#I'm aesthetically attracted to Lizzy Bennet

[it-is-only-a-novel]

Aroaces that experience aesthetic attraction:

[ID: Image from the BBC "Pride and Prejudice" mini series. Mr. Darcy is speaking to Mr. Bingley and saying:

"She is tolerable, I suppose. But she is not handsome enough to tempt me."

Referring to Elizabeth Bennet.

They are off in the background, in the foreground, Elizabeth Bennet is sitting, and smiling to herself.

End]

[nellygwyn]

keira knightley acts as if she hasn't fully swallowed her mouthful of marbles and while i'm very gay and very into her in an aesthetic sense she isn't the be all and end all of acting/period dramas and i'm so pleased a blog i admire acknowledges this too

Here are my two thought processes about her (without sounding like a bitch):

1. A lot of my resentment towards her comes from being jealous of her. I admit, I personally never had my ~bisexual awakening~ because of her, I know other women did, but I was more interested in other celebrity women, I suppose, so she never really showed up on my radar. She was a fairly mediocre actress who was in a lot of films and genres I enjoyed but that was it. Unfortunately, everyone I’ve ever cared about romantically has been so vastly in love with her that it turned me from being just kind of eh about her to being irritated on sight. Like, my ex sent me a admiring text about her once, I guess because he was watching POTC that evening, and it filled me with so much all-consuming anger that I deleted the message and pretended it had never been sent to me. Not being funny but how can one be into women like her and then also, somehow, into women like me? Like, I don’t even look human in comparison to that. Do Not Compute. Idk, I guess it just makes me insecure and feel disgusting and I always find myself apt to hate women based on whether they’re more attractive to me. Just speaking candidly!

2. I feel like she’s miscast in a lot of period dramas and it has everything to do with the fact that she’s thin and pretty and she’s not the only woman to be used in this way but she’s the most prominent, especially if you like period dramas. Like The Duchess for example; Georgiana Cavendish was historically a curvaceous woman, not stunningly pretty in her face, but charming and sparkling enough to compensate for it and make herself magnetic. Her body was a great source of unhappiness for her, unfortunately, she would starve herself, make herself sick etc. but never meet with the desired effects, which I guess was to be tiny, even though 18th century beauty standards did not dictate this. Her obvious eating disorder and body dysmorphia was discussed at length in Foreman’s bio of her, which was the basis for the film, but we were still met with 21st Century Vogue Model Casting and I felt a little…insulted? Hayley Atwell, who was cast as Bess Foster in that film, was closer to the look. I can’t really speak for any other period dramas she’s been in (Jennifer Ehle will always be my Lizzie Bennet), mostly because the characters seem to be written for her specifically, rather than just a character that would still be that character if played by anyone else. It’s just another symptom of a film and television industry that claim they are making historical movies with rigorous attention to detail but seem to pick their cast on their own personal Hot or Not scale.

And if this sounds bitter, maybe it is a little bit, I’m only human, but I do think there is a lot to be said against casting women with the same Too Perfect 21st Century Look, in historical films. One of great things about history is that the past (at least pre Victorian era) tended to celebrate variety in female looks more than we do (obviously this is a nuanced topic but I feel it’s fine for me to simplify it this way) and casting crews have a real chance to make not only accurate looking period dramas but films that make a subtle statement about our own constricting beauty standards….but they won’t.