I Did NOT Wake Up Like This... And Neither Did You!

I said in one of my last posts that something pretty shocking happened to me while I was in Spain. In truth, there were a lot of things that happened during my time there that have opened my eyes and given me new perspectives, but this experience that I'm particularly referring to made me feel very isolated. Like an American whose been gone too long.
This is part 1 of that experience, and you can ultimately thank Beyonce.
I was in Spain to teach English at a project outside of Madrid. I flew into Barcelona, partially because I love the city, partially because I have an acquaintance studying there who told me I could crash at her place. Upon arrival, she told me that actually that plan wasn't okay with her host mom, but I could stay with her "friends", no problem. This is one of the many reasons why she's an acquaintance.
Still thinking about the free accom, I took it. We spent the day together, sight seeing and catching up, but what really struck me was how much she complained about the girls I was going to be staying with. It made me really nervous.
"They just say stupid things." She told me. That could mean so many things! Can you give me an example? "Not really," She told me, "But you'll see."
Gulp.
When it came time to head over there, I had an ache in my stomach. I was so nervous although I had no idea what to expect. If I'm totally honest, the word "white" was thrown around a bit, but I never really know what to think when someone says to me, "They're white girls." I'm familiar with white people. Umm, I'm half white. I have white friends. These people are cool, honest, open-minded, and educated so whatever emotion or understanding "white" was supposed to evoke in me was totally lost, and just left me to more anxiety and confusion.
Walked through the door - yes, okay, they're white. There was no loud screeching, the walls didn't crumble... Just some innocent, polite small talk. I began to ease. What's the trap?
There was this cool Venezuelan girl with us, Francie, we'll call her. Francie also lived there although my acquaintance hadn't mentioned her at all. Francie rolled a jay. She was the first and only person I liked right off the bat.
We all sat together and smoked, kept talking about life abroad, at home, in general... when the conversation took a strange turn.
Something prompted the conversation onto Beyonce.
Now, this was not long after the "notorious" unphotoshopped pictures of Beyonce were published by one of her fansites. Naturally, we began talking about it.
Let's get something straight. Beyonce is obviously a gorgeous woman. She's 33, which is by no means old, but 33 is not 16.

This is Beyonce's face, so why is Loreal trying to sell us someone totally different?

When I look at these pictures, the only thing I see that's ugly is all the gunk that Loreal has smeared all over this beautiful woman's face. There was never a moment where I thought, "Beyonce is ugly" but I was overwhelmed by the thought, "That make up is a lie!" And clearly, the photoshopped pictures prove it.

Looking at the photoshopped pictures, I would want to run to my nearest Target and get the new foundation! Get that new eye shadow. Get that new lipstick! Of course, I know in the back of my head that Beyonce uses different make up on a daily basis, but for the Loreal campaign, she looks great!
Those unleaked photos shatter this belief. It shatters your trust in the shitty make up you can afford, and forces you to take a look at a beauty icon for what she really is -- a human. This doesn't have to be devastating. This can be empowering. Seeing Beyonce covered in the make up she doesn't need forces us to confront ourselves and our own make up rituals that we do day in and day out in order to "be" beautiful. In order to keep our heads high when we claim, "I woke up like this".
Beyonce sets two beauty standards. A realistic one. One that's fierce and sexy. One that dances and sings with confidence, and walks through the streets with a bright smile and a gait of charisma. That's beautiful!
But the other beauty standard Beyonce has set is not realistic. It's the one that tells us if we just do this, if we just wear that, if we just LOOK like this, we'll be beautiful and everyone will think so and tell us so too. The Loreal pictures are the best thing that's happened to us in a long time. It shows the farce of it all. Not just the farce of the make up, the farce of the standard.
The sham of the expectation.
And that's all I said to the American girls in Barcelona.
But they heard something else.
The unleaked Beyonce photos make a mockery of the beauty industry, but for many women, the beauty industry has succeeded in convincing them that their untouched faces are not beautiful at all, and so in return the beauty industry has become a self-esteem life saver for these women. To crush the beauty industry is personal.
To those girls, the unphotoshopped pictures of Beyonce did not directly challenge them, they directly attacked them. These were girls who believed the lie. They wore thick make up. Their hair was burned with bleach. They talked about their insecurities as though swapping juicy secrets.
I should have picked up on the social queues, but, I was high.
On a final limb, they claimed, "Those pictures were fake!"
Even if they were, it forces us to think about these things, isn't that great? Isn't that what our hyper materialistic culture needs?
No. Not for them. Not at all.

What my acquaintance had meant when she said, "They're white" was really "They're extremely privileged and have never had their bubbles popped." (That sounds kind of weird to write out, but you know what I mean). I walked into their lives, with a giant backpack and an open mind, and gave them a reality check they won't soon forget. And it wasn't even on purpose. At some point, people of color and/or LGBTQ people face this sort of reality check... That the main narrative isn't for them. That they're different. Or weird. Or ugly. These white American girls never had to feel that until I dismantled the power of the beauty industry before their eyes and they were left with questioning the beauty of their faces without the Loreal bandage.
Unfortunately, the conversation didn't end well. I feel strongly about this issue, but ultimately I'm comfortable in my skin. None of this was personal for me. Their responses evoked genuine curiosity from me and feeling the effects of the jay, I really just wanted to understand them. It ended with them saying to me, "Are you still talking shit about Beyonce?" That's when I realized that we could never find each other if we're on totally different planets. I let it go.
My acquaintance and Francie clapped for me, telling me this is what they'd been dealing with and what bravery it took for me to actually take those girls on. But in all honesty, it was just that I was in a state of mind where I really just wanted to sit back and talk about the bigger issues in our society... I was in no way prepared to give a lesson on the importance of body acceptance and body-image positivity that unrealistic beauty standards undermine for the sake of profits. I wasn't ready to go into why Beyonce's fake-me-out Loreal campaign is a capitalistic ploy to make you feel uncomfortable with how you look, finding contentment only behind chemical-laden lipstick or in a bottle of cheap foundation.
The girls went to bed angry that I'd poked them to wake up. I went to bed confused that such a deep mindset can really exist among my peers.
It was an important experience for me. Truly shocking. Truly eye-opening. Or am I just so out of it in Germany where people aren't so duped?
I could hear the girls talking from their room while I lied on the couch. "Oh my god. Sean just face-timed me!" "Why didn't you answer?" "Ew because I'm so ugly right now!"

 

Are you fucking serious?

There are a lot of ways that we are breaking down these social constructs that make us feel insecure.
Barbie sales are on the decline. More people are publicly identifying with feminism. In 2012, two girls from Maine successfully campaigned to change one of the most popular teen magazines in America to show real girls. The internet is flooded with movements against the social sources of debilitating self-esteem, from the unapologetic campaign of The Body is Not an Apology, to Twitter's #bodypositive, to the amazing women who take the Ted stage to demand change.
It's not okay that the two young women I met in Barcelona are the rule and not the exception. I guess when I think about my friends, I realize it's in them too, only surfacing in the passing comment. When I want to meet society's standard of beauty (at least in my mind), my under eye circles feel like two dark demons hanging on my face. We all have insecurities, but they shouldn't debilitate us into consumerist slaves. We shouldn't feel sub-human if we're not "flawless".
I mean, hey, this is me writing this blog post right now.

I really did wake up like this.

And yes, yoga pants are on.
I do not believe make up in itself is bad, but I do believe that the way it is marketed is shaming and that's shameful. Perfection is a disease of a nation. Just ask Beyonce.

*Stay tuned for Part 2: They Kylie Jenner Experience

My Weird Relationship With Shaving

Coming out again: I haven't regularly shaved my armpits or vagina in almost 10 months.

The boycott started in response to this ad gag:

I got a really bad feeling in my stomach from this ad. And I wasn't the only one. Thousands of comments flooded veet's social media networks complaining that these ads were body-shaming and insulting. I was glad to not be alone. I couldn't imagine how I'd feel if these commercials were written off as "wacky, tongue-in-cheek humor" as Veet said in an apology after the backlash.

Again, it goes back to feminism is the fight for gender equality. I believe gender equality begins by becoming aware of the gender binary, its narrative in society, and the behavioral confines it establishes for people of conventional and non-conventional identities. I believe that my greatest responsibility as a feminist is to challenge these structures and de-sexualize behaviors and attitudes that limit and/or judge people outside of status-quo. It's why I always try to get the little girls and boys I teach to use other colors than just blue, green, pink, and purple during arts and crafts time. (I must say, it's amazing the way a 4 year old has already internalized this outlook of pink=girl, blue=boy). It's why I'm open to men wearing make up. And it's also why I've stopped shaving.

After Veet infamously highlighted the severity of this social expectation, I began researching hair removal for aesthetic purposes and came across some interesting, and disturbing, revelations.

1) The idea to remove hair for beauty did not begin with men suddenly desiring a completely hairless woman and it did not begin with a paradigm shift among women to put hot wax all over them and then rip it off in strips, taking hair right from the roots with it. No, the idea to remove female body hair began with an ad campaign in 1915 for Gillette. The razor company. That's right. Like engagement rings, Valentine's Day, and make up, companies have once again been able to convince us women that in order to be the most beautiful and loved, we need to have A, B, and C (A Bare Coochie).

2) Beyond its shoddy origins, regularly removing body hair also isn't good for human skin for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, shaving and waxing cause microscopic cuts in the skin that irritate it, causing bumps (staph boils) or ingrown hairs later. (We all know those). Perhaps more importantly, let's focus exclusively on the mons pubis (the top of your vagina where the hair grows) and think about how microscopic cuts make it easier to pass STDs..... uhh what?! Ew! Well, correlation does not always mean causation, however, there have been studies which have associated the two.

3) The worst thing I came across was this question:

What people have no hair on their vaginas?

Take a breath and think about it. Yeah, you're right: ONLY little girls.

There's something inherently disturbing about a post-pubescent woman trying to emulate a young girl's vagina in order to be "attractive" for her man. Like really... what?? I talked to my grandma about this once, and she told me she was shocked to learn that girls these days shave their pubes. She told me back in the day (60s/70s) no girls shaved like that! And while there is plenty of evidence to show that removing pubic hair is a result of porn's influence in society, let's think about the basic porn narrative: Some beautiful girl has the shit fucked out of her hairless, labia majora liposuctioned/labia minora clipped vagina (appearing almost like a little girl's) by some ridiculous guy and his artificially giant dick. Add more or less details, but porn creates a lot of misconceptions about true sex and genital beauty that's I'm not sure I want to aesthetically mirror for my bedroom experiences.

So yeah. There's a lot more that goes into this than just shave or no-shave decision you have to make each time you shower.
Can't really blame the companies. We live in a capitalistic society. It's not personal, it's profits. But when they're sending us messages in order to produce anxiety in us that we need to buy stuff in order to ease,  and we turn around and internalize that and absorb these beliefs into our culture and allow porn to intensify these insecurities, I've got a problem. 1915 is long enough that we're having a bit of cultural amnesia, but let's snap out of it.  It's the social limitations we've constructed in our minds toward and against each other that make something as absolutely meaningless as body hair suddenly a subject of insecurity. Shave or don't shave, but it doesn't make you any more or less attractive. And as much as they talk, I can guarantee you, 99.999% of guys won't turn you down because of your natural hair.

BUT......

I have to admit, sometimes I do feel self conscious with hairy armpits. At the end of the day, we're social creatures and when the society rejects you, it can hurt pretty damn bad.
As J Whitehead explains,

If feminism is about choice, then women who make the decision to embrace the Brazilian, in isolation, should be respected (although as we don’t live in a vacuum, such a choice is no mean feat). Those who succumb to peer or partner pressure, body issues or unrealistic images of femininity, should also be respected, at the same time as being treated with compassion and empathy. The politics of disgust are hugely complex and it’s not easy to stand tall and furry while people crinkle their noses in disgust at you.

It's not easy at all. Sometimes I'd conform and feel like shit after shaving. Then I'd swear to never do it again, then a few months later, I'd feel pressured and shave and the whole cycle would start over again. So I've had to really confront myself with this issue and I'm still figuring out where I stand.

But for all of the reasons above, I'll never put a razor down there again. It doesn't mean I don't groom at all, I just do it based on my own comfort level, not on some ideal society has handed me to swallow without remark. I shave my armpits ONLY when I want to. A few weeks ago, I went to the club hairy arm-pitted in a tank top and danced shamelessly. Guys still hit on me and bought me drinks, and I got to dance with my girlfriends and let them see a girl completely confident in her own skin. Two weeks later, I shaved, and now I'm letting these bad boys grow back out. I think I might even dye them. Because come on, dyed armpits are fucking cool.

So no more of this:

And a lot more of this:

 

(And no, Daily Mail, it's not bizarre, it's beautiful!)

So why do or don't you shave? Has boycotting shaving ever crossed your mind? 

(P.S. This article did not discuss legs because I haven't touched those since the 8th grade)

Femithought Of The Day/Public Announcement: GIRLS, STOP WALKING WITH YOUR HEAD DOWN

So I'm post-epiphany on this one and just fed up.

Girls, stop walking with your head down.

I remember how it used to feel... Walking down the street all alone and just feeling out of place. There aren't even real words to describe this discomfort, but your chest feels a little tight and you're tense to get from A to B. Pulling out your phone to refresh facebook over and over does ease the tension a little bit, but not much. It feels like there's a spotlight on you, but every time you look up, you don't see one, so you try to shake the feeling. But you can't help it, its like when you've woken up from a nightmare... You know everything is okay, but nevertheless, your chest feels hollow.

At least that's my best attempt at describing the feeling with no name. I used to walk down the street and just keep my eyes on the sidewalk. That feeling became so normal that I didn't even realize how crazy any of this was.

Until one day...

I was walking down the street, blinders on, when I decided to look up and to my amazement, it was an absolutely beautiful day! I was passing by a church with a small pond in front of it. The sky was bright blue and the willow trees were swaying in the breeze. And I got angry. Angry that I had chosen to blind myself because of this stupid feeling in my chest. Because I didn't want to look at some stranger or feel their eyes on me. Why do they have more of a right to experience and enjoy the earth that surrounds us when we all got here the same spontaneous way? When I lie in my deathbed, am I really going to look back on my life and the endless sidewalks I've stared at?

Absolutely not.

So I made it a point to retrain my brain. Every time I was outside, I became hyper aware of my actions. I would make sure to keep my head up, facing ahead, and when others would walk passed me (especially a man or a group of men) and I'd feel that cold tight feeling grip my stomach and I'd just want to look down and walk faster, I'd force my neck stiff and walk on.

It was hard at first, but I stayed persistent and it's been at least a year since I've reshaped my walking behavior. Since changing, I've seen how many girls and women still hold this presence on the street and it makes me sad to see.


There's a lot of information in the feminist world about internalized social shame that women feel. We're supposed to be small, docile, and up until really the last century, mostly unseen. It's not surprising that remnants of these mindsets still exist in our culture today. To me, walking with your head down is the result of that. So stop it.

Today I saw this picture and I was taken aback. Of course, the girl posing looks happy. Her smile is radiating, and you can tell she feels confident in her tube top. Good for you, girlie! But its the girl in the background that made my eyes freeze. She's walking, maybe over to the fountains, or passed them, or who knows. Maybe she's just having a bad day. Or maybe she is just showing the "natural" walk that many girls have when in public. Slouched shoulders, head down, walking quickly and trying to be as low to the ground as possible. Point A to Point B.

It makes me sad. So here is my challenge to any person reading this: Start noticing how you present yourself when you're walking down the street. I'm not talking about your clothes or your make up. I'm talking about your gait. And once you notice that, notice the feeling within your chest. Is it tight and empty? And if it is, why?

And once you can't answer that question to self-satisfaction, realize that it could just be cultural stress because you're a girl in a world that subliminally tells you that you shouldn't be there. But you should. So let any self consciousness about that melt away like the dying patriarchy. You belong here and have just as much a right as any other to see the world in front of you. Your presence is not insulting or intimidating. It just is. So just be.


***Very important final note: Going back to my first post, I am a cisgender feminist and can only approach issues as such. However, I care about everyone and know that many of these issues stem beyond the cisgender feminist narrative. I'd imagine LGBTQ people or people of color may also slouch when they're walking due to subconscious (or very conscious) uneasiness in society. And who could blame them? But your body is just as worthy to be present and experience the world as anyone else. In everything that you do, your body is an act of defiance. So be there with your head high.