
15I have no comment on what her face looks like.
16But she is aiding and abetting fascists. Not a good look.
The lips! My God! Did she get her face caught in a grate in a swimming pool? Yikes!!!
17joel @ 3
That was my second thought. My first was to wonder if that’s an authentic image.
18Though it’s obvious that KG does not have a portrait hidden in her attic (Like Dorian Gray did) which would reflect her inner self instead of making her public face ugly, I’m still with Joel@13. Appearance-shaming is low.
19BTW there are plenty of women on both sides of the aisle who look similar – masculine, cold, with poor make up choices paired with botox.
Also, I agree with Steve@14 about KG’s career, but. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Point taken Fraufree.
20I feel sufficiently bad for appearance shaming of Guilfoyle. I’ll try to be a better progressive woke Democrat. Now that I’ve apologized, this is what she does with those lips (there are plenty of examples out there and she used them lips to fundraise to help the Jan. 6 insurrection):
21https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/kimberly-guilfoyle-yelled-her-entire-speech-at-the-rnc.html
Steve@21 – yeah, that speech… I still get nightmares about it!
22What comes to woke… Well, you would probably be hard pressed to find a less woke Democrat than I am 🙂 For instance, do not even get me started on wannabe females in womens sports, phrases like ‘birthing people’ or those 10.000 pronouns we all have to remember, otherwise we are bigots. But I just felt like giving my 2 cents on publicly slamming someone’s appearance. It just feels so… I dunno… brutal? childish? (For the record – I completely agree, she IS ugly, inside and out.)
FrauFree, concerning exactly what “woke” means to Republicans is a bit fuzzy to me. I think it’s just a convenient term they can use about Democrats without actually saying out loud the type of racist, bigoted, intolerant, white nationalistic things that might come back to bite them in the press. Desantis is a master of it’s use along with MTG and Boebert. So I’ll happily call myself “woke” if it gets them all riled up.
23“If you don’t have anything nice to say, come and sit here by me.” – Dorothy Parker
24Steve, I despise DeSantis, MTG and Boebert as much as any other client of Salon, but oddly enough, in some instances, to me “woke” means the same as to them (see my examples above). Does it make me a “bad” Democrat? Maybe. But I simply can’t change my views, just to oppose or rile up Republicans.
25Hmm… should I run and take cover now? Not being 100% partisan? =)
Papa @ 24
Ah! Another example of one of my favorite topics: Migration of quotes. If it was supposed to have been part of the Roaring Twenties, then it will be universally attributed to Dorothy Parker (if by a woman) or Will Rogers (if by a man).
That was was Alice Roosevelt Longworth (probably).
Somday, I hope to publish a list of pairs by decade to whom all quotations migrate i popular culture.
26I think Steve has hit on something pretty important. It seems that a favorite tactic of the right is the use of pejorative terms they conveniently refuse to define. This has taken the form of woke, socialist, groomer, antifa, BLM, CRT, defund the police. It is a common tactic great writers use as well. If you think of shows like Cheers and Frasier there is always a character off camera who is never introduced visually. It allows you to insert your own mental image in place of anything concrete.
The same thing happens with these vague and undefined terms. I realize you were exaggerating but the reference to 10,000 pronouns is a perfect example. They are literally the same pronouns we use in everyday life. So, essentially what you are talking about is more a feeling than a reality. The feeling is that some within the LGTBQ+ are intolerant of people that get the pronouns “wrong” when first getting used to the idea of referring to them as something different than we used to refer them as.
I liken it to my name. My parents actually gave me a different first name than the one I have always gone by. So, people will often refer to me by the wrong name. They will call me by my first name and I usually won’t respond. It isn’t out of spite or anger, but I just don’t recognize that as who I am. I don’t identify with that name. So, if someone calls me that name it takes me awhile to realize they are actually talking to me.
This is not a new phenomenon. The accepted term for various ethnic groups and races has changed over the years. The question is whether we offer people the grace to get used to the changing of the times. I can still remember my grandmother using the “wrong” term when referring to African-Americans. The question is whether we believed that utterance also came with the negative feelings that people often had when using those terms.
I personally could really care less about woke, socialist, grooming, or any other vague term because I believe it is something people use to insult and subjugate others without doing it in a crude and impolite way. We know socialism is bad. We know woke is bad. We know grooming is really bad. We know antifa is bad. We know CRT is just awful. Except we really don’t know these things because no one has bothered to concretely define them in any meaningful way. So, therefore it becomes a useful label to combat a person or idea when I don’t have any cogent thoughts available to actually push back against that person or idea. This person is woke. That person is a groomer. The folks teaching CRT want to make our kids feel bad about being white. Antifa are terrorists. Socialism is a scurge and makes us like Venezuela. All of these things use a floating definition of those terms to fit the narrative we need in the moment.
27Nick, I’d love to see a member of the press ask Desantis exactly what he’s referring to when he says in his campaign speeches that if elected, he’s going to stamp out wokeness. Then when he dances around an answer, ask him to clarify. Maybe Chuck Todd’s replacement can do that if he’s on the new improved “Meet the Press”.
28Nick – exactly! Semantics.
But. For me it seems that both sides of the aisle are guilty, when it comes to undefined, pejorative terms. I mean even here in the Salon, words like “Republican” and “conservative ” are mostly used as insults, right? Although both trump and some decent, hard working Grandpa fit into those categories (well, we really can’t call trump a conservative, but you get the point).
Also, what bugs me about that LGTBQ+, pronouns etc topic, is: I get automatically labelled as a bigot when I say Lia Thomas should not compete with women. And I do not need time as you suggest – my opinion won’t change. She’s not a woman. Period. (Pun intended.) At the same time, I’m not a bigot. My best, dearest childhood pal is a trans woman (transitioned before the whole gender thing became a fad). Plus I have several “alphabet” friends. But I reserve my freedom to find it weird calling someone “them”, or some such things. They, at the same time, have their full freedom finding it weird calling me “Epp”, which is my real first name by the way. We all have our freedoms, but at the moment I feel like mine are getting taken away.
29It’s just the whole thing has been getting so insanely partisan, so unpleasantly black and white. If you want to qualify as a proper Democrat, you have to fully support Lia Thomas and “tuck friendly” swimwear. If you want to qualify as a proper Republican, you have to vilify her and not shop in Target no matter what.
For me, being a relatively fresh citizen of the U.S., it feels like suppressing my 1st Amendment rights. (I passed my civics test with flying colours, thank you for asking =)) I want to express my own personal opinions, without being pulled into some stupid partisan tug of war.
p.s. Sorry for going down the rabbit hole here, as well as OT =)
Fraufree @ 29
There’s a great confusion about intersex and transgenderism.
My view, based on a long life, is if a person presents as a woman, she’s she, and if she presents as a man, he’s he, and nobody presents as more than one person, so there are no theys.
Many people present ambiguously. Sometimes, you have to guess.
30I’m going to opine on this in more detail, but essentially we have a problem of proportion. We are talking about something that impacts less than one percent of the population and treating it as if it is real hot button issue.
I see two issues that we can separate out. First is the question about the difference between acceptance and agreement. I should accept everyone on a basic level because our humanity demands it. That basically means treating people with respect and dignity. Obviously, we can have a more long-winded discussion of what that looks like. Then there is agreement. I (or anyone else) don’t have a moral obligation to agree with anyone’s lifestyle choice. That could mean anything. I could rail against Southern Baptists and refuse to agree with their tenets of faith. It could also go for anyone on the alphabet spectrum. The key though is that while I may not be required to agree with someone being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender I have to treat them with dignity and respect.
The second point is that while these issues are very important to those going through them and their close family and friends, it makes little sense to legislate against something that effects so few people. As a general rule, we should consider their situations on a case by case basis. Should someone born a boy be allowed to participate in girls’ athletics? I would stipulate that we have a governing body (the UIL in Texas) already there to litigate such matters. Outlawing such out of hand constitutes the heavy handed use of power that conservatives are supposed to be against.
31Nick – first, I want you to know that you and I are on the same side. I’m a registered Democrat, with a history of literally fighting for democracy. I grew up in the former USSR, and took part in the independence movement of the Baltic States.
The reason why I wrote my first comment after your post was exactly the one you are pointing out @31: we need to treat people with respect and dignity. IMO, that includes not ridiculing people’s appearance. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t comment at all. Also, I went too far from your posts topic in my next comments. So I would like to throw the towel in the ring.
Just one more thing – you mentioned the ‘governing body’, when it comes to deciding whether a born boy/man should participate in girls/women’s sports. For me, it sounds similar to ‘governing bodies’ deciding should girls/women have abortions or not. In other words, leaving girls/women without a free choice. Again.
32But like I said, it’s completely another topic. Truce?
We are good. I never took issue with any of your points including the first one.
33