It’s sunny again, I’m not sure when that rain they were talking about is due, and I think I am finally coming down from my high anxiety.
It might take a little while longer, I got a big dose this time around.
I’ve been watching A Different World, the reboot now on Netflix, and I saw that people have much to say about Jasmine Guy having the audacity to age.
Not about her flawless portrayal of a character–who, if you’ve ever seen her speaking as herself has absolutely not one thing in common with her–or the thoughtful way she’s brought that character into another season of life with a nod to the seasons we’ve missed.
But her appearance.
Kadeem Hardison has changed in appearance as well, but we’re not hearing about that.
If you want to see Jasmine Guy in a role as far from Whitley as you can get, checkout Dead Like Me, but I digress.
Tired is too flimsy a word for what I am when it comes to the way women are devalued and broken into parts. The moment she appeared on screen I knew she was Whitley Gilbert, older, wiser, successful.
I think society, as a whole, is terrified of fully adult women. That is why we are not supposed to age; that is why we are treated as though it’s silly if we object to being called “girls” when our girlhoods are long faded into that all-enveloping past.
Keep us childlike, keep us small. Keep us from the totality of our power and potential at all costs, and change the conversation always, always, from what we’ve done and what we can do to how we look while doing it.
Ignore the costs, physical, mental, financial, of trying to keep up with the base requirements for women. I remember a speaker in college pointing out that women on average then spent 2 hours a day on appearance, and asked us to think about what else we could do in that time.
I haven’t been much of a makeup wearer since.
My curly hair now does what it wants to do, though I went through all that nonsense of straightening it to “look professional.”
Julianne Moore once said she was always hungry trying to maintain her size for Hollywood, but men can expand and expand, the terms used for them are cute like “fluffy” and “dad bod” and they still get work.
Here we are, it’s 2026, a show from decades ago has been successfully revived in a truly brilliant way and is all there is to say about it that one of the main characters is older than she was?
While we pretend we don’t see how her on-screen husband has aged?
Isn’t it enough of this?
Jasmine Guy is and has always been an extraordinarily beautiful woman. That’s not even up for debate.
But why should that be louder than her talent? She is not a porcelain vase on a shelf. She’s a fully realized human being who brought a tiny piece of the past back to life.
And that’s amazing.
Anyway, that’s it for me on this Tuesday, I hope you have a great day and check out A Different World. I’m only a few episodes in, I don’t want to watch it too quickly!
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