“When beauty becomes mandatory, it ceases to be about fun, about play. Dressing up, playing with gender roles, doing your braids badly in the mirror, and eating half your mother’s lipstick in an attempt to get it on your face: Do you remember when that used to be fun? And do you remember when it stopped? Like any game, the woman game stops being fun when you start playing to win, especially if you’ve got no choice: Win or be ridiculed, win or become invisible, dismissed — disturbed.” — Laurie Penny, “Model Behavior”
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Unfortunately, beauty feels mandatory for almost every woman of childbearing years. I’m in the first stages of moving beyond it and I hardly know what to do with myself. I’ve had a box of hair color under my sink for three weeks because I can’t decide whether to use it or let the threads of gray multiply. A surprisingly difficult decision, as a matter of fact.
So often I am glad I’m a man. Though there are vain men concerned about their looks, our half of the species is generally spared the close personal abrasions of physical concern. Tell any one of us we’re handsome and we’ll wag our tails and believe it, we’re such easy suckers. And we can wear anything and think we’re well-dressed.
The pressure on our side comes more from money and the things it will buy. Those are the true plumages of the male human. If a man’s only worth however much he’s worth in net currency terms, then the plain fact is most of us poor bastards are barely worth the patch of ground we’ll be buried in. From this plain fact comes much male rage, both the exploding noisy smashing kind and the cold vicious quiet cutting kind.