benyw:

studylightstudy:

benyw:

rad-and-i-dont-stop:

benyw:

despaclito:

alliluyevas:

alliluyevas:

National Geographic on Facebook: this is a facial reconstruction of a teenage girl who lived 9000 years ago based on her remains!

half the comments: men criticizing her looks and saying she’s unattractive and mannish

anyway this is the reconstruction and I always enjoy seeing the faces of prehistoric humans and how much we have in common over thousands of years despite how incredibly different our lives are. I support her and I think she looks wonderful.

everyone in the replies of this post saying “well I think she’s pretty!” missed the whole damn point lmao

I remember watching a documentary once where historians were trying to work out who a dead girl was and what her life was like. I’m pretty sure they dated the body back to the early Victorian era, and established pretty early on that she lived in poverty, died young, and was most certainly a prostitute.

The grand finale of the show was the reveal of her reconstructed face. Now, bare in mind that through their investigations they discovered that she had lived an awful life and died an agonizing death (syphilis iirc). So, you can imagine my disgust when the historians reacted with disappointment at the reveal of her ‘face’. This poor girl, who had suffered terribly, was obviously not the poor, tragic beauty they had been hoping for.

She was plain, maybe some would say she was ugly, but what was truly hideous was the fact that you could practically see the sympathy these historians had for this poor girl slip away as they looked at her ‘face’, and you could certainly hear it in their voices.

Even in death our value rests on the basis of our looks. Sympathy is conditional - based on where you fall on the looks scale.

It’s was probably their creepy sex fantasy of “saving” her and the raping her that was ruined.

I doubt it, as (and this made it even worse for me tbh) at least two of the historians were women, and they were just as disappointed as their male colleagues. 

Oh do you by any chance remember the name of the show? I remember watching something very very similar, and I’d like to watch that show again!

(I remember it different though, they were sad because she was normal in the “this could be anyone” kind of way? Maybe it was the Portuguese dub idk)

There was also an episode with the mummy of a young girl in some sort of cloak (?) In a cave that was really heartbreaking.

EDIT: Oh there was one where they did the skeleton of a youngish man who worked in the British Navy in the 1700’s I think, it was really informative. Learned about the existence of scurvy from that show. I remember they found out about the navy thing because he had a fracture on his toe from the recoil of a cannon.

It’s called ‘history cold case’ and you can find it on YouTube.

I actually went back and rewatched the ending of that episode to see if it really was as awful as I remember;

There’s three women and one man at the very end reacting to the facial reconstruction. The one who did the facial reconstruction (a woman) actually uses the word ‘disappointed’ when talking about her looks! Her two other female colleagues half-assedly try to convince themselves/the others/the camera that they think the reconstruction of the poor girl is “actually pretty” (as if her looks even matter???), but you can tell by their voices that they don’t even mean it, and are probably just trying to be kind in front of the camera. Then one of the women asks the male colleague for a man’s opinion, to which he basically says he thinks she’s ugly (paraphrasing here, but that was the gist of it).

It’s very dehumanizing, and imo trivialises the horrid nature of this girl’s very short and tragic life - reducing her whole life story down to whether or not she could have been considered ‘pretty’, which is even more fucking disrespectful when you take into account that she was disfigured due to contracting syphilis as a child!