Gender Rules and my Naked Face

I make no secret of loving makeup.  I love the imagination and the artistry, I love color and the idea of creating a painting out of my natural features.

That being said, I also love my naked face.

Some people might say this is easy for me, because my naked face is “pretty”.  Meaning (in science terms) that it’s reasonably symmetrical from left to right side and has the evenly spaced features which draw humans to one another as an indicator of adequate health and breed-ability.  Maybe it's genetics - my mom and sister are both pretty too, and both perfectly fine with leaving the house sans paint job some days.  (Note: although one should always wear sunscreen!)

I do like my face, of all the things about myself I’d like to change – my face is one thing I would keep.  However it’s not a spectacular one.  I do not stop cars on the street or easily escape speeding tickets by virtue of it.  And it’s aging; I now sport crow’s feet around the eyes, lines across the brow and what appears to be a liver spot on my left cheek.

So be it.  I will still continue to refuse to wear makeup most days.  Makeup is a fun choice I make if I have the time, inclination, or am going somewhere special.  On days I go to work – I almost never wear it.  On the rare occasions I do wear it at work I get compliments on how nice it looks and queries on why I don’t wear it every day.

I could say that when I wake up in the morning my eyes are itchy and dry and I don’t particularly feel like messing with them.  But really, the short version is that I just don’t feel like it – nor do I feel the slightest pressure to cover my natural appearance on an average day any more than my husband (or countless other men) do.

I don’t know how I got this way, or if it displays strength of character or simple laziness on my part.  A lifetime of being overweight has likely forced me to shift my focus off of finding too much value in my appearance, despite the responses of my fellow human beings to my appearance always being a mostly positive thing.

Looking back though, I have to admit I wasn’t particularly prone to being a dressed up Princess from the start.  I’ve been scanning and archiving old family photos and I found this shot of me at around age ten to twelve dressed up for Halloween.  I was that awkward age range where girls start wanting to be beautiful, to grow boobs, to emulate the slender, perfect women on their TV’s or the Barbie dolls in their bedroom.

RHAR!

As you can see, I wanted to be a scary green dragon with a huge rubber head and long, bloody claws.  A more simple way to put it would be to say that I wanted to be magical and powerful.  I played with Transformers and Voltron at that age, not out of any particular longing for “boy” toys but just because I thought they were cool.  I had a lot of Barbies too, but I admit I have vague memories of throwing them off of play-cliffs a great deal for some reason.  It wasn’t that I disliked or was offended by the idea of Barbie, it was that you couldn’t do anything with her – she couldn’t move, so she was boring.  I wanted dolls and toys with a high degree of articulation, like jointed horses that could move at five different points in each leg or G.I. Joes.  I had Cabbage Patch Dolls – they were all the rage after all – but my favorite was the one that was a cat, a pet, rather than a baby.

And because I was a girl and it’s considered cute for girls to like boy things, this was totally okay.  There’s still a horrendous double standard for boys who’d really prefer the Cabbage Patch babies I tended to leave forgotten under my bed.

Now, as a grownup, I think this has bled over into my views on cosmetics.  I like them (I occasionally spend way too much money on them) and I also like to leave them and head out the door.  Sometimes I do this while sporting wet, un-styled hair too.

More controversially I think men should be allowed the exact same freedom of appearance without judgment that women enjoy.  Including makeup if they so choose.  I don’t think makeup should be a female thing, I think it should simply be a fancy human thing.  We need to take on some of men’s comfort with their casual style an unvarnished features, and they in return should be able to feel sexy and dressed up just as much as they danged well please.

The "Emotional" Female

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a big fan of men.  I don’t mean this just as a heterosexual female, but because I’ve been blessed to know and love some truly outstanding examples of human masculinity in my lifetime.  My father and husband being two easy examples to cite, but I’ve also got an incredible wealth of awesome guy friends.

I would never claim that men and women are exactly the same because I have never observed us to be so.  Although we’re the same species and very similar creatures, we have biological and mental differences that are impossible for me to ignore.  One is not “better” than the other despite what many people think.  Hopefully we manage to complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses under ideal circumstances.  That being said, over the years I keep hearing many men (although rarely ones I personally know) cite a negative trope about women that is simply not true in my experience.  That women are “emotional” and men are “rational”. 

I’ve seen many personal examples of the inaccuracy of this stereotype in my life.  The workplace is an excellent microcosm in which to view human behavior patterns.  Both women and men in the workplace exhibit inappropriate levels of emotion from time to time.  Humans are emotional creatures and none of us are very Vulcan-like with our control levels, in fact we both pretty much suck at it.  I mean, c'mon, I have an entire blog category labelled "emotional meltdowns" so I'm aware that I'm entirely capable of them.  I just note that men and women tend to meltdown in slightly different ways – women become sad and men lose control of their anger.  Still, this is not always the case.  The last time I myself showed inappropriate emotion at work – it was in throwing an entirely guy-like fit of annoyance over something somebody else did.

Still… the trope persists.

I don’t indulge often in reality TV but it’s the summer and most of my alien and vampire shows are on hiatus, so I recently wound up watching a bizarre reality show experiment called Naked and Afraid.  The idea is to drop two strangers – one male and one female – almost completely without resources into a difficult survival based environment for about twenty days and see how they fare.  They are, unsurprisingly, hungry, cold, thirsty and miserable.  Modern human beings are no longer very good at surviving the way wild animals do.

The most interesting part though is watching the social experiment that goes on.  The type of guy who would volunteer for such a thing is generally what I would quantify as a “Type A male” – very in charge and a bit bossy.  The women strike me as slightly more varied in personality and harder to pin down personality wise, but they all have a survival training background of some type.  Almost without exception, during their initial interviews the men express concern that the “emotional” nature of their female partner is going to be a problem, and that they’re going to wind up looking after their physically weaker counterparts.

Then, without fail, within a few days that same man is having an emotional breakdown – screaming at the wilderness over his lack of ability to control it while his female partner sits patiently somewhere nearby waiting for him to pull himself back together.  Sometimes there are tears too.

It would be funny if it wasn’t quite so frustrating.  Why are these guys unable to see that the ones breaking down and being emotionally weak are them?  Why does this trope persist?  Anger has a purpose – it can save your life in a dangerous moment and give you the strength you need to break free from and escape a hostile predator, but directionless anger just saps your energy and annoys everyone around you.

Of course, perhaps the editors are just editing every single episode to present the women more favorably than the men?  I’m aware of the overwhelming control a film editor has to manipulate the flow of narrative from what must have been hundreds of hours of raw footage gathered.  I guess it’s possible, I have no way of knowing.  But, like I said, it’s interesting to watch.

I left the cake out in the rain, whatever will I do?!  *sob*

Addiction is Tricksy

Yesterday at work someone made a raspberry dark chocolate ice cream cake for a fellow coworker’s birthday.  It looked gorgeous.  According to everyone who ate a piece it tasted pretty gorgeous too.

I wouldn’t know.

I’ve had to accept the fact that I am not one of those people who can have “just a small slice” or “just a bite” of a sugary treat.  A single bite of sugar basically turns me into the all consuming sugar sucking vortex that Allie describes in this comic.

Her excuse was childhood – I’m pretty sure my inability to taste sugar and then walk away is the result of addiction.  A small taste of sugary treats, instead of being satisfying, sets off a relentless and painful craving for more and more and MOAR that takes days to calm down again.  I don’t know why this happened to me.  Maybe it’s the result of thirty-odd years of cruelly tricking my body with diet sodas, or maybe it’s just part of my mental makeup to get addicted.  You’d need a scientist or psychologist to be sure.

Fructose is no problem, I eat fruit every day and it doesn’t cause me to crave ice cream or binge on bags upon bags of apples.  I guess because it’s a different kind of molecule my metabolism is processing it differently.   I do experience fruit lust – like when I know cherries are coming into season I salivate over the thought of them.  Even so I’ve probably never managed to eat more than forty cherries or so in a single sitting.  That’s a lot of fruit, but it still won’t cause a body any harm.

I have to be honest with myself and accept the fact that I will never be one of those people who forgets to eat or craves the crunch of celery.  I like celery just fine, but I have never craved it once in my entire life.  Most of my craving revolves around a pretty lethal combination of sugar mixed with fat (chocolate is my perfect drug) and once triggered the binging that can result is incredibly hard to stop.

For example, if someone gives me a chocolate treat at work I do not put that treat in my desk drawer for later and then forget it’s there.  I can try to set it away somewhere – but I will think about and obsess over the chocolate pretty much nonstop until I have sought it out and eaten all of it.

My best recourse is to do what I did yesterday, to ignore the problem food completely.  If the taste doesn’t make it to my tongue I seem to be pretty much okay.  If someone gives me something I know I shouldn’t have I need to give it away again just as fast before making it to the privacy of my home.  As soon as addiction foods pass from my possession and belong to someone else, my obsession with them ceases – they’re not mine anymore, so eating them would be stealing.  Like any addict, I do much better where people can see me.  If I am alone in my house with chocolate, I am in trouble.

With trips to the shore looming in my immediate future I’m trying to figure out how to deal with the inevitable ice cream runs and stops at the monkey bread shop.  I don’t want to live life denying myself completely, indeed as I’ve posted before I don’t believe constant denial is a proper way to live at all.

My plan is to ask my husband to share everything with me.  If all I can get is tastes of what he’s eating it’s likely he’ll hork things down before I manage to do too much damage.  He and I sharing sugary treats rather than us each overindulging is a pretty good idea for both of us anyhow.