feminist blogs

It seems that someone thinks it's hilarious, oh excuse me - "heelarious" - to make fake high heels for infants. Yes, I know it's supposed to be funny and clever. But then why does it just make me sad?

Via The F Word and The Frisky.

Thanks to, somewhat appropriately, Mz.Stilletto for the link.

Attention women over 35! Did you think that your days of desperately trying to fit in with unrealistic beauty standards were over? Guess again! The new TV show "She's Got the Look" gives women of all ages the chance to feel insecure and unworthy!

When will the madness stop?

The amazing Julia Serano has contributed a post to Feministing about this Philips ad for an epilator:

All of her points are great, and you should go over to Feministing and read them, and then follow the link from her fourth point to her essay on media depictions of trans women. Personally, I shave my legs about twice a year, and mostly so I don’t have to be aware of disgusted stares from random assholes. So I’m especially glad that Serano pointed out how myopic this portrayal of trans-feminine spectrum folks as hyper-feminine propagators of sexist stereotypes and beauty rituals is. (If you really want more examples of that, just click on the Youtube link and look at all the sex-objectastic “related videos.”)
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This has got to be a joke.

When the warm weather comes, I always dread to go outside when I wear a dress for the first time and find men cat-call, whistle and - what's worst for me - stare me down as I walk past them. While I should be happy that the sun is finally out and I can wear lighter clothes again, the spring seems to bring the neighborhood sleazies out of hibernation.

The New York Times published this gem yesterday about how dresses are becoming out-of-date, in which the author makes a plea for the survival of dresses, not for the comfort or convenience for women, but for all leering men's sakes:

It is also, for what it’s worth, unwelcome news to me.

That is because, unlike Ms. Slowey, I am not eager for women to become 'a little more hard-core, a little more androgynous, a little more butch.' Yes, gender play is fun, and trousers are a useful wardrobe default for the woman in business. But unless you are Thomas McGuane and find nothing sexier than a woman with crow’s feet, tight Wranglers and suede chaps, you will have to concede that, for flattering a woman’s body, nothing is quite like a dress.

Might as well throw some heterosexism in there too. And women wearing pants is "gender play"? I didn't realize trousers were still a "man's" piece of clothing.

And it doesn't end there, not by a long shot. He proceeds to refer to the "classic story" by Irwin Shaw, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” not surprisingly an unbelievably sexist story about a man who is explaining to his wife that he just loves to look at beautiful women while she begs him not to leave her for someone else. Here are a couple of other lovely references to why women should wear dresses:

The summer dress, in all shapes and styles, is preferred by many women, and by men who like watching them. (Photo caption)

From a 'retro' and 'Mad Men' garment, the dress was transformed into a wardrobe staple, to the benefit of women and those who get pleasure from gazing at them. . .

The dress, Jennifer Emory, another midday shopper, said: 'is very easy and very flattering — a no-brainer, really. It’s comfortable, and you can easily go from day to night. And guys like it because it’s so feminine.'

. . . And so, for those of us who take pleasure in the sight of a woman in a summer dress walking along Fifth Avenue, her dress caught in a faint breeze, a vision that calls to mind a Guy Wiggins painting or the famous bit of dialogue spoken by the actor Everett Sloane in 'Citizen Kane,' there is still time. (Emphasis mine)

In short, dresses are still the hot thing this summer so men can have their daily dose of voyeurism.

The sad thing about this piece is that it won't do anything but discourage women from wearing dresses this summer, despite some women's love to wear them. (Ahem.) I guess they didn't get the message that women wear their clothes for comfort and fashion, not someone else's fancy.

Thanks to the readers who alerted us to this!

Queen Latifah then:

Queen Latifah now:

Okay, I get that they're trying to promote her through this "healthier" rhetoric so that it's not about beauty standards - but conflating health with size really bugs the shit out of me.

(And yes, I realize that I'm a bit late on this one - but I had to post on it anyway.)

This is going to be fun.

I do love being quoted in the New York Times as saying that “I see a scary animalistic black man, a primal scream, and a beautiful white woman.” Ah, context!

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d kill to be as “unsexy” as Sarah Jessica Parker.

I’d say fuck Maxim and their “hottest” lists, but this is actually a pretty useful illustration of how women can’t win when it comes to beauty contests, and how male rankings are used to beat us over the head. SJP is a talented actress and a successful businesswoman. She is, by most standards, a beautiful woman — she’s even played one on TV. And still, a stupid ratings game in a magazine has caused her “significant pain.”

That isn’t a sign of personal weakness on her part; it’s a recognition that “ugly” is one of the worst slurs you can throw at a woman (and especially one whose career largely depends on her being perceived as attractive). Maxim’s Unsexiest award also serves as a way of keeping other women in line — if even someone as famous and lovely as Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t sexy enough (because of her long face? her age? her refusal to stay in the role of the vapid pretty girl? her business sense? her stable personal life?), where does that leave the “real” women who date Maxim’s target audience?

And what does it say to the men who read Maxim, who are supposed to be chuckling at the idea of a successful woman taken down a peg because she’s not hot enough?

Maybe I’m reading too much into a stupid Maxim article — after all, it’s not exactly a magazine known for its intellectual articles or its evolved readership. But it’s this shit that sends the constant message to women that you aren’t good enough, and that where men rate you on the sexy scale is of utmost importance — or that it should even matter at all.

Thanks to Going Gray in the comments to this post, I found her blog as well as the site Going Gray, Looking Great, a site for Diana Jewell’s book of the same name. Lots of great information about transitioning there, as well as colors to wear with gray and photos of great gray hair.

I haven’t yet done anything with the color, though I got a haircut yesterday. I was willing to chop it short, but I left the cut in the hands of the stylist with some instructions (i.e., GET THIS FUCKING HAIR OUT OF MY EYES OR I’M GOING AFTER IT WITH NAIL SCISSORS!!!!), and wound up with something much more textured but still more or less a chin-length bob. Which looks great. And given that there’s a good deal of texturizing, there’s a lot of shorter pieces which won’t take long to grow out.

I hadn’t been planning on getting a haircut yet, but I had a job interview yesterday afternoon, and since my hair was both showing roots and overgrown, I had to fix one or the other in order to look polished. And since I both still couldn’t stain my bathtub AND I suspect I’ve developed an allergy to a chemical in hair dye, I went with the cut.

I’ll be 40 this year (yipe!). And 40 is a Big Birthday. And when one is staring down the business end of a Big Birthday, one starts to ponder. One of the things I’m pondering is what it means to be a middle-aged (eep!) woman in this culture.

One thing that it means is that I’m no longer the target for handwringing articles urging me to get married and have children before it’s too late. It’s already assumed to be too late! Pressure’s off on that score.

Another thing it means is that I face somewhat of a dilemma: do I opt out of trying to look young, even if that means a certain amount of invisibility in a culture which prizes feminine youthfulness? Do I try instead to cultivate a look of authoritativeness?

The question before me now is: do I stop coloring my hair and let the gray come in?

I’ve been coloring my hair since college, which is coincidentally when I started getting my first gray hairs. Those weren’t the reason for the dye jobs, though; I was just experimenting. Indeed, one of my first experiments went very awry (I envisioned some kind of blonde highlights in my chestnut-brown hair; I wound up with brassy orange), and when the roots came in, I just picked a darker color and re-did the whole thing. Suddenly, I had auburn hair, and people started noticing it. I got stopped on the street and told how beautiful my hair was (oddly enough, people assumed the haircolor was real, but asked me if I wore colored contact lenses). I enjoyed the attention.

But after a while, more and more gray started coming in, and covering it up became more of a hassle. But still, there wasn’t enough gray yet for me to even consider laying off the dye — I’d always told myself that I’d love to have gray hair, I just didn’t want graying hair. “Gray hair” made me think of my middle-school friend Ellen’s mom — Mrs. W was prematurely gray, and in her mid-30s had lovely, striking silver hair which set off her green eyes.

So I kept dyeing my hair, and trying to keep the root growth to a minimum; as a result, I never really got a sense of just how gray my hair really was, because I couldn’t get a good look at it.

Now, though — I have not been able to color my hair for about two months because I just refinished my bathtub and put my apartment up for sale. I don’t want to do anything that might stain the finish before I have the contract signed. And I noticed the other day, what with there being two months’ worth of roots, that I might just be gray enough, finally.

Unfortunately, I’m not really sure how to proceed here. I don’t want to walk around with a giant skunk stripe of undyed gray hair in the middle of my head. If I switch to henna for the new growth, will that eventually fade out? Do I have to cut it all off and start fresh?

Help!

And feel free to share your thoughts re: gray hair, aging and the way that middle-aged (urk!) women are viewed.

That’s right, I said scrubbing. Scrubbing sweat off of underage boys in a locker room. It’s central part of a new game for the Nintendo DS called Duel Love, in which you play a female transfer student who ends up as the personal trainer for a secret “Fight Club” at her new high school. That’s right, the companies that brought you Pac-Man, Tekken, Power Rangers, Tamagotchi and many more now bring you… scrubbing down sweaty boys and giving them massages!

Romance comics for girls, often featuring delicate, beautiful boys who fall in love with the plucky or cipher-like heroine — or, just as often, fall in love with each other — are nothing new in Japan. It used to be that you could pretend this was just another Or in the United States; check the Manga section of your local Barnes & Noble. Dating games based in similar scenarios (often called otome, the Japanese word for maiden) are nothing new either, but they’re getting to be bigger and bigger-budget projects. And utilizing new technology as well… as you can see in the trailer below, you have to actually scrub back and forth with the Nintendo DS styles, and here’s a picture instructing the player to blow into the microphone to clear away the steamed-up shower stalls. Why, whatever on earth for?

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