Thursday, March 08, 2007

Me=Bad

I've been thinking all week that I will post about women's issues particularly issues about women's rights around the world or events for international women's day but there I go just posting about food again.

It's been pretty quite in the event front except for North cote social club hosting a special night with all female musicians called 'play like a girl'. But that's too late now. :-(

So instead I can direct to you other great blogs:
Richie writes a great response here about privilege in the same line as Andrea's post at Official Shrub.

Another great unrelated post over at Feminist, unmodified on a comment on 'young feminists' versus 'feminists of previous generations'.

The initial comment about femininity has been kind of niggling away at me. Mr T and I got into a kind of unusual argument the other day. He was arguing that he doesn't understand why I bother with traditional hair removal (I shave my underarms, legs, and pluck my eyebrows). While I agree with him that it's not fair that women are expected to remove all of that hair while men are not expected to. Whatever way you look at it, is unnecessary and well just not fair. Why is it gross on a woman but not a man? While I understand this inequality, I am so socially conditioned that I can't break through with leaving hair because I hate the idea of someone thinking of me as 'gross' and well I have heard those terms too often in response to female underarm or leg hair. Don't get me wrong when I see other women with underarm hair or whatever I am not grossed out instead I want to say 'good on you'. I just can't seem to do it myself. Mr T said 'if he was a female he simply wouldn't remove the hair' to which I was quite annoyed with because it is simply unfair for him to make that remark as a man. It's like me saying 'If I was Asian I would argue with my parents' or 'If I was in a relationship with another woman I would show public displays of affection everywhere'. It's very easy to sit there from another side and argue 'if....' but let's face it you really don't know what it's like til you have experienced it and dominant culture is quite powerful.

Ok it's not much for a women's day post but better than nothing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey kristy! Been a long time since we chatted, eh? :) Everything going well on your side of the blogsphere?

Okay, my comment on hair removal got too long, so I decided to put it on my blog... and it ended up turning into a series. The first two are here and here.