Sunday, May 27, 2007

There's an annoying cultural narrative out there that I hate. It's the whole "women run out and just randomly conform to beauty standards for themselves" It's annoying because it leaves 90% of the decision making process out. When women say "I needed to have painful possibly sensation killing surgery for my self esteem", people don't think about the reasons why their self esteem would be dependent on not having the vulva they were born with- such as the narrative that women aren't say...their achievements, their drive,their hard work, their fun loving natures, but instead are only valued for how they look. Even if a man didn't hold a gun to a woman's head and say "chop off bits of your vulva or else!", note that men, who also are born into a system full of inaccurate information about women's genitalia and crazy mess like porn, are over represented in the media, and most of the women in the media are the type who buy this sort of crap line hook, vulva and anal bleaching.

Of course, this narrative also relies on the idea that women are irrational. Men are above petty worries like what nails look like, what make up looks like, what a woman's vulva looks like. Women just do that stuff on their own! Unlike rational men. This is of course bullshit- that right winger talking about a woman's flappy labia in the same sentence that he says that men don't notice them is insane, but also if guys didn't notice these things then men's magazines like Maxim wouldn't be so uniform in featuring women with lots of makeup and fancy nails, no body hair below the eyebrows, etc. Be honest- it's the first step to destroying the patriarchy.

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