The hairdressers gives me a knock on the head

I hated uni. Obviously. However, I was lucky to learn a few valuable things that I will always use in my life. Things that will stop me from becoming a dumb bitch. Maybe people think I’m slow or dumb, or maybe they don’t realise that I couldn’t give a fuck. I like to think. I like to think way too much. And sometimes I overthink that I cause a blowout. I blame uni. Slightly. But then I guess I can also blame the fact that I was brought up without a single issue of Cosmopolitan or Vogue in the house.

When I was growing up, my parents and grandparents pushed me to constantly be more girly. More female. Not that I wasn’t. I liked playing with Barbie Dolls. As I got older, I wanted to play with make up. At 13, I wasn’t allowed to buy a Dolly magazine. But I did anyway and hid it under my mattress like a porno.

One of the most interesting things I remember - my mother dragging me around at the Perth Royal Show every year to get me the Barbie bag, or any bag that was for girls. Although I did show an interest in them, the moment we got home I would fight my brothers for their Batman capes or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s plastic nun-chucks. I liked to play footy and cricket.I liked to watch wrestling. And then I got into metal.

As I was sitting in the salon waiting for someone (ANYONE!) to come rescue me from looking like a tin foil alien, I tried to pass the time by reading Vogue and Cosmopolitan. I confess, I usually do read these magazines at salons because I don’t exactly want to seem out of place (more so than I already am) by just staring ahead as my hair is being done. Sometimes I will just stare at a page so it looks like I’m reading. But what I’m really doing is counting how long until I turn the page or think about conversations I had earlier in the day. I realise that in trying not to seem odd, I have just outdone myself.

I came across one of Vogue’s poor excuse for an article about women, youth, society and the media. I am somewhat aware that women in Hollywood who are nearing 40 are considered “hags”. And I am also aware that there is immense pressure on women to remain youthful looking and beautiful all the time or some guy won’t like us. I somehow thought it was Anna Wintour’s obsession with youth that seemed to fuel this fire. I don’t read fashion magazines, but I somehow know who Anna Wintour is. And I have a fair idea of what she is probably like in person. Ouch.

I thought it was amusing that I was reading an article that seemed to further shoot the world of fashion magazine’s in the fucking face. Here was this article, claiming that the media was to blame for this very ideology, when in fact the whole ideology was their doing in the first place. I almost laughed out loud. See, the one thing this uni class taught me was that these fashion magazines ‘condition’ women to stay or become society’s idea of what a woman should be - sexy, beautiful, youthful, thin, flawless. Possibly even some variation of “intelligent”. Not much has changed in these magazines in my lifetime. They are the chunder, constantly recycled. The article was based purely on their own doing and now they were questioning it? Classic.

After a while, I remembered why Cosmo and Vogue was not for me. Too shallow. Too easy. Too 2-dimensional. Too fake. I would much rather go out and find things that please me, instead of being served the monthly “how a woman should be” memo.

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Entry Filed under: Fashion, Feminism, Gender Roles