the art of scruff.

Cross posted from ScubaNurse’s Blog.

I went to a shopping mall today to grab some birthday presents and do some chores.
While I was there I passed a stand designed to promote some kind of fancy-pants-hair-straightening-miracle- treatment-thingameebob. As I passed, looking completely disinterested and focused on something else, the two women working the stand went BANNANAS.
It was like a kid seeing candy in the checkout isle.
Like a girl spotting her crush.
Like a rugby fan in 2000 seeing Jonah Lomu.
Like a sceptic seeing a crack in someone’s iridology theory.
If my startled reaction hadn’t been to leap backwards, eyes wide and alarmed looking, I’m pretty sure they would have had me on the seat and being wrangled with the fancy-pants-hair-straightening-miracle- treatment-thingameebob in an instant.
As it was, they kept a bit of distance but began hollering at me (at the same time).
“Oh my god your hair is Amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing.”
“you would looooooove this product.”
“The curls are soooooooooooooo awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwsome”
“Do you love to straighten?”
“We can heeeeelp yoooooooooooooooooou.”

I vanished as fast as I could, trying very hard not to laugh.

One of the things I like very much with my curls is that I can deliberately appear homeless. If I don’t put product in it, it takes on a life of its own and develops a protective radius around me which strangers avoid.

I suspect they saw the hair and assumed no one would DELIBERATELY do that to themselves, and assumed they could save me from my ignorance.

Ha, I pity the fools.
The maintainance of hair that can look wayward and terrifying for doing chores, then look fab for tapas with my best friend tonight is ENTIRELY deliberate, and I feel sorry for you, only using your hair for good, not evil.

Embrace your inner anti-social hair, and enjoy the benefits you shall reap.
Shorter queues
Less annoying shop keeper questions.
No small talk (people assume you are having a REALLY bad day, and don’t ask)
People you know pretend they never saw you (see above)
Staff will help you efficiently without silly banter.
Clothing shop staff automatically direct you to the sales racks.

Brilliant. Have fun!

On an associated note, I went to go and put on make-up last night and couldn’t find my mascara or key pieces anywhere.
I found them in my work bag which I haven’t opened since I left almost three weeks ago.
No make-up in three weeks, and I didn’t even notice. I’m going to call it effective minimising of annoying chores while on holiday.

Mum raised a good daughter.

Covering up the bald spot

Lauredhel Hoyden has found what I think must be one of the most squicky baby products ever: toupees for baby girls. (Sidebar: Lauredhel, how on earth do you find these things?!!!)



That's right. If you're concerned that your baby girl's soft fine short hair means she's not pretty enough (gah!) or even worse, makes her look like a boy (oh noes - gender confusion.... how terrible), then you can get her a headband with false hair attached.

There's just so many things wrong with this.

For extra squickiness, here's the testimonials from the Baby Bangs site:

I absolutely LOVE the Baby Bangs! concept!'--"Very cute and apropos in our image-conscious modern world. I will be getting these as shower gifts for any of my friends having a baby girl.

GOOD LUCK SELLING THEM! -- THEY REALLY MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE ON THE BABIES. I CAN'T BELIEVE THE CHANGE IT MADE IN EMILY. THANK GOODNESS SHE HAS HAIR NOW. BEAUTIFUL BLONDE RINGLETS. I WILL SEND YOU SOME PICS. WE SHOULD BE GETTING HER THREE YEAR OLD PICS DONE SOON.

The anti-chick

I once attended a Pride Week function where the speaker talked about how each of us 'acts out' feminity, masculinity, or some other gender identity of our choosing. She was expressing the idea that our gender identity isn't something unchangeable that we're born with, or even something that's so completely bludgeoned into us by society that we have no choice in how we look or act. There's heaps of social pressure surrounding how we should be masculine or feminine, but we still have some say in the matter. A woman in the audience piped up, 'I know what you mean. Look at women from Southland - they look more like dykes than we do!'.

It made me chuckle. I grew up in rural Southland, and the woman's comment gave me a strong memory of the sort of women I grew up with: standard issue bowl haircuts, no-nonsense corduroy trousers. These women raised families, worked on farms and, as often as not, had paid jobs too. They were relentlessly practical because they had to be, doing everything from feeding out hay to doing the farm books to whipping up a batch of scones.

Like my rural foremothers, I don't quite get the point of girl stuff. I do enjoy mucking about with make up, clothes and hair dye from time to time; but these are leisure activities, not an oppressive uniform, and certainly not things that my life feels incomplete without. I had kids quite young, so I've never had the disposable income to get fancy. And I've never much cared. To me, elaborate clothes/hair/makeup/shoes are a barrier. If I can't run about with my kids, do stuff in the garden, carry out my dubious home improvements, I don't feel like me.

Consequently, I don't see the point of Sex and the City. I don't see the point of clothes that look great but make you feel cold. I don't see the point of fabrics which kids' snot doesn't wash out of easily. I don't see the point of trying to have nice fingernails when I'll only get dirt underneath them. I make some concession to the sartorial demands of the workplace, but most of the time I'm a savage. And it's not just that I subscribe to rather old school, second wave views of the beauty industry (although, by and large, I do) - I really enjoy wearing trackpants and doing messy stuff. Nor do I consider myself a tomboy; I just have my own way of being female.

For the most part, I get away with my slight lack of conformity, including in the workplace. I have a sense, though, that this is because I'm a good worker, and I can hold my own against people who might otherwise look down their noses at me. Despite my generally cheerful, self-actualised disposition, I do feel inferior from time to time when I compare myself to women with more money to spend on beautification than I have, and more knowledge of how to look good. I have bleak moments of not feeling like a 'proper' woman.

It's not all doom and gloom, of course. My partner of almost twelve years once told me the reason he was first attracted to me. It was because I had boots and a shabby green jersey and plenty of unladylike left wing opinions on everything. It's a description which most women would rather not have made of them, but I kind of like it!

Feminist gets a wax, anaesthetises crotch with feminism.

Welcome to another infrequent installment of 'Lowering the Tone: Third-Wave Drivel with Ms Enid Tak-Entity'. Warning: contains swearing and references to 'catbags'.

It is a ridiculous state of affairs to have life rudely inform you that one does not learn everything about the state of womanity through reading Cosmo. But I was indeed surprised to recently discover that my current 'phase of life' is coming with some strange 'changes'. No, I'm not fourteen, nor fifty-five. But Cosmo and Cleo never said that the late twenties-early thirties female 'sexual peak' was a result of fluctuating androgen levels which could grant you the joy of getting hairier, zittier, and prone to moronic crushes on unsuitable people. No-one ever mentioned that just as we were getting some kind of control over our lives, that we had a good chance of being hit by a hormone bus and reincarnated as horny, greasy, idiotic teenage boys. I guess it explains Sex and the City. But yeah, thanks a lot Cosmo - or Jezebel or Feministing or Ms. or Jane or even Margaret fucking Atwood - you could have said something ladies. God knows, I was listening. But no, you were too busy being sex-positive third waver propagandists.* Sheesh.

So - I booked my first ever wax at age 30 last weekend. A bikini wax. Call me fussy, but the very slight increase in hairiness, noticeable only to me, was really starting to be irritating. I am not of hairy stock; some phenotypes are just programmed that way. I went through puberty half a lifetime ago, and was well past graduation when I first read an article around the turn of the century, that mentioned asshole-waxing. 'Christ, what girl has hair on their asshole?' I thought to myself at the time.

Eight years later: 'Ah.'

As a naturally unhairy feminist, I've always been able to be offhandedly smug about not shaving or waxing anything, ultimately because there was never any aesthetic demand for it, rather than because of retro-chic radical principle. But this year, fate finally played its bathetic hand, and as Carrie Bradshaw herself might have put it if her character had ever really been writing about sex rather than (sigh) feelings: 'Just as the world was about to get rid of one unwelcome Bush, the universe laid a brand new one on me.'

I just did not like it. It was annoying. It's the northern hemisphere summer right now people, so hot that I'm tempted to wax my head too. Some people think waxing is feminist self-actualisation, while others think that not waxing is feminist self-actualisation. Would waxing both head and my crotch cancel out the feminist or anti-feminist powers of the other end, leaving me neutral? For some reason, this makes me think of how Western porn has women dressed as hookers, but with the hairless crotches of children, while Japanese porn has women dressed as demure schoolgirls, but with completely untended grown-up pubic hair. My depilatory choice however, was rather more influenced by the weather than by porn or feminism. Was it a feminist experience getting hair yanked off my catbag? Did it make me more confident and empowered? Or was it an oppressive moment of false-consciousness and conformity, consigning me to Britneyland? Neither really: it made me minimally poorer, momentarily surprised, and slightly more comfortable in the long run.

But most importantly, drunk.

The advice from the internet and from friends for one's first ever crotch-wax was: get stoned and drunk. The first wax is always the worst, that much is widely acknowledged. I feared that, like chicken-pox, the older you are when you get it, the worse it would be.

Unable to score weed last minute, I swallowed three Nurofen, let them sink in while monitoring the gradual loss of my motor control, then swilled down a triple shot of vodka. Feeling no pain, indeed drifting out of my body, I shambled around the corner to the fancy-pants Clarins Institute. 'This is my first wax ever!' I said in a language other than English. 'Ooh la la', the attendant may well have responded. 'Don't worry though,' I said, 'I'm trashed!'

As the more serious-minded ladies of THM know, women who drink are just asking for punishment. But first, I was clad in what I can only describe as a surgical g-string, and laid out on a comfy leatherette chaise which put me in mind of nothing so much as a psychiatrist's couch. A really nice psychiatrist, with a soothing voice and no hang-ups about cigars. Staring straight up, my eyes were massaged by the soft ceiling accent of a circular blue sky. Wispy clouds drifted in a gentle vortex pattern, seemingly wafted along by calming limpid music that sounded like cucumber water dripping on sleeping eyelids.

rrrrrip 'Yaaaiii! I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm fine. Oh. There's more isn't there.'

The famed misogynist Milan Kundera lyrically examined the etymological and spiritual roots of compassion in The Unbearable Lightness of Being - in a nutshell (somewhere between the S&M role-play and the dog dying) we must experience each other's suffering before we can claim understanding. Why do so many women put themselves through the pain of stilettos, corsets, weave-tracks, or getting their pubic hair ripped out? In my Nurofen-and-Smirnoff reverie, whimpering just a little at each fresh rip, I wondered briefly if I was on an experimental oppression safari. Revisited by this second adolescence, it had seemed like a real lark to embark on my last ever teenage rite of passage. Like losing one's virginity all over again, which was, let's admit, like a holy mission at the time in terms of absolute determination to get it done and dusted, just to know. You knew it was going to hurt, but that was how you knew that you'd be able to take the pain of the rest of your life. It made sense at the time because teenagers are dramatic. Then later, you chill out, realise that sex is actually for enjoyment, and abandon No.1 Shoe Warehouse plastic heels for Kumfs and hoodies. (This, by the way, is the stereotype overseas of New Zealand women. That we are not drama queens, wear hoodies and comfortable shoes, and are kind of slutty. All attributable to early suffrage.)

My waxeuse's name was Virginie. She was very skilled, and it was mostly not that bad. The drugs and booze were definitely the right move. Half the time it wasn't much more of a shocker than ripping off a medical bandage. The right side was surprisingly painful though compared to the left. More neurology on the dominant side - there is no limit to the things you can learn from your vulva. As a finisher Virginie asked if I wanted 'a little off the top?' or 'a little off the sides?' just like an oldschool barber. Hey, I was drunk and high, I just gurgled a little, waved my hand. Yowch. Top and sides were stingy. I looked down and it appeared she'd given me a mohawk. I had the Maddox.

I was most apprehensive about the asshole, but it didn't hurt at all. The asshole, as I should well have expected, can take a lot of punishment.

Afterwards, I was still so boozed that I had difficulty reattaching my strappy gladiatoresque sandals proudly purchased from Kumfs. Wobbling out, and picking up a discount lipstick, "I couldn't help but wonder" if, despite this experience being embedded in a hundred years of feminist theoretical context, I had just successfully waxed my vag completely outside the field of either feminism or anti-feminism.

Well sure, it was still locked into gender theory, but that's neither here nor there, and you'll never be free of that shit anyway.

If you're determined to be superfeminist in every act of your life, I guess there are a few points you could score in this context. High end crotch-waxing will:
1. Give you a really weak example of physically arduous or painful experiences suffered by privileged women, from which you can extrapolate the far more arduous and painful experiences suffered by non-privileged women, and thus motivate your progressive activism through having re-engaged with real-world, everyday experiences outside the ivory tower. Right on.
2. Provide an opportunity to generously tip poorly paid immigrant female service workers, and encourage them to unionise.
3. Give you a great excuse to get shitfaced outside of the judgmental purview of ALAC.


*except for Margaret Atwood, duh.