Why Do They Always Look Like That?

You already know the answer. The cowardice is in pretending you don't.

Maybe you've heard there's a new adaptation of Little House on the Prairie on Netflix, wherein Pa Ingalls has the most shampoo-commercial hair I've ever seen. Of course the books and the 1970s tv adaptation are beloved classics, so the series has been met with some skepticism.

But nothing could have prepared me for the review by Sarah Moss, a columnist for The Irish Times, who confessed unprovoked that she found it hard not to feel, on behalf of energetic plain girls everywhere, that there was "some justice" in pretty, good girl Mary going blind after measles.

... I beg your finest pardon?

This is a former professor of nineteenth-century literature, writing under her own byline in a national newspaper, confessing that she felt satisfaction in a (very real) child losing her sight because the child was attractive.

Obviously, I don't read the Irish Times so I saw this odious article thanks to Rachel Moiselle, a conservative commentator, who shared the article and highlighted the passage about Mary.

More interesting even than the post was one of the comments. Another user, going by Orion, posted a photo of Moss with the caption "Intrasexual competition is wild." And Moss looked exactly the way you'd expect a woman who resents another woman's beauty (or in this case, a girl) for being pretty to look. Everybody who saw it recognized it instantly, which is the whole problem.

Rachel was furious. She called the photo misogynistic bullying and asked Orion to take it down. As of this writing he has not, which I am glad of. Because his point is correct. Moss looks like the woman who is unkind to pretty girls and wishes harm upon them, and likely feels justified in those feelings. Why else would she so boldly put them in print?

And yet Rachel didn't even want to see that comment, let alone consider its merits. She instead held the seemingly respectable position that it was necessary to comment only on the contents of Moss's words, and that her outward appearance was entirely irrelevant. Only a spiteful misogynist would link Moss's appearance to her inner nastiness, apparently.

The problem is that Rachel (and many other good-hearted people) will often invoke this principle and reject the obvious truth that yes, actually, you often can judge a book by its cover. And you should.

Feigning Blindness

I'm hardly the first to observe that how people live shows up in how they look. Writers have been saying this for over a century, and they keep saying it because it keeps being true.

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