Plain? Really? I gotta tell you, I don’t see it. Unless the standard is
- the most gorgeous woman on earth
- all other women
I don’t see how Colleen McCullough qualifies as “plain.”
We already know I don’t consider it necessary to announce in news items about women that they are or are not “plain” in the first place, but even putting that aside for the moment ad arguendo, I still don’t see how Colleen McCullough qualifies as “plain.”
I.don’t.see.the.plain.
Seriously? Who looks at that and thinks “plain”?
She aged well, too. Check out the photo by Quentin Jones for the SMH in 2013. Take a quick look at the Google images search. The more pics I see, the less sense “plain” makes.
tigtog at Hoyden About Town shares a beauty –
THERE IS NOTHING PLAIN ABOUT THAT.
She had a glorious mind. What more needs to be said?
*Sigh* I saw this so-called tribute the other day. I’ve yet to hear of any male author, dead or alive, being judged on their appearance.
In one way, nothing at all. In another way, something, since it’s so grotesque that anyone thought she was “plain” in the first place. It would suck if she’d been ugly, but she wasn’t even ugly so what the hell man???
Maybe — at some point in her life — the obit author asked her to dinner and she politely declined. That kind of insult demanded punishment — but only after she had died. Not because he was afraid or petty or anything. Really, he was just being polite by waiting!
Seriously, makes as much sense as anything else to me. (Well, not really. Entrenched sexism displayed by a News Corp publication makes a lot more sense.)
Colleen McCullough was successful in science and literature, so naturally, she must have been as plain as a brick. The converse is also true of course. A few years ago some of the presenters of the UK archeology TV series “Time Team” were replaced under somewhat controversial circumstances.
One of the new presenters, Mary-Anne Ochota, was described as a ‘former model’ many times in the MSM and online, the fact that she also has a Masters degree in archaeology and anthropology from Cambridge was apparently, not very significant.
I did not realize she wrote historical novels–I have to check them out.
The plain came, I think, because she was fat (which was what followed “plain” in the copy of the obituary text I saw.
As a fat woman, I can say that no matter what, fat women cannot be deemed attractive, sexy, or anything else positive in today’s US media (I don’t know enough about other countries to say.
Subjective; but as noted, appearence is completely irrelevant in general and blatantly inappropriate in an obituary.
She’s attractive but she’s not a page 2 model and that is the Murdoch empire opinion on what an attractive woman looks like.