That's Soooo LA

This is a guest post by Mackenzie Busch, who blogs regularly at Fetus Frolic. 

Awhile back this video was released:

...entitled, “Women of LA” and it is chock-full of every -ism and phobia you can fit into five minutes. A little fat-shaming, gold digging references, racism, homophobia, and gross generalizations of women based solely on their geographic location. They even have a clever line about being unable to get a woman drunk enough to sleep with them, but in the their defense you can’t have misogyny without a little rape culture thrown in, right?  Toss in a few B-List celebrities and you’ve garnered 1 million + views of your unsubstantiated male opinions. 

Being a woman of LA I can say the picture they are painting is in no way representative of the women that live here and is an irritatingly popular image of Los Angeles.  Not to mention that most women that are entertainers are stringently policed on how to look and act in order for them to succeed; and when they exhibit these qualities they are also shamed.  Be classy, but still have sex with us, but if you have sex with us you’re not classy anymore. 

As a side note not everyone who lives in LA is a part of the industry or is stereotypically attractive, need I remind you that there are almost 10 million people living in Los Angeles County.  Over half of the population is Hispanic, and not that anyone should be represented in this video, but they’re just not “LA” enough to be included.   We are women of varying shapes, sizes, ethnicities, religions, economic backgrounds, sexualities, oh and some of us do have sex. But if you’re a man who produces garbage like this video, there might be a reason women aren’t lining up to be graced with your almighty penis. 

The most troubling aspect of this is that I have heard an inordinate amount of women validate the statements that are made in this video, while exempting themselves from the description.  A female co-worker emailed this video to me with the caption “so true”.  No, it’s not true, not of you and not of me.  This video is laced with nice guy syndrome and it is calling us a slut by not calling us a slut.  “There must be something wrong with the women here if we’re not getting laid.”  Yes of course, I am a thin-obsessed, coked out star-fucker and the reason I can’t come home with you, even though you clearly have my best interests at heart, is because I desperately need to screw Justin Timberlake.  Maybe, just maybe, I don’t want to sleep with you because I don’t want to sleep with you.  Maybe, just maybe, I don’t need your attention to feel good about myself.  Maybe, just maybe, I have other things to do that don’t involve validating your masculinity.  Maybe, just maybe, I don’t have to sleep with anyone just because it’s available to me.

It’s not lost on me that LA can be an extremely aesthetic-centric city, but women cannot possibly be everything the patriarchy wants us to be or says we are.  If that was the case we would be constantly contradicting ourselves.  If any women in any way mirror this description it’s because somewhere along the line they were conditioned to believe this was a path to success.  These women did not create this image, it was created for them to perpetuate for future generations.  This image keeps women in a state of submission and reliance to men, but yet when it ends up hurting men it becomes the woman’s fault, makes sense. 

Regardless, it’s absurd to believe that the entirety of LA is some modernized Stepford.  My response to the “Women of LA” video is this:  I’m just going to go ahead and do me without an explanation for you and you can go home and masturbate. Everybody wins.

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