In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Life

Wear It, Bitch: Musings on Beauty Culture and the Femme Feminist

Several years ago, Anne leveled an accusation at me that straight pissed me off. She said I was vain.

Me? Vain? Pshaw. I mean, I was only spending an hour on my daily beauty routine and maybe two hours for a really big night. Perhaps twenty or so hours a week on the stair machine and the weight benches at the YWCA. Vain? For real. There was an art to this package.

But the more I thought about it and shucked the initial repulsion of identifying myself with a culture I despised, the more I realized she was correct. I was spending an unbelievable amount of my time maintaining an image I didn’t value. I took it as a challenge, stopped blow-drying my hair, cut the makeup down to three products, and cut the shower routine down to soap, shampoo, conditioner, and a razor (and most of the time, not even the razor). I also cut back on the time at the gym, partially because the YWCA doubled their rates and I could no longer afford it. I substituted an at-home yoga and pilates routine which soon faded for more lifestyle-exercise activities.

To my genuine surprise, I didn’t look much different.

In fact, I looked healthier and more well-rested.

I never gave up the skirts and heels that I took up during a self-imposed pant boycott, partially because I like them and partially because nearly no one my age wears anything remotely similar except to job interviews. But I’ll tell you this, a skirt is far more comfortable than pants on most days.

I’m late to this article, a response to the lawsuit in which the court found that women can be fired for not wearing enough of, or the right, makeup:

Never again is anyone allowed to give me crap about how women naturally want to adorn themselves with makeup, as if there’s some genetic urge to look fake that’s wended its way here on the sparkly pink path of evolution. This ain’t biology. This is your government, endorsing your corporate lackey’s creepy-ass urge to make me turn my happy, natural face into a twisted parody of comeliness. This is some cosmetics executive getting rich on state-enforced gender norms.

This quote resonated with me as well.

Let’s not get into the question of whether it’s degrading or sexist for women to wear makeup. Sure, it might be for some women – but there are plenty of politically aware girls out there who like to get dolled up. The question here is whether women who are forced to wear makeup when men aren’t can be described as experiencing gender equality. The 9th Circuit’s opinion acknowledged that makeup costs money and takes time, then dismissed this point as “academic.” But if these costs are so insignificant, why not require Harrah’s to pay to keep its female employees looking as if they’d just had a makeover? Maybe the company could even pay these women for the time it takes to keep their faces properly clad.

My defiant nature dictates that anyone who requires me to adhere to a gender-based standard will quickly find me behaving in just the opposite fashion. The pedestal of femininity is not only a high place from which to fall, but I will whip that thing out from under me and hit you with it faster than you can blink. Nothing (nothing!) irritates me more than someone informing me how I or someone like me ought to appear or behave.

The operative term here is “ought.”

The lovely Bitch Ph.D. touches on these points in a completely unrelated post:

Now, by doing all this shit, I recognize that I am being shaped by (and myself contributing to) a system that judges women by how they look, that burdens us temporally and economically with adhereing to a fairly narrow standard…

At the same time, I do speak out about the falsehoods inherent in these systems. Should I walk the walk as well as talk the talk and refuse to play the game at all? Should I refuse to wear stylish clothing, refuse to spend $50 on a haircut, refuse to consider my appearance, eschew vanity? Doing so would, on one level, be consistent with my beliefs. But not entirely, because frankly, I enjoy this shit. I enjoy it when my colleagues whisper, “fantastic purse!” or “we were talking earlier about how great your shoes are!” after a meeting. I take pleasure in compliments, and I like it when people find me attractive. I’m not interested in a revolution where I can’t dance, and I think there is not a goddamn thing wrong with enjoying pleasure and flirting. I also, of course, reserve the right to schlep around and look like crap on a given day, and I’m not going to play the game of running other women down, and frankly I go through periods where I am more or less femmey (right now I’m in a femmey phase), and I’m cool with that too.

Because frankly, even while I can criticize the system, even while I can bitch about the beauty standard and point out the constructedness of gender and all of that, I am also well aware that I do live in that system. We all care about what we look like, even if the look we choose to project is “I don’t care about what I look like” or “fuck your fascist beauty standards” or “combat boots kick ass.” I can pull those looks off, too, and sometimes I do. But it is a fact that, if I stand up and identify myself as a feminist, the fact that I am femmey, the fact that I am married and have a kid, the fact that I have a Ph.D., gives my words a certain kind of weight.

In my unbiased opinion, the words of a femme feminist help, in some unenlightened circles, to defy the stereotypical feminist image. This notion in itself is inherently irritating — while my words are rarely different than, and rarely more poignant than, most feminists, the messenger sometimes makes the difference.

One of my goals here on the blog has been to mix the personal and political to an indefinable mush. We cannot easily divorce our politics from our personal experiences thus this has been my experiment in the opposite. I have found readers who have reluctantly begun to stick around and like what I have to say about feminism because something about the rest of my online persona appealed to them, just as I have had people in my tangible life who have approached me for my looks or femmey personality and been turned onto feminism by virtue of my physical persona.

While this wasn’t a conscious effort on my part, I have noticed over time that for some people, especially young women, the acceptance of the belief system and the feminist label are far more acceptable from someone who appears in every other way to be like them (and for young men, from someone physically unthreatening). Sometimes I want to hold them down and wash them of this silliness, but I usually tell carefully crafted stories about my coming out as a feminist at the same time I came out as an unabashed femme.

This may get me some criticism, but I’m not sure I care. As the doctor paraphrased: “I’m not interested in a revolution where I can’t dance.”

Today’s Observations

Because I feel like bitching about my illness:

1. If I see Donald Trump one more time today I will throw something through my television.

2. The chili was excellent, thanks for asking. However, it is probably a good thing I am sleeping alone tonight.

3. I must shave my cat — there is no other solution to The Hair Problem. (and by that, I mean Pablo. Don’t read into this)

4. Finished three books today: A People’s History of the United States, Stolen Harvest, and Nickel and Dimed.

5. No, there will not be a book report. They have been sitting around half-read for well over a month and it was my duty as their owner to read them.

6. My bathtub is absolutely filthy, but taking a bath in it is very close to cleaning it, so that will have to do.

7. Why must I always have a horrendous break out when I get ill? Really.

8. Stephen King’s made-for-TV movies are really bad, but I will watch them anyway.

9. “Anways” is not a word. Neither is “irregardless.” Let’s strike them from the lexicon.

10. No, I do not want the “watch this blonde hottie strip for the camera now!” or “enlarge my penis in ten days!” so please stop soliciting me.

11. I really don’t like those Lysol wipes thingies, but Ethan was so excited that they were on sale at the grocery store that I bought some and he cleaned two whole bathrooms today on his own. And liked it! His next lesson in home maintenance: shoveling the driveway.

Now, back to the dishes and the floors and the hearty expulsion of phlegm.

Snow Day

We are under warning of a Winter Storm, but the snow is so peacefully falling that “storm” is wholly the wrong word for this bit of natural serenity.


I would enjoy this view from my back window if I weren’t feeling so under the weather. Some time last night I began to feel that nasty feeling in the back of my throat, the kind where you realize you’ve been draining something nasty on a direct route from the sinuses to the stomach all day long. This shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’ve felt run down all week — achy, tired, like my mind and body are moving through molasses. To comfort myself, I threw together a chili recipe in a crockpot that hasn’t seen the light of day since before I was born. Scary.

I’m almost done with the first of four panels for the Klaralund sweater. Two rows and a bind-off row to go.


I wasn’t keen on the colors after knitting them up, but it usually takes me a full skein to warm to the color repeats. Once I began the second skein, a love affair with Silk Garden had begun. This is exciting – it’s my first wearable object that isn’t an accessory. Conversely, it is also dangerous. After seeing this poetic take on the Clapotis, I could be in for some serious debt. The colors! The drape! Lovely!

I’m also finishing up with massive felted Skully bag this weekend, I hope. I hate sewing and two very large pockets must be sewn onto the front after the bag dries. Pictures to follow.

The rest of the day will be spent watching horrible TV movies on the couch, knitting and coughing, and attempting not to move in any direction further than my arms’ length. And being short, that’s not very far.

Where There Is Nothing Else to Say, Talk Weather and Knitting

Today’s weather was so warm I took a run in a t-shirt and pants. Something is amiss when your January weather, in the span of five days, goes from ice storm to snowman weather to 50 degrees, and then is predicted to be in the negatives by the weekend.

Tonight, thunderstorms rumble over us the way they do in the summertime, the kind wherein I check on Ethan’s sleep after every burst of lightning and thunder. And not being a scientist, I blame it on the Earth’s shifting plates.

I expect to have the Skully bag (of my own haphazard design) felted and blocked by tomorrow, and completely finished by the weekend. I have also started a shadow scarf (alternating two balls of long-repeat yarn by two rows, carrying up the side) with some leftover Kureyon, and bought a heinous amount of Silk Garden #88 to make Klaralund, my first sweater.

In the meantime I have decided that 7:30 am classes do indeed suck unless I nap. But I’m not a good napper. It’s only one semester, right?

Ugh

My classes start tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning. When I am president no work or school will begin until at least 9 o’clock in the morning. Anything else is just straight stupid.

I got (count ’em: 1, 2, 3, 4) four hours of sleep last night, I’m on my second cup of tea, and it looks like an unintended nap is inevitable. I sill have to get E in the tub and to bed, finish up some laundry, and tackle the obscene pile of dishes in the kitchen. Perhaps I’ll move them to the bathtub. I really wanted to finish up my knitted Skully book bag tonight, but that is now out of the question.

It hurts.

Guardian: Debbie Stoller Interview

Debbie Stoller is interviewed by Zoe Williams for the Guardian on the knitting wave, feminism, men, and more:

In person, she elaborates: “Women’s work is never done, and it’s drudgery, and it’s tedious, and you always have to do it again the next day. But you know, here at Bust a lot of the work we do is drudgery. It’s all work. Taking care of the home, or putting out a magazine, or picking up the garbage, it’s all work. Even this job, which is my dream job, is not always so satisfying. This is the thing that I feel 1970s feminists got really fucked-up in. That was the aim of any life – you can become president, you can become anything you want to be, and any fulfilment you’re going to get, as a woman, will be to do with the job that you have.”

And she’s right – I think this might be the core battle in modern feminism. The status of paid employment as an elevated pursuit that would provide self-expression and self-respect, regardless of its nature, held total sway at a time when women were fighting to get into the workplace. Now that we’re in, that ideal – of perfect fulfilment through work – very rarely obtains. Surveys in this country and in America show women often saying that they’d rather be at home with their kids after all. Data points like that are used more and more often by the Daily Mail, by far-right pundits like Ann Coulter, by rightwing, mainly American, academics, as evidence that the feminist revolution was a terrible mistake. Conclusions that would have been heresy in the 80s – women were betrayed by the quest for equality, work just makes them unhappy, they would have been better off at home – are trotted out with alarming shamelessness now. There are far too few people like Stoller, pointing out the obvious – some women find work a grind because that’s exactly what it is. Men find it a grind as well.

The secret to gender parity doesn’t lie in shunting women from one arena of toil to another, then back again; it lies in everybody being able to range freely between one probably partly boring pursuit and another, according to his or her ambition, without certain activities being irrationally denigrated for their traditionally female associations. This point needs to be made, trenchantly and repeatedly, and knitting is as good a way in as any.

This excellent read via Dr. B.

Snow

We rolled snow around the yard in near silence, asses in the air, rolling, rolling like arctic dung beetles and occasionally stopping for a mini-snowball fight. Include one pause to glare at a man trying to park in front of my driveway to save himself some time walking to the basketball game. Later, include a healthy dose of hot chocolate and what-will-we-have-for-dinner fantasies.

Meet Mister Snowman, as christened by Ethan. What you can’t tell from this picture is that this six-feet tall Mister Snowman took up nearly all the snow in my double lot, and even some scraped off the top of my hedges. Frugal and psychotic, we are.

A Long Rambling Post On Snobbery and Slumming

I was struck by this post by Amanda, reflecting on Roxanne’s New Year’s resolution, snobbery, and intelligence:

I had a conversation a few months ago with a friend who drunkenly told me that I am sort of amusing because I apparently make like I’m some punk rock chick but deep down inside I’m really bright and educated and I just told him that I didn’t really think the two were opposites or anything. He was mildly humbled and corrected himself, but I knew what he meant.

I told him I disapprove of the division between high and low art. But obviously, the distinction still stings or I wouldn’t have a post like this. But I did quote the Ramones to make my point, and it was pretty funny. So it’s very confusing.

I’m stung by snobbiness. By no means do I think Rox is a snob, because true rejection of snobbiness would mean embracing high and low art without double-checking it or anything. I am acutely aware that many aspiring and educated people I know have sneered at me for having my rock music habits. And many of my good friends who didn’t study what I did in college or didn’t go at all sometimes worry that I think I’m better or something lame like that. The worst is people who come from the snotty, educated background but like to hang out with a sort of wide-eyed wonder at how cool they are being by being near the rock and roll, what they perceive as thuggish types that are many of my friends. Or, to put it more succiently, they’re slumming.

I’ve always viewed my open snobbery as a fun digression into playful competition. Almost a year ago I wrote on this very subject:

…things I am snobbish about include celebrity worship and fansites (trash), materialism (stupid), misplaced wealth (I might be jealous), video games (waste of time, unless it’s a game I like and play myself), music (the more obscure the better), fashion (“classic” looks only, please), and snobbishness.

Even as I look down on snobbery, which suspiciously seems like snobbery, I know that I am a snob. I don’t know of any of us that aren’t.

The commenters on this post were asked to list their snobbish habits and which forms of snobbery are unacceptable — a very interesting thread. But over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about elitism of another sort, the same sort that Amanda references.

Earlier today I went on my biyearly trip to the hair salon. I was musing on a potential writing project aimed at young single parents, born from my ruminations on the weird ways I save money and the weirder ways I spend it. My hairdresser and I were talking about antiques, high school, Nikki Sixx, and dating.

“You and I are alike,” she said. “Kind of weird, unwilling to accept the standard.” She was referring to men.

Agreed. I’ve never been one attracted to the guys in crew cuts and polo shirts, or those whose interests don’t go beyond football, Victoria’s Secret catalogs and Smallville. And in my experience, in this town, that leaves me with a select few, a population who must be combed of those whose hobbies include a never-ending ingestion of illegal drugs and those who engage in LARP. One of my sisters suggested that what I need is a nice graduate student, but even these are a chaparral of football-loving, Victoria’s Secret-gazing, Smallville-watching, pot-smoking, live action role playing kind of crew. Or for that matter, unforgivably snobbish. In the bad way.

Finding women my age with whom I’d like to spend time is just as frustrating. I find myself navigating a sea of competition and infighting for male attention not worth having, the arrangement of an unspoken pecking order, or for some reason, younger women all too eager to pander to my feminism and just as willing to degrade themselves for the attention of football-loving, Victoria’s Secret-gazing, Smallville-watching, pot-smoking, live action role playing men. This is why I was pleased when my hairdresser gave me her phone number and encouraged me to come out with her sometime. And why I was also pleased when another two women I have long admired invited me out to play over the holidays. I’m shy enough to have trouble approaching people for anything more than a pen or a stick of gum. I don’t make new friends very well and I hold on tight to the ones I have.

This is something my mother, and the many people I know who believe as she does, has never understood, how I could be a reasonably successful, intelligent, (on my way to) well-educated person and surround myself with people Mom might describe as “tacky.” Where she sees someone’s lack of formal education or perhaps a few past digressions, I see whole people. When I have pointed out to her that if someone judged me on my past, my language, or my easily shifting demeanor, I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere, she dismisses that as somehow different. When she laments their tattoos, I remind her that I have tattoos. Weird hair? I have weird hair. Spurious circumstances? I have spurious circumstances in some circles. And when she suggests that I am somehow a wide-eyed voyeur in a “thuggish” world, I want to take her hand and show her that the lives of blue-collar workers, gays and lesbians, people of other colors and cultures, aren’t that much different from ours except in the most meaningless ways. But usually I remind her that in many realities, my reality is less than desirable.

Sometimes I wish Mom had met Tammy. Hell, I wish everyone could meet Tammy.

What it really comes down to, as Amanda put it, is offense at the taste of others. I’ll never understand my poor mother (who I have apparently decided to pick on in this post) and her penchant for manufactured pottery, and I imagine she’ll never understand my thing for red wine (a maybe once per week thing she has deemed “too much”) and obscure music (“the drums are so loud! it’s just so noisy”). She’ll never understand my compulsion toward male-centered homoerotic novels or why I use the F-word far too much in adult company. So be it. She has to love me. It’s practically a law.

The incongruities between perception and reality are difficult to reconcile to someone who remains and will choose to remain an outsider of different realities, why Amanda and I sting at the assertion that being “some punk rock chick but deep down inside I’m really bright and educated and I just told him that I didn’t really think the two were opposites or anything” because they aren’t opposites or anything. And this is why, to pick on the parental units again, that I continuously feel the need to defend my choice of friends and mates across the four-decade generation gap between me and my parents. A lack of formal education does not equal a lack of intelligence or a lack of worth.

And believe you me, when I find someone worth my time I drink it in. Intelligent people don’t waste good company on faulty preconceptions.

[To anyone interested in football, Victoria’s Secret catalogues, Smallville, marijuana, or LARP: Present company always excluded. I swear.]

Because Lists are Fantastic and I Can’t Sleep

If Trish and Amanda jumped off a bridge, would I?

Pet Peeves

  1. Repetitive clicking of ballpoint pens or fingernails.
  2. False sincerity.
  3. People who try too hard. Painfully hard. Embarassingly hard.

Favorite Sounds

  1. A clear, open voice in song.
  2. Ethan’s belly laugh.
  3. A soft breeze at night.

Least Favorite Sounds

  1. The alarm clock.
  2. My other alarm clock, Pablo, who goes off every morning at 7am.
  3. Other people’s cell phones.

All these things are so damned startling and disruptive to my pseudo-peace.

Favorite Flavors of Candy

  1. Cherry suckers.
  2. Chocolate.
  3. Mint.

Not a big candy fan — I prefer icing in a jar.

Biggest Fears

  1. Fish.
  2. Anything that deals with the Achilles’ tendon, or for that matter, anything that involves pain or breakage of the phalanges.
  3. Falling on my head.

Biggest Challenges

  1. Overcoming procrastination.
  2. Laundry.
  3. Sad attempts at optimism.

Favorite Department Stores
We’re avoiding department stores, so I’m filling in my own.

  1. Von’s Bookstore, a local joint that sells beads, books, jewelry, candles, gifts, cards, and has the best CD store that I’ve ever visited (even though I could kick any of their empolyees’ asses on music trivia).
  2. River Knits Yarns, my favorite place for S.E.X. (Stash Enchancing eXcursions).
  3. Sunspot Grocery, a local healthfood store that carries anything crunchy-granola-hippie one could ever want including organic produce in the dead of winter.

Most Often Used Words

  1. Dude.
  2. Fuck (in it’s many incarnations).
  3. Nebulous.

Favorite Pizza Toppings

  1. Fresh basil.
  2. Whole tomato slices.
  3. Olive oil.

I’m about to reveal myself as a food snob.

Favorite Cartoon Characters

  1. Betty Boop.
  2. Nermal.
  3. Ren and Stimpy.

Um, I don’t really like cartoons at all.

Recently Viewed Movies

  1. L.I.E.
  2. Chuck & Buck.
  3. Monster.

If you haven’t seen “Chuck & Buck” go out and find it immediately. It’s disturbing and endearing, homoerotic and innocently virginal, funny and sad all at the same time.

Favorite Fruits

  1. Fresh cantaloupe, the kind so juicy it runs down your chin.
  2. Pear (on a basalmic vinegar-dipped roast beef sandwich with Swiss cheese).
  3. Warm strawberries.

Favorite Vegetables

  1. Asparagus.
  2. Spaghetti squash.
  3. Crisp, uncut green beans.

Sometime in the next year I will cut back on the fluff and get back to more serious and/or editorial material, but hell, it’s vacation and I’ll blather if I want to.