i rarely smile in the self portraits i take, i've noticed. let's try and change this.
this is also an excellent way to make me write at least a line or so every day. i wonder why i don't smile. i smile a lot in real life. i guess, i look at the image on the screen, and i dislike how the smile mutates my skin and folds it around my mouth, my nose, and i feel self conscious about it. which is a little silly, because i try not to follow the beauty myth. i am also feeling more and more self conscious about my eyebrows. i've plucked them since i was 12, or so, when my best friend told me i had a monobrow. every so often, even now, a well meaning friend offers to do it, or instructs me on how much nicer my face would look with two slightly more distinct eyebrows, rather than a line of finer hair linking between them, and finer hair below them. the shape of them is still distinct, it's just not defined and preened. it's taken me 14 years to stop the habit of keeping them in the kind, socially confined ideas of how female eyebrows should look, and each time i study one of these pictures, i just want to take to them and make myself look 'better', before i slow down, and remember that this is just our socially conditioned notion of how i, as a woman, am supposed to look. i've come to think of my leg hair as attractive, and i love it, i love the way it feels, and how the air feels against it. i will not remove pubic hair. it's simple. underarm hair was my second most recent concession, but probably the easiest, because i think it's sexy as all hell on women. the warmth of it, the way sweat clings to it, the scent, i find lovely.
now it's just the damn eyebrows. i look at them merging between my eyes, and i want to think of it as poetic. i want to focus on the way the hair feels when i touch it, and how different it feels to how it has for the last 14 years. i remind myself that there is no substantial reason that it is less attractive than were i spending an arduous amount of time in front of a mirror, carefully removing each hair to submit my face to a more typical version of attractiveness. and, in the end, i don't tackle it, i leave them messy and merged, but still, i feel that little bit uglier still. i'm looking forward to celebrating them more, the acceptance of, no matter how small, i can play out the politics of identity, and consumption, and gender, with my own body.
while cooking dinner (a delightful pasta 'thing' my New Friend Fiona I Met Off Facebook told me how to make) i pondered something i often do. gender in writing. and how much it shits me when i realise male friends who consider themselves well read have read such a small number of women writers without realising this. i had one debate with a drunk kid (ok, i too was extremely intoxicated, and belligerent, as i tend to get when drunk and debating with people who assume i am stupid) who listed all these male philosophers, but could not name a SINGLE significant female one. i think i was using that as a proof of either his ignorance of feminism, or philosophy, or ... something, i dunno. but it's surprising how common it is - men who read, but only really read male writers. i know teen boys are like this, largely, from when i was working in abookstore - to generalise, they are more comfortable reading about boys, while girls will read about people regardless of gender. perhaps this is why girls tend to be better socialised, their lack of fear of gender transgression?
to be slightly simplistic it comes back to the fact, simple, that i can wear pants, and it's not transgressive. men, however, wearing skirts to work, with a gender identity of male, would have a larger problem. for me to be 'transgressive' through not wearing make-up, or plucking my eyebrows is a far less transgressive act than for a man to wear make-up and tidily, openly, pluck his eyebrows. does this make men freed from these stupid, idiotic beauty rituals that push women into time wasting, consumer, object based activities for hours, or simply deprived of choice? however, as i've mentioned in a blog-entry-long-ago, i don't think that feminism is about choice. that to me is bullshit. and i've explained why before.
