The Acid Attack Was a Hoax!

I won't say that I knew that twenty-eight-year-old Bethany Storro was lying all along about a black woman throwing acid in her face. I won't even say that I even questioned her story; in fact, I found it plausible given the acid attack on British woman Katie Piper. I theorized that a spurned lover had perhaps paid an accomplice to disfigure her. (Intentionally disfiguring someone's face is a common aspect of domestic violence, incidentally.)
So imagine my surprise when I watched the Today Show this morning and discovered that Ms. Storro had made the whole thing up. I am flabbergasted by the fact that Ms. Storro was so committed to her lie that she permanently disfigured her own face.

Then I got mad. Not because yet another white person had invented a phantom black attacker to cover up wrongdoing on their part. Charles Stuart, Susan Smith, and Ashley Todd all played the scary black guy card and were initially believed. The myth of the black bogeyman randomly striking out at white people is as American as apple pie.

I wasn't even angry at Storro for wasting the resources of the police department of Vancouver, Washington. That's their problem and if the taxpayers of this town are smart, they'll insist upon Ms. Storro making restitutions to them.

I'm upset over the way the blogosphere seized upon the black-women-are-jealous-of-white-women angle. The statement below is the work of Gucci Little Pig at http://glpiggy.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/acid-attacks-jealousy-and-race/:

Storro ...has yet to come to the realization that her attack wasn’t purely random and it certainly wasn’t a dare. This black woman – and that is important – wouldn’t have attacked a man if he was the first person she saw, and she probably wouldn’t have attacked an older woman – black or white. The attacker sought out a good-looking woman and one that she perceived to be the biggest existential threat, and only a white woman could meet all of those prerequisites. The black attacker wouldn’t have attacked Rihanna or Tyra Banks because they could at least be considered part of “the struggle”...

Unfortunately, GLP's anti-black woman rant wasn't the work of one idiot blogger with a small readership. Much of the internet commentary featured some variation of the same amateur (read: faulty) psychological profiling that GLP employed: White women are better-looking than black women and women (of all races) always envy better-looking women. Women act out aggressively when they feel envious. Therefore, black women are likely to strike out aggressively against white females.

Because the argument is based on three faulty premises, Gucci Little Pig's entire blog post collapses under the weight of non-sequiturs. In order for GLP's argument to be logically sound: (1) all white women would have to be better-looking than all black women, (2) all women would have to envy women who they perceive to be more beautiful than them and (3) all women who have to able to or at least inclined to attack women who they believe to be more aesthetically gifted than them.

The thing is, all white women aren't all better looking than all black women. Could Rosie O'Donnell win a beauty contest with Naomi Campbell? Not likely. And that's assuming that there is one universal and completely objective ranking system that would be able to place all women on a continuum between "absolutely gorgeous"  and "not so cute". As beauty standards are extremely subjective--that is, Eurocentric, ageist, and body fascist among other things--there will always be debate about who's hot and who's not. The fact that there even could be debate that would render a ranking system moot.

Second, every woman in the world knows at least one woman who is better looking than she is and no, we women don't always envy "the pretty ones." And guess what, feelings of envy don't always preclude friendship and admiration, or at least respectful cooperation between the "pretty one" and the "ugly one". If there was any truth to the second premise, no "pretty girl" would ever have friends or even be tolerated.

Third, most women are mature enough to understand that it is not okay to maim someone out of simple jealousy and that's the thought process involved when women actually do feel jealous. And, even if a woman could justify attacking another woman, doesn't mean she actually can carry out an attack.

Not only is GLP's argument a thinly veiled justification for white supremacist attitudes, it is also inherently misogynistic. Would we believe a story about a schlubby homeless guy throwing acid on a man who looks like Brad Pitt or George Clooney out of looks envy? Most likely not. It's understood that men don't do things like that--at least not to other men.

Anyway, now that Storro has been revealed to be a liar, I hope that all the other writers in the blogosphere will at least rethink their opinions on the issue.