I was sitting on the internet last night, stuck
in my usual holding pattern of, "what am I going to write about/I
have nothing to write about/I’ll never finish my post in time/oooh
look something shiny!" when I ran across this article. And while
I certainly hate to make any disparaging remarks about another writer
who is out there doing his thing, it really kind of rubbed me the wrong
way. "Why I Hate Feminists."
Why is that an okay statement to make? He goes on to say that he doesn’t
ACTUALLY hate ALL feminists, just the man-hating, "we want everything
for ourselves and nothing for the peens" feminists. Which, actually,
is not a feminist at all. But I digress. To me, his statement is the equivalent
of me writing a post called, "I HATE FAGS AND JEWS!" but then
writing about how I actually really hate men who. . .I don’t know,
eat babies but also sometimes qualify themselves as gay or Jewish. Throwing
out sweeping generalizations about a group of people that you hate, then
backing it up with reasons that aren’t actually true to said group
of people makes you not only ill-informed, but now you look like an asshole
to boot. If you hate feminists based solely on the misandrists among them
you don’t actually hate what a feminist is at all, you hate those woman
who feel that way, which has nothing to do with what label they
put upon themselves. Furthermore. . . You know what? This post is getting
away from me. Let me try again.
Hello. My name is Emily. I am (almost) 24 years old. I am a feminist.
I know it’s probably a strange thing for me to say, considering all of the lesbians
I’ve rated and all of the generally shitty things I’ve said on this site
about the ladies in the past. It took me a very long time to call myself a feminist
comfortably. I still have a lot to learn. I don’t have any Gloria Steinem books
on my shelf, and I have yet to scrawl a Germaine Greer quote onto an old t-shirt
with a sharpie, but I’m getting there. I consider myself a feminist because,
even if I kind of suck and my anti-feminist transgressions abound, I refuse to take
for granted what I’ve been born into. What the women from the first and second
waves work for and sacrificed so that women today can flippantly blow off the concept
of feminism as "yucky" because they
"love boys!" and have conveniently forgotten (or never bothered
to think about) how different their lives would have been if they had been
born thirty years earlier. I refuse to ignore the privilege I’ve been
given, and I refuse to ignore what still needs to change. More importantly
(I’m working my way into the entertaining part, for those of you who
clicked on this and went, "Feminism? FUCK.THAT.SHIT. I’m goin’ back
to the baseball post."), it’s not all doom gloom and Roe v. Wade.
To embrace the idea of feminism is to embrace all of the things that make
it really great be a woman. Or a girl! We get to identify ourselves either
way these days! Sometimes when I’m really writer blocked I start talking
about myself in the third person as a
"lousy dame" named "Trixie". . . .okay that might just
be my personality disorder. The larger point here is that while the world
is not perfect, there is a lot to love about our half of the population.
We get pants or skirts. Heels or Birkenstocks. Sparkly nail polish or car
oil on our cuticles. BAAAABBIEEEEESSS or,
"Jesus Christ get that squalling thing away from me."
I love gal culture. I’m proud to be a part of it. So, in celebration of nothing
in particular and only because I feel like it, a list of things I love about being
a girl. WARNING: may or may not include repeated references to my vagina. Proceed
at your own caution.
Buying Shoes on Ebay
You know, I really hated Sex and the City when it was on the
air. I thought it was the most vapid, unrealistic and needlessly raunchy show.
Then one day after it had ended I caught one of the highly edited episodes in
syndication and it was like someone had flipped a switch. Suddenly, I was in
love with the show and all of the characters. How very my style, to finally
start to appreciate something only after it’s dead (excuse me, I have to
go listen to my Elliott Smith albums now). Anyway, I tried to figure out what
had changed to make me like the show so much. I wanted to believe it was because
I’m older, a bit wiser, certainly more mature about the nature of love
and relationships. Maybe I’m just getting to be a grown up, and can better
understand the ins and outs of what the show was about. Maybe.
No wait, its gotta be the shoes.
If there is one stereotypically, "I’m an asshole and I read Sophie
Kinsella novels" GIRLY thing about me, it’s my unreasonable love of
buying shoes. I’m not an incredibly high maintenance person. Sometimes
my pendulum swings over to
"goth" and I can’t leave the house without elaborate outfits
and lots of eyeliner, but if I’m being honest with myself I’ll admit
that I roll in to work wearing jeans and glasses with wet hair more often than
not. But the one thing I’m always willing to splurge on is another pair
of shoes. However, unlike the SATC girls with their high profile careers
and their giant Manhattan apartments, I live in West Virginia. I make $8.00
an hour. So, when I wanted to get myself something pretty for my tootsies, my
options used to be pretty limited. And they also normally had
"carnival" in the name. Then I discovered the joy of shoes on Ebay.
Whatever IT is, you can find it on Ebay, and what IT is is a fucking adorable
pair of platforms that cost two dollars.
When I was about 20 I went through my first big, "ebayebayebaycantstopbidding
AHHHHwheredidallmymoneygo?" phase. That year of my life was spent wasting
most of my paychecks on Simpsons toys and wacky
hats. The next few years after that I mostly lived on my
own (with people, but not my parents), so I had to grow out of Ebay in favor
of keeping my electric turned on. Now that I’m finally in a position where
I can support myself and have a little bit of play money, I’ve naturally
started wasting it all on ebay again. And I could not be more pleased with myself.
The pleasing thing about buying shoes (especially at deliciously low cost)
is that you’re decorating the least attractive part of yourself. Your feet
are funny looking smelly things, so you’re putting them in stylish kitten
heels to make up for it. People who say, "I hate feet" are about as
unique a snowflake as someone who says, "I hate loneliness." Fetishists
aside, nobody LIKES feet. Nobody thinks their cute pinky toes will help them
get laid. They’re just these weird things that you have and must deal with,
which is where shoe buying comes in! It’s a completely different clothes
buying experience. Nobody buys adorable tops to distract others from their shoulders.
I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that people associate obsessive
shoe-buying with the money to burn, "The Devil Wears Prada," cute
little Kate Spade handbag tucked in the crook of your arm set, but no. We poor
chicks love it too. And we do it on Ebay. But you don’t have to take my word
for it.
Male Equivalent: All the boys
in my sixth grade class buying the same pair of purple and white Charles Barkley
basketball shoes.
Bust Magazine
Once every couple of months or so I wander into our city’s lone magazine
emporium (helpfully labeled "The People’s News," because the
3 or 4 teenagers you see in the corner trying to surreptitiously pull a nudie
mag out of its plastic wrapper are there to find the NEWS dictated by the PEOPLE)
and ask the confused individual behind the counter if they carry Bust magazine.
The answer is always no, and each time I leave disappointed while the register
worker stares at me like I’m crazy or, alternately, a sexual deviant.
I won’t lie. The first time I found Bust (in a Barnes & Noble
in Lynchburg, Virginia of all places) I too gave a little giggle at the marginally
subversive title. Then I laid it on the counter face down so the Christian twenty
something ringing me up wouldn’t think me one of those crazy liberated
females. The back of magazine featured a large black woman in a seductive pose,
talking about how great her vibrator was/is. Oops.
Bust’s tagline is, "For women with something to get off of their
chests." It self-identifies as a feminist magazine, but it doesn’t
have the mom vibe that Ms.does, nor is it quite as blatantly pissed off
as Bitch can sometimes be (though I adore it with equal fervor). Bust,
to me anyway, has always seemed like the magazine for women who want to be aware,
who don’t want to take shit when they don’t have to, but who want to
go out in the world not taking shit while wearing a cute outfit. It’s the
grown up magazine for women who spent their early teen years flipping through Sassy while
they waiting for the "Todd Time"
segment on MTV’s House of Style.
The greatest thing about Bust is that, essentially, your typical women’s
magazine, only with half a brain. It’s got all of the bells and whistles
of a Cosmo or a Marie Claire but you don’t have to feel like
you’re betraying Lisa Simpson by enjoying it. You want a celebrity interview?
Okay, but instead of Lindsey Lohan you get Tina Fey or Margaret Cho. Fashion?
Sure, we love fashion, but we might throw in a plus-sized model or three to
keep the universe in check. Men? We love men! Oh, but we love John Cusack, not
Tom Cruise. Lifestyle "tips"? No problem. How about a 75 year-old
woman with a column about auto repair, rather than 10 ways to make a man horny?
How does that sound?
It sounds just loverly, Bust. I’ll have seconds.
Male Equivalent: Men’s Health? Dude, I don’t know, but
I think we win.
Sex Toys Hilariously Shaped Like Animals
I have a vibrator that looks like Hello Kitty.
That is all.
Male Equivalent: Masturbating into a tube sock.
Pregnant Bellies
Not to sound like some crunchy earth mother dill hole, but I just think the
womb is the most amazing thing. It’s the center of the universe. LIFE comes
from it. How is everyone not completely amazed by it? Why are we not rubbing
down pregnant women with scented oils and fanning them with palm fronds?
The natural extension of my womb love is, of course, the pregnant
belly. They are, to me, one of the most beautiful things in the world. The Mona
Lisa. The top of Mt. Everest. I’ve written before about my semi-annual
obsession with settling down and popping out some kids. I don’t know when
it’s going to happen, or why it does. I’m just here, a normal person
one minute, a crazy-eyed baby fanatic the next. So I continue through life,
trying not to be a psycho, but ogling every gorgeous rotund belly I spy in the
grocery store or at the mall. Eventually I come to my senses and remember that
babies, plural, are a fairly stupid idea for someone who can’t even remember
what day her garbage gets picked up. I’m sure that if I had a baby I’d
just leave it in my car one day. I did that to my camera for a like two weeks
once, and it was REALLY expensive.
But even when I’m not thristin’ for a birthin’, I still can’t
get over how awesome the pregnant belly is. Its not fat, nobody sees a normally
size 4 girl with a 40 pound pregnant belly and thinks, "wow, she really
let herself go." It’s just this tremendous swollen mound that has
A PERSON GROWING IN IT. I just. . . I can’t stop babbling. They’re
the most awesome, awe-inspiring, terrifying thing in the whole world.
You put your hand on one and the baby is RIGHT THERE. Jesus.
Male Equivalent: Pregnant boobs. Okay yeah, I’ll give you that one.
Redheads
Tom Robbins once wrote, "red hair is a woman’s game." Here’s
proof.
Male Equivalent: Boris Becker.
Fascinating
I read an article once, about "that thing that girls do to other girls.
A pretty girl walks into a room and all of the other women
stare at her like they alternately hate her and want to make
out with her." The
article went on to refer to this unnamed thing that we all
do as "fascinating." Women
fascinate upon each other. That girl walked by and I fascinated
on her.
It’s the most appropriate term I’ve ever heard for such a singularly
female trait. The tendency to want another woman’s perfect body and alternately
hold it against her for having it is not something a man could understand. A
man does not see another man and think, "look at that asshole and his perfectly
coiffed hair. I wonder what product he’s using. . ." but we do. She
is an asshole, that’s already decided. But her hair is SO PRETTY. Bitch.
I make it sound like a bad thing, but it isn’t. I love to fascinate. I
love looking at other women, see what they have that I don’t, and noticing
what I’ve done better. It isn’t the same as "checking out" someone
you want to fuck. It’s appreciating someone who has what you have, but
they’re working it better.
So if you ever meet me, and I stare you down, don’t worry girl. I’m
just fascinated.
Male Equivalent: None. Girls get this one to themselves.
While writing this article I won these in an Ebay auction. Life’s so
rad.
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