98: Fight Cast

Filed under: Podcasts — marina August 8, 2007 @ 10:14 pm

An hour of Ben and me fighting over pubic hair and feminism.

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I find that by reading blogs and non-academic books, you can still pick up a lot of theory (fat activist, feminist, and otherwise). Shapely Prose is a really awesome fat activist blog, and feministing.com and pandagon.net are my favorite feminist blogs. (Also Fuck_shaving is a pretty cool LJ community for, you know, the obvious.)

It’s kind of assy to think unshaved chicks are groess because a) does the same apply to men? Like, does he shave? Does he think men with hairy armpits/pubes are gross? If so, that’s, duh, sexist. b) it’s a patriarchal beauty standard that combines an obsession with youth with this demand for weird, inhuman, streamlined perfection in women. (Yeah, I still shave my legs and armpits because I cave to societal pressure, even though I’m a little confused as to how red, bumpy legs with ingrown hairs and cuts all over them are more attractive than hair.)

On the other hand, if you had a boyfriend who demanded you to grow out your armpit hair to satisfy *his* desires, that would be equally assy.

You might want to remind Ben that shaved armpits, legs, and cooches are as fake as makeup, since it takes effort–we’re not just all smooth and shit naturally. And there’s much more societal pressure in regards to body hair–if I go out without makeup, there’s no reaction, but if I went out bare-legged with hair, I would get so much shit.

He is right that you shouldn’t care what he thinks, but trust me, I totally get the weird obsessive “what do you really think of me” girl thing. Ask me about the time I tortured Tyler by asking him if he’d still love me if I was a boy. Fun times of self-torture, dude.

Re: BSC, the Asian one was actually *not* smart–she was really shitty at math and spelling, but good at art, so it was actually kind of non-stereotypical. And the message of that story was, “Not everyone who seems like they have an eating disorder does, sometimes they’re diabetic! So never call anyone on their weird food issues!” *g* Okay, it was actually more like what Ben said, but the “don’t question people’s eating disorders” thing was a disturbing subtext to it.

Comment by Katy — August 9, 2007 @ 3:14 am