Whatever happened to "Love Your Body"?

The idea was that there's a conspiracy between the beauty industry and the media to foist onto women a "beauty template" that's "extremely narrow, unrealistic and frequently hazardous to their health." Instead, as the title of one Pinterest site has it, "Beauty and Sexy Come in All Sizes and Shapes." A poster chlld for this movement among the unconventionally bodied is the "beautiful" Caitlyn Jenner, You can't get more "all sizes and shapes" in terms of female sex appeal than Jenner–a massive-thighed 65-year-old wearing an entire Macy's cosmetic department's worth of makeup.

But that was B.T.H.–Before Tim Hunt. Hunt is the Nobel Prize-winning–but now jobless–biologist who made the mistake of saying that he found the women he encountered in science labs sexy.  "I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen in love with me and it's very disruptive to the science because it's terribly important that in a lab people are on a level playing field," Hunt said.

So suddenly, instead of advertising how beautiful and desirable you are you are if, say, you've got a few extra pounds on your thighs, it's now the fashion to advertise how ugly and undesirable you are–supposedly to make the point that no one who worked alongside you could ever "fall in love" with you–because that's sexism. .

That's the message of #DistractinglySexy, the feminist-scientist revenge-hashtag, in which women in biology, chemistry, and physics post photos of themselves sporting hideous lab coats and eyewear, not to mention badly styled hair and bulging sectors of their anatomies.

What are these women trying to do–reinforce the stereotype that women scientists are too hideous-looking to be taken out on dates? Great way to inspire young girls to choose STEM careers, ladies!

Let's take a look at the most famous woman scientist of all time, Marie Curie. Here's what Wikipedia says about how the discoverer of radium and polonium met her husband, Pierre Curie:

"They were introduced by the Polish physicist, Professor Józef Kowalski-Wierusz, who had learned that Marie was looking for a larger laboratory space, something that Kowalski-Wierusz thought Pierre had access to.[8][20] Though Pierre did not have a large laboratory, he was able to find some space for Marie where she was able to begin work.[20] Their mutual passion for science brought them increasingly closer, and they began to develop feelings for one another."

Oops! Distractingly sexy!

And you never saw Marie Curie try to make herself look ugly.