Saturday, May 28, 2011

Coochies and va jay jays... a rant about a major pet peeve

These are words I really hate:

snatch
cooch
cooter
hoo-ha
beaver
cha-cha
and especially VA JAY JAY

It drives me insane when women have to use some cutesy non-word to describe a part of their anatomy because somehow there is something wrong and offensive about using the correct terms to describe our bodies.  And while we're on the subject...

Nobody shaves their vagina.  Hair does not grow on your vagina. The vagina is "the genital canal in the female, leading from the opening of the vulva to the cervix of the uterus"*.
vulva is "the external genital organs of the female, including the labia majora, labia minora, clitoris, and vestibule of the vagina"*.

Now I know men have plenty of names for their parts both medically correct and otherwise:
cock, dick, balls, etc, but they are not cutesy baby words made up because men are afraid of the words "penis" and "testicles". 

These are words I do not hate:

pussy
cunt

These words are also used as insults.  Pussy denotes cowardice.  Cunt is a term used for a woman who is perceived as hostile, strong-willed, opinionated, moody, angry, etc...
No one calls a man a cunt.  Calling a man a pussy is highly insulting.  These words attempt to link the female anatomy to characteristics and behaviors that are usually undesirable in our society.  To be a pussy is to be something less than acceptable.  Used in a derogatory manner these words associate "negative" aspects of personality with femaleness, ie: to be cowardly is to be female and conversely, to be female is to be cowardly.  These words used as insults even go so far as to create a subconscious legislation of what is "socially correct" female and male behavior. 
I call bullshit.
Pussy and cunt are powerful words and using these powerful words in a positive manner
to describe vulvas/vaginas can be one way to strip the negative connotations of such words while giving them a new power and a positive association- one that females can claim as ours and ours alone. 
I like the word pussy partly because I like kitties.  The pussy between my legs is warm and covered with soft downy hair.  I purr when it is petted the right way.
Cunt is strong and powerful.  Cunts have thunderous wonderful spasmodic orgasms.  Cunts bleed in lunar cycles.  Cunts give birth.  Life comes from cunts. The epitome of creation comes from cunts.   

I have a vagina. I have a vulva. I also have arms, legs, fingers, toes, a nose, lips, ears.  I am not embarrassed to say these words, but maybe I should start referring to my nose as my "sniffy" or my "noo-noo"... that would make about as much sense as "hoo-ha" or va jay jay, now wouldn't it?

Definitions from The American Heritage® Medical Dictionary Copyright © 2007, 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Accessed via http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/

Transgender Clownfish? Gender Diversity Lesson at California School Riles Critics

By Joshua Rhett Miller and Claudia Cowan
Published: May 25, 2011  foxnews.com

A gender diversity lesson at a California elementary school that featured single-sex geckos and transgender clownfish has angered conservative critics, who question its appropriateness for in-class instruction.
Students in all grades at Oakland's Redwood Heights Elementary School got an introductory lesson on the topic on Monday. Fox News was allowed to sit in on the lessons, which included teachings to kindergartners and fourth-graders. 
The lessons were presented by an outside anti-bullying educational group called Gender Spectrum, paid for with a $1,500 grant from the California Teachers Union. 
Joel Baum, director of education and training for Gender Spectrum, taught the classes. In the kindergarten class he asked the 5- and 6-year-olds to identify if a toy was a "girl toy" or a "boy toy" or both. He also asked which students liked the color pink, prompting many to raise their hands, to which he responded that that boys can like pink, too. 
n the fourth-grade class, Baum focused on specific animal species, like sea horses, where the males can have or take care of the children. He suggested that even if someone was born with male “private parts” but identified more with being a girl, that was something to be “accepted” and “respected.”
Students in the class were given cards, which included information on all-girl geckos and transgender clownfish, to illustrate the variations in nature that occur in humans, too. 
“Gender identity is one’s own sense of themselves. Do they know themselves to be a girl? Do they know themselves to be a boy? Do they know themselves to be a combination?” Baum said. "Gender identity is a spectrum where people can be girls, feel like girls, they feel like boys, they feel like both, or they can feel like neither.”
Oakland Unified School District spokesman Troy Flint told FoxNews.com that the two-day lesson plan for all 350 students at the school was intended to emphasize that not all children will conform to gender norms. 
"What it does emphasize is that there are differences," Flint said. "And that not all children will conform to gender norms around areas such as clothing or hair, or the colors they prefer. We should be accepting of these differences in the interest of creating an environment where all children are welcome." 
Flint said the two-day lessons were given to students in age-appropriate groups, with kindergartners and first-grade students paired together. 
Second- and third-grade students were another group, and another was made up of fourth- and fifth-grade students, he said. The lessons, which were required under school district policy to address issues of gender identity, were not intended to advocate a "particular lifestyle," Flint said. 
"But we are trying to promote a level of acceptance that will allow all students to participate in school equally, and that is an important equity issue, which is supported by federal, state and local law, as well as school board policy," he said. 
Principal Sara Stone has said the lessons are part of a larger effort to provide a more welcoming and safer classroom environment. 
Critics, however, were unmoved by that explanation, claiming the lesson does not represent the values of most Oakland residents. 
"This instruction does not represent the values of the majority of families in Oakland," attorney Kevin Snider of the Pacific Justice Institute said in a written statement. "Though to many this may seem extreme, based upon some of the bills now pending in the Capitol, such as SB 48, this will be the new normal in California’s K-12 public schools." 
Brad Dacus, president of The Pacific Justice Institute, told Fox News that three families chose to keep their kids home that day. 
Legal counsel is now being provided to parents who opposed the lessons, Snider said.
"Unfortunately, many parents in the school are unaware that this is being taught," he said. "If you are a parent of a child enrolled in a school where this instruction is taking place, you may consider keeping your child home on days when this material is being presented." 
Flint said all parents were informed of the lesson in advance, adding that just three families kept their children home from school during the lessons. 
In a blog posting on the website for Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, Erin Brown said the plans were the latest example of a "gender-bending" agenda infiltrating mainstream culture. 
"This is only the latest example of what seems to be a New-Age, gender-bending agenda pushed into the mainstream media by those who refuse to accept the traditional sex differences between men and women," Brown wrote. 
To further illustrate her point, Brown also cited a Toronto couple who has riled some for refusing to assign a specific gender to their third child and an advertisement released earlier this year by clothing company J. Crew that depicting a 5-year-old boy with pink toenails. 
The Associated Press contributed to this report

Monday, May 23, 2011

Queens Lawmaker Proposes "Panic Button" for Hotel Housekeepers

Monday, May 23, 2011 | Updated 10:43 AM EDT

A New York assemblyman says he wants the state to require hotels to provide their housekeepers with an emergency "panic button" that would help protect them from sexual assaults on the job.
Assemblyman Rory Lancman, a Democrat from Queens, said he will introduce the bill Monday. The move comes a week after former International Monetary Fund Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged with sexually assaulting a Manhattan hotel maid.
"We send hotel workers, housekeepers into rooms by themselves without any other staff, without any other security," Lancman said at a news conference Sunday outside the Sofitel Hotel, the site of Strauss-Kahn's alleged sexual assault of a hotel maid last week.
Lancman said attacks on hotel housekeepers are common, and though the incidents "may not be as brutal or as sensational" as the allegations in the Strauss-Kahn case, housekeepers are often inappropriately groped or propositioned.
Lancman referred to a New York Times article on Saturday highlighting the sexual affronts hotel housekeepers have long had to face.
he proposed legislation calls for hotels to provide a small device for housekeepers that would, at the touch of a button, trigger an audible alarm or alert hotel security.
He estimated a cost of $20 to $40 per device, though he said it would cost "significantly less" for hotels to buy in bulk.
The Associated Press said a review of court documents and news reports found at least 10 other hotel housekeepers who say they've been attacked in the U.S. in the last three years.
Labor groups said other cases are kept quiet because the victims are illegal immigrants or because hotels are wary of scaring off guests.

Source: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Queens-Lawmaker-Proposes-Panic-Button-for-Hotel-Housekeepers-122419684.html

Wouldn't this be a great idea?  Not just for hotel housekeepers but for any worker who enters residences/hotel rooms alone... like one of those life alert necklaces... maybe even with a GPS that can be activated for emergency services...  In the past I've noticed that several hotel housekeepers may work a floor at once... I don't know if this is common practice, but a call button could be really good additional measure to ensure safety. 

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Parents keep child's gender secret


May 21, 2011
Jayme Poisson
STAFF REPORTER

“So it’s a boy, right?” a neighbour calls out as Kathy Witterick walks by, her four month old baby, Storm, strapped to her chest in a carrier.
Each week the woman asks the same question about the baby with the squishy cheeks and feathery blond hair.
Witterick smiles, opens her arms wide, comments on the sunny spring day, and keeps walking.
She’s used to it. The neighbours know Witterick and her husband, David Stocker, are raising a genderless baby. But they don’t pretend to understand it.
While there’s nothing ambiguous about Storm’s genitalia, they aren’t telling anyone whether their third child is a boy or a girl.
The only people who know are Storm’s brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, a close family friend and the two midwives who helped deliver the baby in a birthing pool at their Toronto home on New Year’s Day.
“When the baby comes out, even the people who love you the most and know you so intimately, the first question they ask is, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’” says Witterick, bouncing Storm, dressed in a red-fleece jumper, on her lap at the kitchen table.
“If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” says Stocker.
When Storm was born, the couple sent an email to friends and family: “We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...).”
Their announcement was met with stony silence. Then the deluge of criticisms began. Not just about Storm, but about how they were parenting their other two children.
The grandparents were supportive, but resented explaining the gender-free baby to friends and co-workers. They worried the children would be ridiculed. Friends said they were imposing their political and ideological values on a newborn. Most of all, people said they were setting their kids up for a life of bullying in a world that can be cruel to outsiders.
Witterick and Stocker believe they are giving their children the freedom to choose who they want to be, unconstrained by social norms about males and females. Some say their choice is alienating.
In an age where helicopter parents hover nervously over their kids micromanaging their lives, and tiger moms ferociously push their progeny to get into Harvard, Stocker, 39, and Witterick, 38, believe kids can make meaningful decisions for themselves from a very early age.
“What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It’s obnoxious,” says Stocker.
Jazz and Kio have picked out their own clothes in the boys and girls sections of stores since they were 18 months old. Just this week, Jazz unearthed a pink dress at Value Village, which he loves because it “really poofs out at the bottom. It feels so nice.” The boys decide whether to cut their hair or let it grow.
Like all mothers and fathers, Witterick and Stocker struggle with parenting decisions. The boys are encouraged to challenge how they’re expected to look and act based on their sex.
“We thought that if we delayed sharing that information, in this case hopefully, we might knock off a couple million of those messages by the time that Storm decides Storm would like to share,” says Witterick.
They don’t want to isolate their kids from the world, but, when it’s meaningful, talk about gender.
This past winter, the family took a vacation to Cuba with Witterick’s parents. Since they weren’t fluent in Spanish, they flipped a coin at the airport to decide what to tell people. It landed on heads, so for the next week, everyone who asked was told Storm was a boy. The language changed immediately. “What a big, strong boy,” people said.
The moment a child’s sex is announced, so begins the parade of pink and barrage of blue. Tutus and toy trucks aren’t far behind. The couple says it only intensifies with age.
“In fact, in not telling the gender of my precious baby, I am saying to the world, ‘Please can you just let Storm discover for him/herself what s (he) wants to be?!.” Witterick writes in an email.
**
Stocker teaches at City View Alternative, a tiny school west of Dufferin Grove Park, with four teachers and about 60 Grade 7 and 8 students whose lessons are framed by social-justice issues around class, race and gender.
When Kio was a baby, the family travelled through the mountains of Mexico, speaking with the Zapatistas, a revolutionary group who shun mainstream politics as corrupt and demand greater indigenous rights. In 1994, about 150 people died in violent clashes with the Mexican military, but the leftist movement has been largely peaceful since.
Last year, they spent two weeks in Cuba, living with local families and learning about the revolution. Witterick has worked in violence prevention, giving workshops to teachers. These days, she volunteers, offering breastfeeding support. At the moment, she is a full-time mom.
Both come from liberal families. Stocker grew up listening to Free to Be ... You and Me, a 1972 record with a central message of gender neutrality. Witterick remembers her brother mucking around with gender as a teen in the ’80s, wearing lipstick and carrying handbags like David Bowie and Mick Jagger.
The family lives in a cream-coloured two-storey brick home in the city’s Junction Triangle neighbourhood. Their front porch is crammed with bicycles, including Kio’s pink and purple tricycle. Inside, it’s organized clutter. The children's arts and crafts projects are stacked in the bookcases, maps hang on the walls and furniture is well-used and of a certain vintage.
Upstairs they co-sleep curled up on two mattresses pushed together on the floor of the master bedroom, under a heap of mismatched pillows and blankets. During the day, the kids build forts with the pillows and pretend to walk a tightrope between the mattresses.
On a recent Tuesday, the boys finish making paper animal puppets and a handmade sign to celebrate their dad’s birthday. “I love to do laundry with dad,” reads one message. They nuzzle Storm, splayed out on the floor. The baby squeals with delight.
Witterick practices unschooling, an offshoot of home-schooling centred on the belief that learning should be driven by a child’s curiosity. There are no report cards, no textbooks and no tests. For unschoolers, learning is about exploring and asking questions, “not something that happens by rote from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays in a building with a group of same-age people, planned, implemented and assessed by someone else,” says Witterick. The fringe movement is growing. An unschooling conference in Toronto drew dozens of families last fall.
The kids have a lot of say in how their day unfolds. They decide if they want to squish through the mud, chase garter snakes in the park or bake cupcakes.
**
Jazz — soft-spoken, with a slight frame and curious brown eyes — keeps his hair long, preferring to wear it in three braids, two in the front and one in the back, even though both his parents have close-cropped hair. His favourite colour is pink, although his parents don’t own a piece of pink clothing between them. He loves to paint his fingernails and wears a sparkly pink stud in one ear, despite the fact his parents wear no nail polish or jewelry.
Kio keeps his curly blond hair just below his chin. The 2-year-old loves purple, although he’s happiest in any kind of pyjama pants.
“As a result, Jazz and now Kio are almost exclusively assumed to be girls,” says Stocker, adding he and Witterick don’t out them. It’s the boys’ choice whether they want to offer a correction.
On a recent trip to High Park, Jazz, wearing pink shorts, patterned pink socks and brightly coloured elastics on his braids, runs and skips across the street.
“That’s a princess!” says a smiling crossing guard, ushering the little boy along. “And that’s a princess, too,” she says again, pointing at Kio with her big red sign.
Jazz doesn’t mind. One of his favourite books is 10,000 Dresses, the story of a boy who loves to dress up. But he doesn’t like being called a girl. Recently, he asked his mom to write a note on his application to the High Park Nature Centre because he likes the group leaders and wants them to know he’s a boy.
Jazz was old enough for school last September, but chose to stay home. “When we would go and visit programs, people — children and adults — would immediately react with Jazz over his gender,” says Witterick, adding the conversation would gravitate to his choice of pink or his hairstyle.
That’s mostly why he doesn’t want to go to school. When asked if it upsets him, he nods, but doesn’t say more.
Instead he grabs a handmade portfolio filled with his drawings and poems. In its pages is a booklet written under his pseudonym, the “Gender Explorer.” In purple and pink lettering, adorned with butterflies, it reads: “Help girls do boy things. Help boys do girl things. Let your kid be whoever they are!”
*
Storm was named after whipped winds and dark rain clouds, because they are beautiful and transformative.
“When I was pregnant, it was really this intense time around Jazz having experiences with gender and I was feeling like I needed some good parenting skills to support him through that,” says Witterick.
It began as a offhand remark. “Hey, what if we just didn’t tell?” And then Stocker found a book in his school library called X: A Fabulous Child’s Story by Lois Gould. The book, published in 1978, is about raising not a boy or a girl, but X. There’s a happy ending here. Little X — who loved to play football and weave baskets — faces the taunting head on, proving that X is the most well-adjusted child ever examined by “an impartial team of Xperts.”
“It became so compelling it was almost like, How could we not?” says Witterick.
There are days when their decisions are tiring, shackling even. “We spend more time than we should providing explanations for why we do things this way,” says Witterick. “I regret that (Jazz) has to discuss his gender before people ask him meaningful questions about what he does and sees in this world, but I don't think I am responsible for that — the culture that narrowly defines what he should do, wear and look like is.”
Longtime friend Ayal Dinner, 35, a father two young boys, was surprised to hear the couple’s announcement when Storm was born, but is supportive.
“I think it’s amazing that they’re willing to take on challenging people in this way,” says Dinner. “While they are political and ideological about these things, they’re also really thinking about what it means and struggling with it as they go along.”
Dinner understands why people may find it extreme. “Although I can see the criticism of ‘This is going to be hard on my kid,’ it’s great to say, ‘I love my kid for whoever they are.’”
On a recent trip to Hamilton, Jazz was out of earshot when family friend Denise Hansen overheard two little girls at the park say they didn’t want to play with a “girl-boy.” Then, there was the time a saleswoman at a second-hand shop refused to sell him a pink feather boa. “Surely you won't buy it for him — he's a boy!” said the woman. Shocked, and not wanting to upset Jazz, Witterick left the store.
Parents talk about the moment they realize they would throw themselves in front of a speeding truck to save their child from harm, yet battle the instinct to overprotect. They want to encourage independence. They hope people won’t be mean. They pray they aren’t bullied. No parent would ever wish that for their child.
On a night after she watched her husband of 11 years and the boys play with sparklers after dark, Witterick, in a reflective mood, writes to say we are all mocked at some point for the way we look, the way we dress and the way we think.
“When faced with inevitable judgment by others, which child stands tall (and sticks up for others) — the one facing teasing despite desperately trying to fit in, or the one with a strong sense of self and at least two 'go-to' adults who love them unconditionally? Well, I guess you know which one we choose.”
*
Diane Ehrensaft is a California-based psychologist and mother of Jesse, a “girlyboy” who turned his trucks into cradles and preferred porcelain dolls over soldiers when he was a child. Her newly published book, Gender Born, Gender Made, is a guide for parents of nonconforming kids.
She believes parents should support gender-creative children, which includes the transgendered, who feel born in the wrong bodies, and gender hybrids, who feel they are part girl and part boy. Then there are gender “smoothies,” who have a blended sense of gender that is purely “them.”
Ehrensaft believes there is something innate about gender, and points to the ’70s, when parents experimented by giving dolls to boys and trucks to girls.
“It only worked up to a certain extent. Some girls never played with the trucks, some boys weren’t interested in ballet ... It was a humbling experiment for us because we learned we don’t have the control that we thought we did.”
But she worries by not divulging Storm’s sex, the parents are denying the child a way to position himself or herself in a world where you are either male, female or in between. In effect they have created another category: Other than other. And that could marginalize the child.
“I believe that it puts restrictions on this particular baby so that in this culture this baby will be a singular person who is not being given an opportunity to find their true gender self, based on also what’s inside them.”
Ehrensaft gets the “What the heck?!” reaction people may have when they hear about Storm. “I think it probably makes people feel played with to have that information withheld from them.”
While she accepts and supports Jazz’s freedom “to be who he is,” she’s concerned about asking two small boys to keep a secret about the baby of the family. “For very young children, just in their brains, they’re not ready to do the kind of sophisticated discernment we do about when a secret is necessary.”
Jazz says it’s not difficult. He usually just calls the baby Storm.
Dr. Ken Zucker, considered a world expert on gender identity and head of the gender identity service for children at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, calls this a “social experiment of nurture.” The broader question, he says, is how much influence parents have on their kids. If Ehrensaft leans toward nature, Zucker puts more emphasis on nurture. Even when parents don’t make a choice, that’s still a choice, and one that can impact the children.
When asked what psychological harm, if any, could come from keeping the sex of a child secret, Zucker said: “One will find out.”
The couple plan to keep Storm’s sex a secret as long as Storm, Kio and Jazz are comfortable with it. In the meantime, philosophy and reality continue to collide.
Out with the kids all day, Witterick doesn’t have the time or the will to hide in a closet every time she changes Storm’s diaper. “If (people) want to peek, that’s their journey,” she says.
There are questions about which bathroom Storm will use, but that is a couple of years off. Then there is the “tyranny of pronouns,” as they call it. They considered referring to Storm as “Z”. Witterick now calls the baby she, imagining the “s” in brackets.
For the moment, it feels right.
“Everyone keeps asking us, ‘When will this end?’” says Witterick. “And we always turn the question back. Yeah, when will this end? When will we live in a world where people can make choices to be whoever they are?”

Random Essays: Dressing Up

Original article: http://nancibeanification.com/tag/nora-ephron/
2 Nov
I remember as a little kid sitting around reading National Geographic magazine and being fascinated by all them foreign people and their interesting customs. There were women with dozens of rings elongating their necks, men in loin cloths with sticks piercing their ears and noses, Chinese girls with feet tightly bound, children running naked and unabashed through the streets of dusty villages, grandmothers gnawing on chicken feet.
I always thought these people were weird, strange, odd, or crazy because their customs and traditions were so completely different from the ones I grew up with. It didn’t occur to me until I was much older that if a photographer from a tribe in Ghana or a villager in the mountains of Peru had visited the United States to photograph the natives, they might have had their own bizarre pictures to share.
Raise your hand if you think hairy armpits on women are gross.
(Did you raise your hand? Now take a sniff. If you think body odor smells bad and wearing deodorant is normal, keep your hand up. If not, put your hand down. You stink.)
padong tribe womanI’m pretty sure that most American men and women believe that hairy armpits on a woman are gross. Now of course there are a few naturalists who love to rub their noses in their lover’s locks, but these people also tend to be stoners and stoners think everything is awesome, even stinky pits. But the rest of us are put off by underarm hair, aren’t we?
Why does pit hair bother us so much? Does it spread disease or make us ill or put us at risk for weird sports injuries? Nope. There is no medical or hygienic reason for the adoption of shaving – somebody in the early 1900s simply thought a chick looked better in a sleeveless dress without the little Bob Marleys poking out from underneath her wings. Women have only been shaving in earnest since the 1920s and the practice didn’t become mainstream until after World War II.
But when we Americans see armpit hair on women, we grow uncomfortable, troubled, disturbed, grossed out. And we’re shocked to learn that this shaving thing, though catching on, is not par for the course around the world. We’re the weird ones when it comes to bald pits.
So why does it bother us? Because it’s different, and we humans seem to be really uncomfortable with different.
Folks seem to forget, or in some cases never realize, that we all start out exactly the same. We’re all born (with the exception of those with birth defects) with faces and hair and genitals and legs and arms and blood and skin. Our bodies in their purest form are what we come into the world with. That’s it.
Everything else is artificial – our languages and religions, what we eat, how we dress, how we adorn our bodies – these are things that our cultures have made up. They aren’t integral to our existence as human beings – they’re just expressions of where, or to whom, we were born.
I think it’s important to have an understanding of how superficial these customs we’ve adopted are because we seem to spend an awful lot of time judging each other based upon them. They don’t define us, really, do they? If I’ve got a pierce nose or a Coach bag or long fingernails that curl and twist around themselves like the limbs of a corkscrew willow, and this is all you see, you don’t really know a thing about me, do you?
Oh, we can make assumptions about each other based on these superficialities. Low-slung pants and a cap turned sideways screams gangsta wannabe. A Coach bag on your arm means you either have lots of money in the bank or not a pot to tinkle in but you’re trying to prove otherwise. A pierced nose means you’re not a committed picker. The problem is that none of these assumptions speaks to the heart of who a person is – just who a person wants to be seen as being.
So much of what we do, so much of what we use to identify ourselves culturally, is nothing more than fashion. And yet we base so many of our opinions about other cultures based on these fashions. A woman who wears a head scarf must be oppressed. A man in a loin cloth must long for Levis. We are so convinced that our way is the right way, that we fail to imagine that there exist other definitions of “normal.”
Let’s think about some of the things women in our culture do that would seem insane to a “normal” person elsewhere:
  1. Have you worn a pair of high heels lately? Seriously, we think it’s beautiful in this country to squeeze our feet into shoes that move our centers of gravity dangerously high putting us at risk for ankle and knee injury. With repeated use, these shoes cause corns, calluses and other foot defects that will make the simple act of walking difficult in our later years. We are deforming our feet, much like Chinese women used to, in order to be fashionable. The funny thing is, in the 20th century the Chinese finally figured out how crazy foot binding was. In the 21st century, Americans started wearing platform stilettos (because the regular kind weren’t suicidal enough).
  2. Because shaving isn’t bad enough, many American women go into little rooms in beauty salons, strip down to their natural states, have hot wax slathered on their genitals and muffle their screams as the wax, and their very natural hair, is ripped off. These are, of course, the same women who then hold fundraisers to end genital mutilation in Africa.
  3. Have you ever worn a bra or a pair of nylons or a jock strap that is actually comfortable? Seriously? Of course you haven’t.
We do these things to ourselves because somebody told us that we’d be beautiful if we did, and we believed it. And yet we look at images of women with dozens of rings around their necks, or sticks poking through their noses, or scarves on their heads or hair growing under their arms as weird or strange or abnormal.
The truth is, we’re all just playing dress up. We’re all just taking these perfect blank canvases we were born with and painting them with the colors adopted by our respective cultures. We are no better than anyone else for our superficialities because simply put, if we are stripped of our fashion, we’re all pretty much the same.

Original article: http://nancibeanification.com/tag/nora-ephron/