Euro Rate: Beard as an adequacy test
Masha Vorslav
The final of the next Eurovision Song Contest took place on Saturday which is amazingly often discussed in social networks and in general everywhere - all because Conchita Wurst became the winner, or, as it is also called, "woman with a beard." It is not at all clear why a man disguised as a woman in a dress causes such a batthart to more or less progressive people (it is more difficult to identify the Facebook audience, and in this situation it is not necessary); that conditional neighbors can also be imagined about the “bearded woman”, although they don’t want to. Yes, people always have the need to switch from more serious and unsolvable problems to something far away and provocative, but it is impossible to simply write off all the ears that spill out onto one of the Eurovision participants.
Generally Conchita Wurst is the pseudonym of Austrian pop singer Thomas Neuwirth, who debuted as a singer three years ago at the talent show "Die große Chance". Neuwirth is anxious about both his images and alternately tries on one or the other. The performances of his Conchita can be interpreted differently. The first, and by no means unimportant, their component is the desire to create a vivid image, to shock, to provide PR, that's all; there is no sense to talk about the mechanisms of attracting attention to the artist, they have long been known and understood by everyone. The second is the idea of “beauty in the eye of the beholder”: the intransigence of society to everything non-standard, including appearance, has long been known, but in the case of the singer, she’s somehow shamelessly exposed. This may not be obvious, but the desire to dye your hair pink, fill your sleeves or change clothes into a woman without shaving off your beard, are in the same coordinate system and differ from each other except by the degree of originality and decisiveness - and in fact remain just one of the ways to comprehend yourself and the world around.
The consequences of Wurst's speech cannot be traced, but one thing is clear: she brought a drop of tolerance into public thought
The third and most essential aspect: whatever the goals of Wurst, she probably inspired other people to experiment and show how to relate to yourself; This topic will be developed by people all over the world for a long time (the internationalism of the competition is very helpful). Conchita Wurst is just one of the few artists who play with the theme of gender (it’s strange that everyone seemed to have forgotten about it), the consequences of her performance are impossible to track down, of course, but one thing is clear: she brought a drop of tolerance into public thought.
Here it is impossible not to recall the case of a "real" woman with a beard, Kharnaam Kaur. The girl suffers from the frequent polycystic ovary syndrome, which caused her beard to break through as a teenager. Adolescents do not differ tolerance and kindness, and you can only imagine how the girl was subjected to bullying. Fortunately, she found a way to take her body and, like, love (and save her beard) - and this causes infinite respect. Undoubtedly, Kaur is a more dramatic figure than Wurst, but in a sense, they both worked in favor of those who doubted their “normality” and showed them an example. The more people will act in this vein, the one wants to believe, the rest will rather understand that it is necessary to treat the emotional health of others carefully, and to waste energy on creating uncomfortable situations for non-standard looking people is at least useless.
Images: Buzzfeed