Allow me to be trivial.
Today, while sitting in a deli and waiting for my breakfast, I ended up flipping through various women’s magazines. This is not a usual pastime for me, as I once made a concerted and direct effort to try not and put myself in the line of people who hate me and want me to give them money at the same time. Therefore, the majority of the content of women’s magazines is new to me. Or rather, even worse, this isn’t new at all. In fact, things haven’t changed all that much from when I decided that Cosmo could suck my dick in 1999.
So, here’s a list of things that I can tell are (still) wrong with our bodies.
- We are too hairy. We are to have only eyebrows, and keep those sorted out while you’re at it.
- Our skin is the wrong consistency. If you have lumps, bumps, bruises, scars or stretchmarks, please get that handled. Try this cream.
- Whatever our body looks like, that is wrong. We’re too fat (that’s bad for your health!), too skinny (and we look like 12 year old boys!), too top heavy, too bottom heavy, too short and too tall. Whatever your horrible, freakish body type is, thank god in heaven, there’s a way to dress to hide your fatal flaw. Buy clothes! And please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t show other people your body confidently, naked, in all your hairy, bumpy, fat, skinny glory. If you have any of these flaws, here’s an article of clothing you can wear during sex to hide it (I swear, Cosmo advocated having sex with a tank top on to prevent your partner from seeing your sad chest).
- The hair on top of our heads, which we are graciously allowed to keep, is bullshit. It never does anything right. In fact, whatever your hair does naturally after it’s washed is just a load of nonsense. If you have hair like mine, you get to read hundreds of articles about how to tame your hair like it is a lion poised to murder you at any moment. This taming, by the way, usually involves doing things that will utterly destroy your hair written by people who think that if you don’t wash your kinky hair every day, you’re gross. As I understand it, those of you with fine, straight hair, need to find ways to add body and depth, right? Like the body and depth that comes naturally to those of us up to our ears in relaxer. Yeah, just checking.
- Our faces are the wrong color.
- Our skin is the wrong color.
- We smell.
I realize that discussing issues related to body hair, make-up and clothes is like sooooo not important to feminist blogs right now. I’ve seen a lot of feminist blogs disparage the idea that we should care about who shaves because there are wars going on, in case you haven’t noticed.
I hate that attitude so much, I could turn blue. I could also make the opposite argument, but I won’t.
All this stuff in my little list is a given. Feminists know this. Women know this. We see these advertisements and we either buy into them or we start flexing the critical thinking and we go, “Wait a damn minute.”
The problem with bodily assault, with who is being told to dye their hair, is that our bodies are basically ground zero. Women live in their bodies. We inhabit them and they are ours. They are the full way that we have to interact with the world. Even when my body doesn’t work the way I need it to, it is mine. This is my home and it’s being assaulted.
This is why feminist blogging frightens me, especially when we get to “X is trivial compared to Y.” That is Planet Stupid to me, as basic as it gets. Just because my neighbor’s house is burning down doesn’t mean that mine hasn’t been burglarized. It means that two things are going on at once that deserve attention.
So this is my tiny little bit of attention. Normalized bodily hatred isn’t over. It hasn’t even slowed down. This isn’t old news. It’s on the backburner for feminist concerns right now, but I thought maybe we want to nod at it once or twice.
Also, have a laugh.
