Making fun of Susan Dell: a dialectic
So many atrocities emerge daily from the Trump administration that it takes something truly special to break through into the broader consciousness, but it happened this week. No, it wasn’t a new development in the Iran war, or a renewed effort to cleanse the nation of disfavored minorities. What’s got people buzzing right now is the odd-looking woman who was standing next to Trump in the Oval Office the other day to talk about something or other, Trump accounts or Trump bucks or whatever.
The woman was Susan Dell, wife of Texas computing magnate Michael Dell and possibly a philanthropist in her own right. Hell if I know anything about her. But she keeps showing up to events promoting Trump accounts and people keep being bewildered and upset by her obviously surgically altered appearance. That makes her an easy target for jokes — which, in my circles, leads to a lot of meta-conversation about who is appropriate to make fun of and what it’s appropriate to make fun of them for. It’s fertile soil for exhausting online arguments that never find a resolution.
The central tension is that a lot of rules we’d agree upon in isolation start to contradict one another pretty quickly, and Susan Dell manages to land at ground zero of most of those contradictions. To wit, this hypothetical debate.
A. Who is it appropriate to make fun of?
B. It is appropriate to make fun of someone with more power than you. Punching up is an act of defiance, while punching down is bullying.
A. Power is fluid. Someone may possess it in one context and lack it in another. For example, many of Trump’s lickspittles are powerless in his presence and that’s why they come off like gormless losers. Yet these are also some of the most powerful people in government and business. Are you saying we shouldn’t make fun of them?
B. We should definitely make fun of them — but for their lack of dignity and self-respect. We shouldn’t make fun of someone for their appearance.
A. No, not if it’s something they don’t have a choice about. Skin color, baldness, weight — a person may have some minimal level of control over some of these things but for the most part they’re immutable physical characteristics. It’s not fair to insult someone just for being who they are. But what if someone’s appearance is the result of conscious choices, such as excessive cosmetic surgery?
B. Are you sure these choices are conscious? We’re specifically talking about a woman who appears to have had procedures done in pursuit of traditional beauty standards in this culture. She’s been marinating in these expectations her whole life.
A. Beauty standards are the same for everyone in the culture but the vast majority of people don’t pursue this level of body modification, both because they realize the futility and because they lack the resources. Dell’s extreme appearance is only possible because she is fabulously wealthy and party of a sociocultural milieu that places so much value on aesthetics. That’s worth making fun of.
B. Women are subjected to far more scrutiny about their faces and bodies than men are, and are expected to meet those standards to a degree that men aren’t. Joking about their looks for any reason only reinforces stereotypes, and furthermore communicates to the women around you that any woman’s appearance is fair game. We should never make fun of that.
A. Must we act as though we don’t see what is plainly in front of our eyes? She looks inhuman. She looks like she just sprang out of a coffin to introduce a tale of spine-tingling terror. A lot of money and effort went into making her look this bad.
B. Touche, but would we ever talk about a man this way?
A. We certainly do make fun of the physical appearance of men. I watched the movie The Iron Claw and although Zac Efron’s performance was great, the bizarre, putty-like aspect of his face was distracting the whole time. Here is someone who clearly has also gone too far in his pursuit of an imagined aesthetic ideal.
B. I’ll grant you that people may take note of something like that. But was Efron relentlessly pilloried for it? Is it all people talk about in relation to him? Do people say that he looks like a clay figure brought to life to protect the Jewish people, or that the Mars face didn’t disappear, just relocated to Zac Efron’s skull? I’ll grant that it happens, but the scale is far greater when the target is a woman — a difference of kind and not degree.
A. Does anybody get made fun of for their appearance more than Donald Trump? His hair has been a punchline for decades. Same for his orange skin and tiny hands, his weird posture and his ever-increasing waistline.
B. I’m glad you brought up Trump’s weight. This is a good example of something that we shouldn’t make fun of, regardless of how many pounds of shit appear to have been stuffed into however small a bag. Lots of people are overweight. It’s not a crime or a character flaw. And when you insult Trump for being fat, he doesn’t hear you, but a lot of heavy people in your life do.
A. Trump’s weight qua weight is not the issue. The issue is his bottomless vanity. The issue is his insistence that he’s trim and athletic. The issue is that his annual physical always pegs him at a svelte 227 pounds when the eye test shows him to be at least 275. Nothing wrong with weighing 275 pounds. Lots wrong with being so insecure that you’re willing to lie so outrageously in service of something so inconsequential.
B. Well then, how come so many jokes about Trump’s weight seem like childish name-calling?
A. That’s because most people aren’t funny.
B. Trump is the most powerful person in the world. We could probably agree to err on the side of it being ok to make fun of him for any reason. But how powerful is Susan Dell, really? She’s rich, yes. She’s in the Oval Office talking about a government program. She’s not some smol beans farm girl who’s just gotten off the bus in the big city with a suitcase and a dream. But she’s not a government official. Not a corporate titan. People just like her show up for these kinds of events every day and nobody even notices. We’re only talking about her because of her physical characteristics.
A. We might disagree on how powerful your run-of-the-mill billionaire is in the United States of America. They’re running the show. Having that kind of bank account gives her a level of influence arguably greater than that of any elected official. Maybe we shouldn’t be insulting her appearance, but she doesn’t deserve to have her delicate feelings protected.
B. Have we resolved these contradictions yet?
A. Not even a little. Maybe it’s fair to say that we shouldn’t pretend not to see what we see, but also that this sort of thing turns into a pile-on pretty quickly. Not only do you hit the point of diminishing returns after just a few jokes, but you also risk turning the conversation from a legitimate point of criticism — rich people having an outsized influence on public life despite being nuts — into something else entirely (and, it must be said, equally valid).
There you have it. This seemed like a much better idea before I started writing it.