GUEST POST - Michael Phelps’ Teeth and the Ugly Chinese Girl

Hi, it's Jen and I have the pleasure of being Shifi's first guest blogger.....

A few thoughts regarding the lip-synching cute girl/ugly girl story from the Olympics opening ceremony…..

Why is this a front-page story for apparently every North American news outlet? Seriously, why? Front page. Above the fold. Top of the webpage. On the front page of what I’ve been led to believe is the intelligent Canadian’s newspaper, the Globe and Mail. Why are even our “best” media outlets so tabloidy these days?

And it wasn’t just headlines. But big side-by-side pictures so you could easily compare the sublime adorableness of one girl to the shocking ugliness of the other. The other one being seven years old, by the way. And famous throughout the world now, at the age of seven, thanks to the professional media, for being not so cute.

Here’s a question my host blogger would ask, I’m sure…. if they weren’t Chinese and somehow “the other”, would the North American media have done this? If they were Canadian or American, would they be posting big comparison pictures on their front pages so you could decide for yourself just how unpleasant-looking this seven-year-old is? (Yeah, maybe I’m giving them to too much credit.)

So we make a big deal about this… (for one day, anyway - writing about it a day later, it already feels irrelevant.) So we potentially ruin someone’s life so we can shake our heads at the Chinese for five minutes. So we tisk-tisk and feel superior with our authenticity and our free speech. But is it really any different than the airbrushing and excessive tooth-whitening we see in half of the pictures in our magazines? Any Torontonians see the picture of Michael Phelps on the front page of the Metro newspaper yesterday (oops, I guess the little girls didn’t make the front of every newspaper)? Apparently in the process of cropping the picture to overlap the masthead, someone took the liberty of normalizing his orthodontically unique teeth. What’s the difference?