Super Bowl 2015

[Content note: cissexism, death]

I'm a slacker. While in years past, I have dedicated a LOT of time and attention to Super Bowl ads, I barely even watched this year. In fact, for the first quarter I was actually out on a walk and the second quarter I was straightening up around my house. I did catch the Katy Perry halftime show (shrug) and a few ads, however.

I love the Always "Like A Girl" ad (although I had seen it before.)



I'M NOT CRYING, YOU'RE CRYING.

It's pretty damn cool this would air during the Super Bowl, which historically has skewed to being out right hostile to women.

While I do love the overall message of this ad, I know it's an AD and it has to be remembered within that context. As Jilliam Berman wrote at the HuffPo, "The ad may be the first time a [menstrual] care product was advertised during the Super Bowl and is a prominent example of how companies trying to woo women customers are shifting advertising tactics...The idea for the touchy-feely ad campaign came from a common business exercise: analyzing consumer research."

So at the end of the day, it's trying to sell us something. I do support advertisements moving toward this empowering perspective, but we can't ever forget their main motive.

I also caught the pretty horrific "your kid could be DEAD, DEAD I SAY!!!!" spot from Nationwide.




I have a feeling someone was fired over this.

I mean, if their goal was to stir controversy and discussion, they did, but I'm not sure the overwhelming negative response was worth it. It's a pretty classic case study in how treading the line of "in poor taste" can  back fire on you.

Otherwise, I didn't really catch any ads that stuck with me. Was there something horribly offensive that I missed?

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Stouffer's Commercials and Teen Girls

I might be looking too far into this, but a series of Stouffer's commercials caught my eye. First up, we have one released this past spring, which ran until June.

In it, teen girl, Katie, is on her cell phone at family dinner, but when she eats Stouffer's lasagna, she puts the phone down.



The message I got initially was "Our food will bring your family together for in-person interactions, get your kid off her phone, and actually talking to you."

Ok, I can get down with that...but then we have this latest installment, which is airing now and made me think a little differently. In this one, another teen girl is shown, this time telling her family a story that "had 30 minutes left." But then the girl takes a bite of Stouffer's Macaroni & Cheese and suddenly forgets the story.



This is what rubs me the wrong way...Now I can't help but wonder...what are they selling here? Not having to listen to your daughter tell a long story? But Stouffer's, I thought you wanted us to talk to our families more?

I know this is by far NOT the most serious gender issue, but I can't help but bristle a little when I see this because it doesn't exist in a vacuum. We live in a society that hates on teen girls, and makes me protective. Media routinely portrays teen and preteen girls as vapid and self-absorbed. It downplays their interests as frivolous and embarrassing. It uses them as an insult (think, "What are you, a 12 year old girl?" said to men.)

In reality, there might be no gender messages here at all, but with the 2 spots together, part of me can't help but see it as Stouffer's selling "how to deal with your annoying teen daughter!"

What do you think?

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Crap Marketing: Hail to the V "Wrong Body Wash" Commercial

Here's another installment in the litany of advertisements that I hate. This time from Summer's Eve:


[Video description below cut.]

There's something extra insulting about this commercial being, theoretically, aimed at women. But I guess it should come as no surprise to me that the company which has been praying on insecurities about vaginas for years would pull this crap. It is very base level, "Ewww girls!" misogyny 101 marketing (plus some cissexism thrown in for good measure.)

I guess because the public is becoming more and more aware about how Summer's Eve's original product is actually dangerous, so they're trying to diversify their product offerings.

But really, if you're trying to market a product specifically to women, why would your tactic be, "Let's make a 'joke' about how men feel emasculated by a gentle soap." So again, I'm asking, when will we ever stop the cultural association between femininity and lesser than? If Summer's Eve has anything to say about it, the answer is never.

Will we ever stop the cultural association between femininity and "lesser than?"

I'm really, really sick of the trend of appealing to men in a way which insults women and/or tries to set men apart by playing up stereotypical manliness and male superiority.

This is basic misogyny 101 stuff. It's literal "ewww girls!" bullshit.

The latest ad using this tactic comes from ECHO, the makers of outdoor power equipment:

Carl's Junior/Hardee's: Still Sucks

Sigh.

Carl's Jr. (Hardee's if you grew up in the Midwest like me) has a long history of gross, shitty, sexist advertising and their most recent ad is no different. I had seen it play a few times recently, but I didn't actually pay attention until last night. Here it is:




Yes, that's right. To eat their new Western X-tra Bacon Thickburger, Mystique from X-Men, the shape shifting bad ass, turned into a dude. With the tag lines, "Man Up" and "Eat like you mean it."

You can't make this stuff up.

And I'm not going to even waste my time explaining why this is sexist. That is totally self evident. I'm tired (and actually home sick today, so yeah.) Let me summarize it with a sweet, simple: Fuck off Carl's Jr.

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Super Bowl 2014 Commercial Watch. With Tweets! And Gifs!

Let the annual tradition continue!

I'm going to do things a little different this year. Instead of waiting until the night is long over, I'm going to semi-live blog this thing. (Only semi, because I'm not going to post it as I go, I'll wait until the end.) But it will be much more stream of conscious style than usual. Plus, I'm much more likely to remember who the companies involved if I just write it all up now instead of trying to remember tomorrow.

Let me make sure I put this out there: I hate football. I really, truly do. It's just not my thing. But the Super Bowl is such a spectacle and its ads are a huge artifact of pop culture and are pretty influential and iconic, so I have to do this, ya know? Companies spend so much on their ads tonight and try to have the best one, so let's see what they have.

If the stream of consciousness thing ain't for you, I'm going to put my TL;DR comments above the cut. If you would actually like to see where my brain went during the game, then the stuff under the cut is made for you!

TL;DR: Overall, things weren't the worst this year. If anything I was absolutely underwhelmed. BUT there were still some distinct disappointments. VW's "Wings" ad included both a penis size and sexual harassment joke while totally ignoring women as engineers. How did at least one person in the production of that not say, "Dude, you gotta have a woman engineer get her wings." Axe brought in some racism and sexism with their "Peace: Make Love Not War" spot, which is nothing surprising for their brand. On the other hand, Goldiblox is awesome but I knew that. Coke actually did something interesting. And my old nemesis GoDaddy had something very different to offer, but no one believes they aren't the same old jerks.

Teen Moms Don't Need More Shame

I had heard a little bit about an NYC anti-teen pregnancy campaign that was coming under scrutiny for stigmatizing young mothers, but I hadn't paid much attention until this morning. I caught an discussion on NPR's Tell Me More where women with differing views about the potential effectiveness of such ads discussed them. 

[Image text: poster of a little girl (maybe age 3) with text that reads "Honestly Mom...chances are he won't stay with you. What happens to me?" A caption reads "Are you ready to raise a child by yourself? 90% of teen parents don't marry each other."]

The discussion was pretty interesting and I recommend you either listen in or read the full transcript. One part of the discussion really stuck with me and made me SO WISH I could chime in.


Host Michele Martin asked panelist Natasha Vianna (who was a teen mom herself and is now a blogger and health care worker) about the shaming side of the campaign.

MARTIN: Well, I got to ask you about this, Natasha, though. What about shame? I mean shame is one of the reasons why we probably cut down on the drunk driving rate in this country. It used to be OK to have a couple beers and people all turned a blind eye to this. Shame is part of the reason we've cut down on smoking in this country. Is shame really such a bad idea?  

VIANNA: Well, I'm not sure, but thinking about it, sex is a basic biological urge. It's something that all humans do. It's not necessarily a choice of whether or not you are going to have sex, it's usually a matter of when you are going to have sex. So I think the issue here is, you know, either delaying sex for teens or encouraging them to use birth control and have safe sex if they decide to. But I don't think that shaming them and making, you know, teenage sex this negative behavior, it's not quite to make teen pregnancy disappear, it's definitely not.

Vianna hit on a important point that shame most likely won't decrease teen pregnancy...but there were a couple of points that struck me as I listened.

1) Teen parenting is nothing like drunk driving or smoking. With the shaming of drunk driving and smoking, there are two groups of people you can, in theory, positively influence a) people at risk for doing these things who might think twice and not do them and b) people who currently do them can learn that they should quit those behaviors. With these NYC ads, by creating a culture of shame, you might deter some teens from becoming parents who otherwise would have. But what is the implication for teens who are already parenting? That's not something they can really "quit," so all you've effectively done is disparaged their choices/circumstance/lifestyle, which brings me to my next point...

2) Teen moms already receive a ton of shame in our culture. To me, a good public service educates society about something they don't know, and there are many ways that a campaign aimed at reducing teen pregnancy could do that. (For example, they could provide the same statistics which explain about the proven difficulties teen parents face, and follow it up with somewhere to receive family planning services.) But instead, these ads contribute to the chorus of shame facing young parents.

The posters are really unfortunate, if you ask me, because as was pointed out in the Tell Me More discussion, they are just one part of a comprehensive campaign to lower teen pregnancy in NYC. But they are the piece getting the most attention, so it's ultimately the stigmatization that rises to the top.


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Superbowl Sexism Watch 2013!

Ah yes, it is time for my 5th annual Superbowl advertisement sexism watch!

I am happy to say that I declare this year's situation to be...drum roll...STATUS QUO! By that, I mean that gender stereotypes were out in full force BUT there wasn't a single commercial which set us back 50 years. And there were actually a few which were kinda good. Kinda.

Same old stereotypes and problematic content:
-Go Daddy's smart + sexy ad. A hot girl is sexy. A nerdy dude is smart. Together, they equal Go Daddy with a lot of disgusting kissing noises. YAWN. BLAH. OVER IT. I mean...for Go Daddy, it was actually pretty mild. For life, it was annoying as hell. Plus, when would it EVER be a nerdy girl with a hot guy? (Hint: never.)

-Audi had a commercial where a teen is going to prom stag, but he takes his dad's car and he feels like such a bad ass that he storms in and kisses the prom queen. I know that people want to pass this kind of thing as romantic or whatever  but I will ALWAYS be uncomfortable with the "sweeping her off her feet" mentality because HOW DO YOU KNOW SHE WANTED SWEPT? Consent is a simple concept and there was none in that commercial. In a perfect world, there's a whole back story that we can't see, but let's be honest, if we don't see it, it doesn't exist. All we (and millions of teens everywhere) see is the story portrayed. At best, it's really problematic. At worst: a contributor to our rape culture.

-The Calvin Klein shiny, ripped dude in underwear caught my, ahem, attention. Ok, I can admit it's a little interesting to see a guy so heavily objectified during the Superbowl, but 1) I don't think we win by having men be objectified too and 2) when a dude is objectified, he's still portrayed as strong, active, athletic, and a human. Women are so often reduced to being passive, idle, dismembered bodies.

-Amy Poehler for Best Buy. It kills my soul to put her on the "same old" side of things because I love her more than I have words for. BUT while the commercial was hilarious, she was kiiiiiiiiiinda being a dumb blonde and that's not my favorite thing ever.

-The Coke race series of ads. The group of women are showgirls while the men are adventurers. Dumb. I mean, yes, the women won, but still. Come on. Plus, it's being criticized for being racist.

-Speaking of racism, what about the VW ad where the white guy is "happy" epitomized by his appropriation of a Rasta/Jamaican accent? WHAT THE HELL? VW, you're better than that.

Interesting takes:
-The Hyundai ad with The Flaming Lips...it was a dad parenting and having a great time with his kids (and The Flaming Lips.) Not bad. Not bad at all. (Hipsters, be damned! I don't care if you're upset that TFL are now "mainstream.")

-Toyota had an ad with Kaley Cuoco where she can apparently grant wishes and they work through what the family wants. It did have a bit of a fatphobic undercurrent to it, but when the little girl wished to be a princess, she became a bad ass warrior one, in a scene that could have been out of Braveheart.

-Jeep had a long RAH 'MERICA ad voiced over by Oprah. (What did that cost!?) I'm not really into the ad in general, but when they show an American soldier at the end, it's a woman of color. So they get points for that, at least.

Like I said, overall there wasn't as much blatant awfulness as usual, but there's certainly so much more progress to be made. At least I can chalk up Superbowl 2013 to being the year where I didn't audibly groan at my TV...at least, not too loud. Ok, I did. Whatever.

Lana Del Rey in GQ: Sexual Expression or Objectification?

I'm sure by now you've seen this image floating around. Lana Del Rey was featured on GQ's cover nude as their "Woman of the Year." That alone is not surprising. But when you see the four other covers featured as the "men of the year" and notice that they're all wearing tuxes, the situation gets a bit trickier.

[Photo: the male covers featuring James Corden, Robbie Williams, Tinie Tempah, and John Slattery all in tuxes followed by Lana Del Rey nude]

I'm Sending You an Eye Roll, Verizon

You know, nothing makes me want to buy a cell phone more than a little gender stereotyping. Around mother's day, Verizon featured this commercial which shows a mom and daughter reduced to blubbering incoherent mess to the point of needing subtitles, at the prospect of living 4.2 miles apart.

It got on my last nerve. But now we have a nice "dads and grads" follow up which depicts a father and son who have such an emotionally stunted relationship that they're incapable of actually expressing how they feel, so we, again, require subtitles.

SIIIIIIIIGH.

I guess at least Verizon is making sure they offend everyone, right? Oh wait? That's not a good thing you say? Huh. Who knew?

Have You Heard of Julia Bluhm?

I'm a little late, but I would be remiss if I didn't give a huge shout out to an 8th grade girl making a big difference, Julia Bluhm. Julia started a petition at Change.org asking Seventeen Magazine to "give girls images of real girls." As her petition reads,

I’m in a ballet class with a bunch of high-school girls. On a daily basis I hear comments like: “It’s a fat day,” and “I ate well today, but I still feel fat.” Ballet dancers do get a lot of flack about their bodies, but it’s not just ballet dancers who feel the pressure to be “pretty”. It’s everyone. To girls today, the word “pretty” means skinny and blemish-free. Why is that, when so few girls actually fit into such a narrow category? It’s because the media tells us that “pretty” girls are impossibly thin with perfect skin. 

Here’s what lots of girls don’t know. Those “pretty women” that we see in magazines are fake. They’re often photoshopped, air-brushed, edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life.

The Sexification of Breast Cancer

While I was on my trip, the amazing Jessica Luther brought this to my attention. As she said:

THIS is ultimate result of breast cancer awareness campaigns that focus on breasts instead of people. This is exactly how campaigns that are motivated by goodness (supposedly) can be co-opted for misogynistic garbage like this. Why create the umbrella under which this bus can exist comfortably? It’s why I say repeatedly and LOUDLY: FUCK “SAVE THE TATAS” and all campaigns like them. That link (post and comments) will explain in detail why I hate this shit so much.

I'm not sure that I can add anything more to this discussion, because it has already been said, really well. I guess I can just add to the chorus of hatred for this campaign and all the "save the tatas" "I <3 boobies" BS that's out there. Time after time, the sexiness of breasts is pushed forward as what's really important instead of the saving of lives. As I tweeted to Luther when she first brought all of this up, "I'm OVER the sexification of breast cancer. When my mom had a chunk of her tit cut out her focus was LIVING not staying sexy."

I remember when my mom was first diagnosed with breast cancer and her course of treatment was not yet discovered. She, from the start, said over and over again "Just take them both if it means I'll live."  Now I know that mastectomies and other breast cancer treatments change a person's body and can certainly affect their personal sense of sexuality. I do not mean to diminish the pain this causes this in any way--but I think we can all agree that the really important thing to save is the person's life.

Furthermore, breast cancer so often receives way too much attention. It is pushed forward as the biggest health issue facing women, when in reality other diseases kill more women. But those diseases are not sexy! They don't include boobies! SO WHO CARES, AMIRIGHT?

I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm just so sick and tired of shallow, objectifying, dehumanizing, and meaningless "awareness" raising campaigns. It's old guys. Really, really old.

"Every" Shape? Looking at Sizesploitation

This post is a part of my “Out of the Kitchen” weekly column at The Progressive Playbook in which various news and pop culture items will be examined through a feminist lens.

This morning, I saw this ad floating around which claims to depict what Levi jeans look like on "different" women's body types, with the headline "Hotness comes in all shapes and sizes." (Clearly the subtitle should be: if you wear a size 4 or less.) Seriously, not to snark on these women, because this is not about their bodies...but they're all fairly the same. With the exception of marginally different bust size and butt positioning, they look almost indistinguishable. 

Super Bowl 46: A Shitty Gender Situation as Ever

So the culmination of the football season just happened...and, you know, there's a reason that the Super Bowl has its own tag here...while all other tags are much more general (like "education" or "sports.") It's because the Super Bowl is a yearly reminder that women just aren't that important.

This year was no exception. The whole thing went down in my hometown of Indianapolis. While I was really happy to have the eyes of the world on my old digs, I was epically disappointed that the advertisements are a case of same shit, different year. If an alien civilization had only access to Super Bowl commercials as artifacts of our way of life, they would find a pretty bleak picture of both men (sex driven meat-heads) and women (sexed up, throw away objects.)

The Problem with Princesses

It's pretty well tread feminist territory to hate on princess culture and Disney Princesses in specific.  It's not hard to figure out how Disney Princesses send little girls (and boys) the wrong messages. For years now, graphics like these two have been making their way around the internet:

I can admit, I was raised on Disney. And while I might not have intentionally thought about the messages it sent me, I can certainly agree that I wasn't exactly being empowered by them. And taking a look through the text on those images, it's a bit undeniable that princesses aren't exactly teaching our girls to be strong, independent women. 

I've been thinking about two other messages princess culture sends girls: stereotypical femininity is best and passivity. 

• Stereotypical femininity: Now, I have no problem with general girliness, but I can't get behind a world which encourages only one kind of girlhood to our young woman. It's just too gender binary--what about the girls who want to play in the dirt and drive cars? Or who just don't like wearing dresses? And PLEASE don't give me the "Mulan" excuse...she didn't get to succeed as a strong female, she had to BE a man to be seen as legit. And when all was said and done, her ultimate prize was ending up back at home with a dude.

• Secondly, it really, really bothers me how the overwhelming characteristic of the princesses is their passivity. Not only are they frequently lost to the whim of villains (who are often evil women, you can tell they're evil because they have dark hair, or they're fat or ugly) and men in the stories, but their very claim to fame/identity (their princessness) is something that they were granted at birth. Not something they fought/worked for or earned. 

And if you think that girls aren't affected by the princess stuff, I give you an anecdote. I was doing an economic literacy program with 6-8 year olds at the nonprofit I worked for in Indy a few years ago and we were discussing future career goals. One little girl asserted that she wanted to be a princess when she grew up. Sigh. My heart was a little bit broken in that minute and I couldn't help but feel that our society had done this little girl a REAL disservice. She quite literally believed that "princess" was a viable future career aspiration. I tried to work through the implausibility of that with her, but I'm not sure I made much headway. (Fortunately, the rest of the girls chose things a little more realistic.)

I know the inclination now is to say, "Aww, how cute. She just doesn't know what she said" and to chalk it up to her being so little. But the truth is I bet you'd be hard pressed to find a boy her same age who would choose something that illogical as his career goal. He might say something difficult to achieve (like astronaut) but not a career straight out of a fairy tale. Life just isn't teaching boys that their role is to be pretty and married. 

Anyway, the princessness of everything really grates on my nerves. I'm sure that this means that someday I am bound to have a daughter who eats and breathes pink, pretty, fluffy, butterfly-y things, much like what happened to strong, independent Julia with her daughter Sydney (in one of my favorite shows, Parenthood) last Halloween. However, much like Sydney, my hypothetical future daughter would have a home life which defied stereotypical gender roles and has outright discussions about gender, which is the environment I wish more kids encountered. In other words, I love this girl's parents: 

"My Heart Belongs to Daddy"...Ewwww

So earlier this week I saw My Week with Marilyn. Truthfully, I wasn't impressed. While I love Michelle Williams and I think she does a good job, it wasn't really an interesting film and Monroe just comes across as annoying, which, maybe she was. I don't know.

Anyway, I saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse, because, you know, I see everything there. One great thing about the Drafthouse is that it does not play commercials as you trickle in the theater. Rather, they have a pre-show composed of clips from music videos, TV shows, movies, and other pop culture artifacts, all which pertain to the "featured presentation."

So for My Week with Marilyn, they played a video, which I assume was from a Monroe movie (I know very little about her, other than what you can't escape from as a member of our society.) It was a song and dance routine of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." I couldn't find the exact video, but this should give you a good idea of what it sounded like:

Let's take a look at some of these lyics:

While tearing off a game of golf
I may make a play for the caddy
But when I do, I don't follow through
Cause my heart belongs to Daddy 

If I invite a boy some night
To dine on my fine food and haddie
I just adore, his asking for more
But my heart belongs to Daddy
...
If I invite a boy some night
To cook up some hot enchilada
Though Spanish rice is all very nice
My heart belongs to Daddy

Obviously, there are a number of things wrong here and this for real grosses me out. I am super uncomfortable with the inclusion of "daddy" into suggestive situations. I have no idea where this type of thing started, but Cole Porter's "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" is the earliest instance of this stuff that I've personally seen. Who knows? It might be as old as human civilization.

I can't help but let my mind go to all kinds of horrible situations when I think about this. And it all has to do with the connection that has been made between youth and sex; the infantilization of women.

Examples of this are everywhere in our youth obsessed society: sugar daddies and sugar babies, Brazilian waxes, baby talk, plastic surgery, and the list could go on. TV shows poke fun at it. Bloggers get mad about it. Advertisers have long capitalized on it, for example, in this old school ad:

Just as with Marilyn saying "da da da da DAD," there is undeniably both undertones of childishness and sexuality in here. I mean, come on. "Innocence is sexier than you think?"

This is a problematic combination.

Ok, listen. I am very much a "to each their own" type of person. If you really think that combining a childlike element in your ADULT CONSENSUAL relationship is for you, then whatever. So long as no kids are actually involved, live and let live. But I will say I am concerned about the power dynamics at play, just as I am with real age disparities. It makes me uncomfortable to have this cultural script of women as weaker, less informed, and dependent.

Ah well, I guess I'll just be over here enjoying a relationship that is blissfully devoid of any daddy references.

Mr. Charney...You Can't Fool Me

So, as Feministing just reported, American Apparel has decided to acknowledge that women up to a size 14 exist.

How very progressive of them.

Lori (at Feministing) tries to give a balanced view of this move, but I can't help but be much more cynical. My hatred of American Apparel and its sleazy CEO, Dov Charney, is well documented. All of my chief complaints about the company aren't rectified by them trying to broaden their customer base to include "plus sized" women...(by the by size 12-ers: Did you know you're plus sized!?)

At the end of the day, the man behind it all is still a scum bag, so all this move makes me think is that now their marketing team will have a more diverse pool of women to objectify in their ads.

Cool. Still hate that store.

Epically Bad Advertisement

This is all around the single stupidest advertisement I've ever seen...and vaginal products have notoriously bad advertising.

In case you need a full explanation why this is a horrifically bad ad, check out the post on Jezebel where I found this.

Dios mio.

UPDATE! Check out more from their horrible new *line* of ads!

What Will My Daughter Wear Someday?

I've been in a bit of a blogging funk lately. Not that I haven't had tons of fodder for a feminist blogger--people throwing around rape apologism in my life, the US ranking the lowest amongst the industrialized world for mothers, and South Dakota trying their damnedest to outlaw abortion, for example.

But I'm going to gloss over that and instead talk about this, which I found on Jezebel.

Some young girls' clothing available online is sexy or sexualizing and U.S. researchers say this contributes to socializing girls as sexually objectified woman.

Samantha Goodin...examined the frequency and nature of sexualizing clothing available for young girls -- children, not adolescents -- on the Web sites of 15 popular U.S. stores.

The study, published in the journal Sex Roles, finds of the 5,666 clothing items studied, 69 percent of the clothing had only childlike characteristics. Of the remaining 31 percent, 4 percent had only sexualized characteristics, 25 percent had both sexualizing and childlike features and 4 percent had neither sexualized nor childlike elements.

If you are surprised by these findings you either haven't shopped for tween clothing or worked with the tween demographic. It's truly appalling how clothing aimed at girl as young as toddlers has become "sexy." Now far be it from me to say that an adult woman shouldn't be able to wear whatever the hell she wants. But when 10 year olds are wanting mini skirts and an 8 year old has a low cut top, something has gone awry. It's particularly scary when you consider the fact that our society blames victims of sexual assault based upon what they were wearing. But there's also some pretty strict gender policing in place too, so if you're a little girl, you're pretty much damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I can't lie and pretend that I wasn't bombarded with sexualized images at a young age, but truthfully the grunge influences of the 90's yielded much more baggy and generally covering clothing than now. My favorite TV characters looked more like this:

And less like this:
The differences are subtle, but do make an impact. The makeup, the cut of the jeans, the heels and even the pose all suggest a maturity that 7-10 year old Ami didn't watch or try to emulate.

It all leaves me wondering what my hypothetical-future daughter will wear someday. What will her options be? Perhaps we will enter an era of throwback and girls' clothing will return to looking like little kid clothes. Or perhaps the androgynous hipsters will take over the fashion industry?

I don't know but either way I hope something changes before this becomes a reality.

I Used a Men's Razor Today

My razors were out--my dainty pink and purple razors that were clearly designed for my strictly feminine curves. So I stole one of Ronald's* manly black and green ones that are to be used on only grizzly man beards and for no other body hair removal purposes. Full stop.

The result? My legs are silky smooth like only a lady's should be.

It's so ridiculous how gendered personal care products are. Take a walk down any deodorant aisle, for example, and you can see the stark contrast. It's always reinforcing that little cultural narrative that women are flowery, dainty, and beautiful while men are bold, strong, and well...smelly. (Need I remind you of the long running deodorant slogan "Strong enough for a man, made for a woman?")

It's an absurd lie that we (or at least most of us) buy into. We get to believing that there is some substantive difference between the pink razor and the black one. Or the flower deodorant and the spice one.

We even put up with (and at times prefer) totally arbitrary pricing structures. For example, if a dude goes into an eyebrow threading place, he's going to pay more because, you know, all guys are automatically hairier than all girls, right? And if a guy goes into a hair salon, he's going to pay less because all guys hair cuts are short and thereby much more simple than all girls haircuts, right?

Somehow, I ain't buying that. But if you end gendered pricing schemes at these places, then people will get mad. The girl asked to pay the hairy rate for her brows will probably be just as offended as the guy asked to pay the female haircut rate. We're that invested in this cultural narrative.

I don't know, it's all just more or less annoying to me. So I'm just gonna sit here and enjoy my silky smooth (and gender appropriate) legs brought to me by my manly razor. So whatevs.



*By the by, HAPPY BIRTHDAY RONALD! <3