No more whiskers

It’s been bothering me ever since I saw those silly Census 2010 pictures of myself. Every time I look in the mirror, I wonder is it there or is it not? That is my mustache.

I have always been self conscious about hair and facial hair in particular. My mother unluckily inherited the gene where occasionally she gets a few longer blond chin hairs. She has always been very careful to make sure they are gone at first notice. Once my sister told me she too had gotten a long chin hair. I inspect my chin frequently always ready with tweezers just in case that day of doom comes upon me.

The first time I became particularly tuned into my facial hair was in 7th grade. My friend and her mother already had a ritual of using a Nair like product on their mustache. I tried it with her the night we were to be going to a "boy/girl party". It was awful. My upper lip was red and swollen and I’m sure I had some chemical burn. That was the night I had my first kiss. It was also quite awful. Tonsil hockey…really? Someone should have warned me.

Now as I look at my mustache in the mirror my wedding day flashes before me. Will my pictures show a mustache? I wish us women could get a break on this whole hair thing because really I’m sure there is something I could be doing slightly more productive and brain creative than worrying about my facial hair...though I absolutely refuse to be running around with whiskers.

The hair must be annihilated.

Sparkles don't belong there

WTF vajazzle?! Ok, so I have heard a lot about this whole Jennifer Love Hewitt vajazzle thing lately; well just that it is something about adorning the vajayjay (not my word I hate it) area with some sparkly shit. Seriously? Some things are not meant to be sparkly. After once again seeing some hater vajazzling comments I decided to use my friend google to search vajazzle.

The first website is...

RATE MY VAJAZZLE

Naturally I clicked on it. Could it possibly actually contain vajayjays all vajazzled? And it does! With no “you must be an adult to enter warning”! The first picture was horrifying. Why on earth would a woman put sticky sparkly fake diamond dots on her vulva? Here I was all worried about the trendiness of pubic hair when really I should have been worried about finding the right vajazzle. Maybe I should just be worried that women are still clueless about their anatomy.

Message: The vagina (vajayjay) is not the vulva.

I feel bad for tween girls and hope that this gross misogynistic fad ends quickly and never reaches their already too vulnerable minds. I am officially a vajazzle hater.

Beautiful and...

I have a new celeb crush. After seeing Toni Collette in an interview and being extremely bored with all the TV series I rented the first season of United States of Tara. Finally entertained I breezed through each episode and at the end of the last episode I thought she was an actress goddess.

Recently, I was asked who my top five female hot celebs were and I really needed some time to think about it. There are tons of beautiful women are screen these days, but lately I have found my list evolving to accommodate women not in my age bracket, but older. Megan Fox is definitely hot and my age, but that is all she is. She, and a lot of twenty-something women are stuck in the “you’re beautiful..." and that's it box, which is a box exclusive to women.

Have you noticed that the women out of the twenties age bracket deal with the beauty box a lot less? And it is not because they are less beautiful (my top hot female celebs are all over the age of 30). I find that I often equate women older than myself with being beautiful and being interesting. I wonder if it is because women are somehow different once they reach their thirties or if there is something else going on that is quite unfair to women in their twenties? It can't be just me.

It might be time to start working on forcing a change in my thought pattern when I see a beautiful woman. Women are multi-dimensional and interesting, even in their twenties. It is time to start seeing and examining all of the other parts. That goes for myself as well; spend more time on examining and developing who I am and less time in any sort of box.

Driving thought tangents

While in my driving daze (Mike left the whole chicken in his car overnight and all day until I discovered that we had no chicken in our refrigerator) I was thinking about this new health care bill and what it says to women about women, which of course went off into another thought tangent as soon as I drove by the Saint Francis Xavier Church.

Last summer I would occasionally go for a run outside and would pass by this church. Whenever I would run by the church I would take those seconds and dedicate them to my spiritual growth. I am more of a spiritual person than a religious person thus running by the church was my church. Of course thinking about running brought me to another thought tangent.

I miss being able to run outside more frequently. When I first started running in middle school I lived on a dirt road. I loved the sound of my shoes hitting the rocky dirt and the way the trees would line the road. It made my own little private world. Now that I am in a city I do not like to run outside as much. I hate the traffic and the smell of exhaust. I hate waiting to cross the road and I hate that instead of my being able to go into a magical world of nature I am forced to take note of who is around me. Am I safe?

There have been enough tragedies that have happened to women in my life to make me weary. It does not help that a simple run just for me can easily turn into the unwanted objectification of my body as some idiot men yell at me from their car windows. It feels as if I cannot have even a little space in the world, which brings me back to my original thought.

The health care bill reinforces the idea that I as a woman cannot have a full right to my body. As a young woman in this current culture it is easy for me to sometimes feel like I cannot own my body and I cannot have space without it being infringed upon. Even so, I keep journeying along because I know I really do own my body and that I will be able to be present in space.

The guilty feminist

I was reading Bitch for my first time and found myself in familiar territory. Issues of colorism, technologizing women’s bodies, beauty products and accessories, honor killings and several others were written about. While I find myself attracted to the discussions around these issues I also find myself in a dilemma. With feminism I feel like I would have to give up some of the things I enjoy or find a way to make them p.c. if I wanted to exist in the feminist world without feeling hypocritical.

For example I love Jean Kilbourne’s work on the image of women in advertising. When I was a young college student it completely opened a different world to me where I could consciously examine the messages advertisements were trying to give me about being a woman. I feel I have more power and more control after Jean Kilbourne’s contribution to my understanding of womanhood. However, this new knowledge often brings on feelings of guilt. The guilt comes with my own desires to want “perfect” thighs, “healthy” hair, and the newest fashion items of the season.

This makes me feel like the bad feminist; the one who should know better than to fall into the traps of wondering about the trendiness of my pubic hair. I am on the quest to find balance because I know I need to live in a world where I can accentuate my own personal femaleness and demand for my equality without feeling guilty.  I want to be sexed up when I feel like being sexed up.  I do not want my intellect to be taken away or doubted because I have chosen to catwalk down my hallway with some stilettos.  I want to move freely between sweaty running, gardening crunchy, Martha Stewart, hot tamale, feminist, and so on.  Someday I will get their without my own judgment or guilt; emancipation will be achieved.




P.S. I am sorry I missed St. Patrick's Day.  I thought very hard about my booby trap and after a google search decided that I just did not have time for crazy rainbow and clover coloring to attract and capture my leprechaun.  I have accepted the consequences and know that my jar of pennies will just have to suffice for this year. 

A pause for gendercide

In my attempts to ease my embarrassment of buying the last book of the Twilight series and to actually turn my brain back on I decided to pick up the latest issue of The Economist. I was eager to read “The Worldwide War on Baby Girls”. Then I made the mistake of reading what people posted for comments on the website. Ugg. Often in such heated issues I find myself angry, baffled, and confused when reading what people think. Questions like “did we read the same article?” or “that is what you have to say?” and “who are these idiots?” often come to mind.

I found the article disturbing for almost a limitless number of reasons. It brings up so many different issues that I am not going to tackle. However, I have to pause and pause for a really long time to think about what all of this means. Ignoring all the comments that I read about the article I keep pondering on value. Often it seems there is a debate over how much women and girls are valued compared to boys as if the traits that make one valuable do not contain a certain value of their own. Is there a disparity between how much women think they are valued versus how much they value themselves? Or better yet how much do women value being a woman?

Ok I cannot ignore the comments I read any further. One commenter suggested The Economist ignored the developed world's war on boys. Huh. Yes, more program content is focused on girls and there is a newer trend of boys being left behind in school. But the article was about the huge trend of limiting/eliminating the population of girls. You cannot compare scholastic aptitude with gendercide, but of course separately the issue of boys falling behind is worth discussing.

I quite thoroughly enjoyed another commentator’s thoughtful description of women and their most powerful abilities- this definitely falls under the that and idiot question categories. Apparently women (especially beautiful women) can get anything they want by flashing a smile and lifting up their skirt to bare their legs. I’m not so sure about the anything part, but I do know it works quite well if I want sex. Question: Are these women trying to get anything from men or from women?

Being a woman seems quite tricky today. It depends on where you are, if you are even born, and who you are asking. It depends on the traits we assign the female gender and the underlying value each trait has. Honestly, and quite simply I feel sad for this loss of girls in the world and I feel this loss as a woman, an individual, and hopefully as part of a collective.