Smart and Pretty, Not Smart or Pretty

     After we discussed the notion of being girly in class the other day, and the idea of being smart or pretty came up in the Sarah Palin/Hillary Clinton subject, I couldn't help but get annoyed. I thought of what I've heard people say about both women. Sure, Sarah Palin is pretty, but there's nothing going on in her head. Or, Hillary Clinton is so hideous. She needs to stop wearing those fugly pantsuits. For both women, people focused on looks. This bothered me because, although both women are intelligent, people only care about their looks. Thus, the notion that women are not intelligent enough or suited for the public sphere is reinforced. It says that the only important thing about a woman is her looks.
     That being said, I would like to discuss what Susan Douglas wrote regarding Miss Congeniality and Legally Blonde. Yes, I love both movies. And yes, I know that they can be perceived as a hindrance to the feminist movement. However, I think the opposite. Both films slash down the notion that women can either be smart, and only smart, or pretty, and only pretty. In Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock's character is a highly intelligent, analytic, tough woman who is horribly unattractive at the beginning. She doesn't brush her hair, doesn't wear flattering clothing, etc. Then, she is given a makeover and is totally gorgeous. With her brains and her beauty, she is so much more powerful. In Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon's character seems to be the world's biggest ditz. She wears pink everything, makes sure her hair and makeup are perfect at all times, and carries a Chihuahua everywhere she goes. It is laughable to the other characters in the film that she would ever be able to go to Harvard Law School. But she does. And she succeeds. She, too, shows that having brains and beauty is possible.
     Douglas claimed that both movies gave feminism a bad face. She says that Enid Wexler, a student who is a lesbian, is the face of feminism. She says that because Enid is the subject of jokes and ridicule, that Legally Blonde is making fun of feminism. But I don't agree because I think that Enid is an example of what society thinks about women (that they can't be pretty if they're smart), and that Elle Woods is an example of the truth: that women can and are both smart and pretty.