Are you not threatening me?!

"So join now, 'cause at the Derek Zoolander Center For People Who Are Really, Really, Ridiculously Good Looking And Want To Meet Other Really, Really, Ridiculously Good Looking People Too, we teach you that there isn't any more to life than just being really, really, really good looking. Right kids?"

I still do this, actually.

I think the problem is that a lot of these kids understand exposure and fame as a form of validation. If a camera crew is following you around at all times, the message is that whatever you're doing is necessarily more interesting than what anyone who doesn't have a camera crew following them around is doing. And so…

I was one of those pre-teen boys, except I was a pre-teen girl.

1. I believe this to be true. Maybe not for everyone, and maybe not other commenters on Jezebel, but the teenagers I work with watch a ton of this crap and I really do think they get the idea that certain behaviors are seen as acceptable/valid because none of these reality "stars" ever face real consequences for being…

"Permit" you? I had no idea I had authority to conduct Citizens' Word Arrest in the first place. I merely pointed out that if you're trying to make a valid claim about discrimination (a claim I'm not arguing with because I don't really think you're off the mark about it!), maybe it's better not to use discriminatory…

I don't really think it's unlikely myself. All the same, what's wrong with "asshole"?

Do you yourself have any subjective experiences that contradict or outweigh the validity of what topsy is saying?

Translation: I wanted you to come in and be transported back to the way I felt when I was the coolest girl on the planet.

Prom is an arbitrary Fancy High School Shin-Dig. Even with going divorce rates weddings are still bigger deals than proms. How many grandmas get on planes for your prom?

Same here. Some of these comments are making me feel like I'm in some kind of poor minority even though I think most prom stories are closer to this?

A celebration of your lifetime union to another adult & starting of a legally-recognized family unit =/= junior prom.

I wouldn't want to put the issue of conventional beauty and white privilege aside when discussing Kathleen Hanna either, but I still think it's odd to diminish what she says when she questions whether a message becomes more potent when its said by "skinny white women in bathing suits," if for no other reason than it…

Come to think of it though, I think I was wrong about the tampon thing. I'm suddenly remembering a detail in that book on riot grrrl about one of the girls from Bratmobile throwing her tampon into an audience and almost beaming Fugazi's Ian McKaye with it (WHOOPS!). Mea culpa on that.

Make-up and convetional prettiness aside, I don't think Kathleen Hanna conforms to the standard of what a woman "should be" at all. She was threatened by male members of her audiences all the time for being Kathleen Hanna in the days of Bikini Kill.

Riot Grrrl was actually the name for a very specific subculture in the early 1990s based around girls who wrote zines and formed bands on independent labels and toured punk rock clubs. I wouldn't say it was based on "shock" at all, most obviously because most riot grrrls utterly shunned mainstream media for fear of…

Isn't the fact that so many women can never attain that look the problem with the skinny thing though? Kathleen Hanna does not represent some unattainable image of beauty — she's pretty the way any of your friends are pretty. And she doesn't perform in bathing suits. And she certainly doesn't style herself with the…

Maybe I'm too big of a fangirl but I simply don't have it in me to defend any of these chicks against Kathleen Hanna's criticism. She's Kathleen Hanna. She can think and say whatever she wants about Lady Gaga or Katy Perry or thinking "TiK ToK" is good.

I've never considered Kathleen Hanna "skinny". Slim, sure, but she'd be called "fat" if she ever showed up at a Vogue photo shoot just like the rest of us would be.