In which Lizzi goes on a feminist rant. [long ranty post warning]

I had an exchange with someone this morning after I heard him complaining about the lady who had made him pasta for lunch. Please bear in mind, this is an adult male, forty-plus if he's a day.

"She's a real Italian," he said, "got a moustache and hairy armpits and hairy legs... disgusting."

At which point, I piped up and said that I have hairy armpits and hairy legs - so what? And then I explained that it's cold out still (oh, BC how I love thee), I'm covered up, so why am I going to care about something no-one can see when it takes an extra ten minutes in the shower and I could be doing useful things in those ten minutes like making a lunch or whatnot?

His response was that I disgusted him. That it's gross. That sure, I can do what I want to, but it's revolting.

I chose not to answer aloud. This is my answer.

I don't shave my legs or my armpits when I don't have to, but I don't know a single man who shaves his legs if he's going to be wearing shorts, or going swimming. There is no earthly reason why I am therefore more disgusting than my imaginary example man. I shower regularly, I wear clean clothes. I am not gross.
So why am I disgusting if I choose, for practicality, to abstain from an optional step in the hygiene procedure? And why is a man who chooses not to shave his face (oh, another optional step!) not equally disgusting?
Is it perhaps, then, that I am disgusting to you because you feel that I should conform to your ideals of what a woman should be like? Well, let me go back to an earlier post to remind you that no-one should come from a cookie-cutter. Just as we're different sizes, we're different people. My sister wants to be a homemaker, and doesn't want a career. I am not my sister. I'm actively pursuing a career. Neither opinion is wrong, even though they're nearly polar opposites, and I have to say, I don't always understand my sister's opinion, but I can allow for a difference. In the same way, just because you have a certain idea of what womanhood and femininity should be, doesn't mean you get to invalidate my understanding of what womanhood and femininity are for me.

Actually, if you think about it, men should have less opportunity to criticise these things, because they are not women. Let's put it in very ridiculous terms, overstating the concept for clarity.
Take, for example, an orange and a fish.
The orange could say to the fish, "You are not swimming properly. Don't they teach you these things in school?"*
Or the fish could say to the orange, "You're not juicy enough. Try harder."
Neither of these things make sense, because the orange is not the fish, and therefore cannot determine between proper swimming and useless flapping about in the water; but neither is the fish the orange, and therefore cannot see what difficulty it would be to change its very nature and makeup.

I use the analogy both ways, because women equally ought not to tell a man what manhood and masculinity are made up of, but the issue under scrutiny right now is chiefly men specifying womanhood and femininity. Because to be honest with you, I see the latter much more than the former.

And one of the things that really tweaks me the wrong way is the act of womanhood being defined on my behalf. I am a woman and therefore I have womanhood; I am a female and therefore I am feminine. My understanding of that cannot be thrown out as being outlying data. Doing so would negate the fact that I have a gender, whether or not my femininity is different from your perception of what it ought to be. And this holds true for every other woman you will ever meet, even if we all approach womanhood from our own angles and viewpoints, it's still womanhood because we are women. So even though my sister and I are very different in what we want from life, I cannot say she's more or less feminine than I, or that she's more or less of a woman than I.

Anyway. Wasn't intending to make this a full-on rant, but it sort of turned into one. My apologies. And semi-congratulations, if you read the whole thing. I won't judge if you didn't, though. Also, I didn't realise I was this emphatic of a feminist. Heh.

Oh, and for the non-redditors, yesterday's post title beginning with TL;DR - it's shorthand for Too Long; Didn't Read. You're welcome.

Toodles.

*pun very much fully intended.

In which a lot of stuff happened.

Well. Yesterday was an interesting day.

Last night on my way home from work, my phone decided that the SD card I had had in it for several months was "damaged". When I tried to plug it into my computer, I got a "could not read Superblock" error. Tried all kinds of things, and I think I ended up borking my computer somehow - because gnome now won't load, suddenly. But before I got to that point, I figured I may as well format the SD card, because I wasn't getting that back any time soon - losing me every photo I ever took (luckily all the important ones were on Instagram...) and all the music, so I had to load that back on after, and now I have all my music back. Doesn't save my photos, but that's life...
So back to my poor computer.
Lucky me, a year and a half ago, I decided to make a bootable USB of Ubuntu 12-something, or possibly 11.10, I'm not quite sure which, but it doesn't matter really, the point being that I got my computer to boot off the flash drive - and it happily loads up the hard drive as an external drive, so I can still get to all my files, yay!
BUT, unluckily, the password for the wifi at my house is stored under my regular profile, and I can't access it from the external boot, nor can I get it out of the wifi settings on my phone, it's all hidden and stuff.
BUT, luckily again, I rooted my phone. So I googled (from my phone) on how to access the wifi password file, opened a terminal window on my phone (because I have one of those - finally it comes in handy!) and did this:
$ su
# cat /system/etc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf
and scrolled through to find the one I wanted. So now I have the wifi password, so I can access the internet from my poor borked laptop.

Fortunately, without the external boot, I can still log into the command line (it's just gnome that's not working), so I suspect the next thing I will have to do is figure out how to log into the wifi from the command line (shouldn't be too difficult, right?) and run a proper update (did I mention I'm still running Ubuntu 11.04?) on my computer, so it should then overwrite the borked files and still keep all my data. Hopefully.

So all that happened, and then I check facebook from my phone and find that my dear parents got in an accident while they were across the border for their 25th anniversary, and while they're fine, the car is totalled. *sadface*

And then on top of all that, UFV got my first cheque. Because I'm working a co-op, it's technically a 6-credit course, meaning I have to pay for it. I got paid for 7 or so days of work (first cheque, it's always the way of it), so I got 690-something deposited into the bank yesterday morning. All well and good. 40 went straight to my cellphone bill (because I haven't paid that in ... well ... a little while - I just haven't had the money) leaving me with 650-odd. Fine. I went to UFV after work yesterday to register and pay, and found that the cost of the co-op is 629.76. Fuck.
I wish they had some kind of deal such that the employer would take a portion out of each of my paycheques and just send it straight to UFV, thus spreading that 630 over the course of four months, rather than a lump sum directly after the end of the last semester when my money's running thin anyways. Thank God my landlords are gracious and will wait til my next cheque to take rent out, and thank God I have a wonderful friend who's buying me groceries today - but not everyone has that. It's stupid, in my opinion, that they don't have such an arrangement.

Yeah. Life has been interesting.

Also, a quick note pursuant to yesterday's warning of long and different blog posts coming:
apparently 1 & 2 Tim and Titus are very possibly (indeed, very probably) not Pauline epistles. This blew my mind, and makes my argument even stronger. See: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/goodspeed/ch21.html.
Yes, I will be blogging about the Bible and Stuff and Things... I warned you it would be different.

So that's it for today.
Toodles.

REAL people...

Last night, I was scrolling through my facebook news feed, as one does, and I saw a photo someone had 'shared'. It was a photo of a woman's belly covered in pregnancy stretch marks, and it bore a caption that (summarised) called for people to post photos of themselves, no matter what they looked like, to fight the Photoshop culture of media.

It also included statements like:
"Real women have stretch marks."
"Real women have curves."
"Real people..."

Don't get me wrong, here. While I am all for resisting the prevalence of Photoshop in advertisements and the like, I cannot help but be equally resistant to campaigns saying that REAL people are a certain way.

"Real women have stretch marks." So, because I've never had a child and therefore have no pregnancy stretch marks, I'm not a real woman? I beg to differ. I have breasts and a vagina just like every other female on the planet. Just because I haven't had children yet doesn't make me less than someone who has. And what about those few women who get to have children without the stretch marks? Does that make them not real, somehow? No, they're real just as much as I am.

"Real women have curves." Don't hate me, but I'm 5'9"ish, and 120ish lbs. I have always been a stick, a bean-pole, a twig, tiny, skinny, thin, slender - there's no end to the words that get applied to my body type. I have a small chest and nearly no hips. I am under no misapprehensions about what shape and size I am. Yes, I'm very close to the magazine ideal. But. Phrases like "real women have curves" make me feel angry - that the idea that having fewer curves makes me less of a woman. I'm not this way on purpose, I am just the size I am and have always been. Am I inadequate simply because I'm thin?

"Real people..." I realise all these "Real People" campaigns that get started are an effort to help people's self-esteem by accepting and de-marginalising the larger/stretch-marked/what-have-you people, but the problem is, this re-marginalises those who are thinner/scar-less/what-have-you. I'm not less than human simply because of what I look like, but neither are you.

So, I'd like to argue, with all due respect and consideration, that REAL people are kind, REAL people are accepting, and REAL people are all different sizes and appearances. REAL people don't marginalise anyone, REAL people don't judge books based solely on their covers, and REAL people don't allow others to judge or bully anyone.

Real people love.

Toodles :)