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gabriel
Love and ferrets and pretending to be a writer.

2003-11-15 8:28 PM
cultural femininity vs. maturity

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Reading: _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ and _Training Your Pet Ferret_ and _The American Sign Language Phrase Book_

Weather: rainy with a chance of frogs (dreich 7)

The ferrets are: asleep in the top deck hammock with distended bellies

Now, maybe it is not nice to quote and comment on someone else's journal entry, but I am going to do it anyway. I'll change her journal entry a little bit for reasons of squeamishness. I am not planning on making fun of this journal entry, just using it to illustrate my own opinion about something, an opinion I didn't know I had till I read this journal entry. The entry is by a person I don't know. She wrote about her daughters and their struggle with "beauty" stuff. Hair stuff, makeup, you know. All that crap.

"Come home and discover that *name deleted* hates the hair color and wants to shave her head. Again. Dissuade her from doing so by agreeing to buy her another bleaching and dye kit so that she can try to achieve the color (royal purple) that she wants (do not inform her that applying any more chemicals to her hair will likely result in baldness anyway). Inform her that all women hate their hair for most of their lives. Does nothing to make her feel better. Damn beauty products. Still not priceless."

Okay. I made an anonymous comment on that entry where I wrote, in part, "Any woman who hates her hair is not a woman yet."

Hair is a part of a person. A minor part, but visible, and so it gets more attention than it deserves. There is a scripture about the gifts people have in the church -- some do this, some do that, and the parts that have less honor... Crumb. This will be more effective if I just look it up and quote it. Hang on a sec.

Okay. I Corinthians 12:23-24. "And those members of the body which we think to be less honorable, on these we bestow greater honor, and our less presentable parts have greater modesty, but our presentable parts have no need."

Okay, so Paul's talking about roles in the church, but body parts is what he uses here, and it's apt. Hair's not important, and we give it a lot of importance just because it's right out there in front. While hearts and lungs and brains are more important, and they are pretty well covered up. Butts and bellies, too, we hope. (Nudity is another subject, but I'll probably go into it one of these days. Stay tuned.)

Hair is not important. It looks kinda neat, or it can, but so what? It doesn't serve any good funtion. There is not enough of it to do a good job of keeping a person warm, or keeping the rain off.

[rabbit trail: why does the hair on a person grow different directions on legs? down on the shins, up on the thighs? picture our probably hairier forebears squatting in the rain. the rain glides down the lower legs to the ground. the rain heads for the ground off the thighs, too, whcih means it has to go what we think of as up. good design for keeping a hairy person slightly drier. end of rabbit trail.]

Okay, so if one is spending a lot of time on hair, which is not very important, but is very visible, does this not seem to indicate a certain shallowness of personality? Lack of development? Immaturity? One expects this in the immature. Hence my remark "Any woman who hates her hair is not a woman yet."

If you have not accepted yourself to the small degree necessary to make peace with your hair, then you aren't grown up. Guys who mess with hair tonics and do comb-overs, they aren't grown up either. (I am one of those women who find bald guys sexy, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.) (Whihc doesn't explain why I wrote it here.)

Now paying no attention at all to grooming would not indicate maturity. It would indicate something, but not necessarily maturity. Being clean is good, and maybe looking conventional to a point that suits your own self. I am happy with the amount of time I spened on my "beauty" routine, and I'm happy with the result. I look okay: my appearance does not give men whiplash nor frighten small children.

Beyond hair: why do women wear makeup and it's not okay for men to wear makeup? I wear some, not a lot. Any old barn looks better with a little paint. I think it's perfectly fine for a man with light eyelashes to wear mascara, for instance, but it's not conventional, and so they don't do it. It's kind of silly. If you think you look nice with some makeup, wear it. Women who don't wear it are no better or worse than ones who don't. Obsessing over it is another thing.

How about shaving legs and armpits? Excuse me! "Underarms," I meant to say. Humph. Why do we do it? Why are women considered sexier-looking without hair? Adult humans grow body hair. It is a fact. So removing hair makes a person look younger, like a child. Why are women considered more attractive if they appear more childlike? You say that hair-free legs look better under nylons? Well, yeah. But why wear nylons anyway? Do men wear nylons?

I am sure glad I do not live in the days of corsets and petticoats. I'd be a rebel, a worse rebel than I am. I don't shave my legs unless I darned well feel like it, I don't wear much makeup, I will not wear heels or dye the gray out of my hair or get acrylic nails. Most women doon't do this stuff, and many women think that they must do this stuff. I think we who don't make those who feel they must nervous.

Who needs any of this stuff? Be sure of who you are, be sure you are choosing what you want to choose, and not doing things, "beauty" things, because you think you have to, or because someone sold you on it or guilted you into it. ("Kitty pits! God, Mom, that is SO gross!")

Be who you are, and like it. This is the essence of being a human being. A mature human being.

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:: JOURNAL HOME :: SUBSCRIBE TO THIS JOURNAL :: Click on Kathy Gabriel and read my stories :: 2-in-1 Romance by me (but the back cover's misspelled!. grrrrr.) :: November is National Novel Writing Month! :: The Feel Good Manual - happiness can be learned :: Mugs with the wet ferret :: Fractured Frugal Frieds - the best frugality site around :: The ferrets, and other pics by a talented local (very local) photographer :: Kettins_Bob's journal :: Clarion SF & F writing workshop :: Genevieve's journal (Clarion classmate) :: Phil's website (Clarion classmate) :: Nnedi Okorafor's blog (Clarion classmate) :: Online magnetic poetry :: Dave's interactive html tutorial :: Make a snowflake here - WARNING: Addictive! ::