Ditching the Double Standard

I am sick and tired of the double standard.      

My friend MS’s daughter wore, as she put it, the “dreaded yoga pants,” to high school, and for violating the dress code, she received in-school suspension. The same week, the school planned “water play” day for the students, and the girls were instructed to not wear white t-shirts. MS was pretty upset about the suspension, but more so that the same week, the school in essence sponsored a wet t-shirt contest for the high school students and then gave it a name that half the student body uses as a keyword for porn searches. Why is it not okay to wear long black fitted pants one day, but the next day students are encouraged to soak and squirt each other, making their clothing not only sopping wet but also clingy and revealing?

The whole dress code issue is out of hand lately, with top students being stripped of their honors for wearing spaghetti strap dresses to award ceremonies and plus sized students banned from proms because even in a long sleeved gown, cleavage is showing. School dress codes and fashion trends have never seen eye to eye, but the burden of this issue is always on the female students.  Wouldn’t it be great if school administrators could stop being the fashion police and get back to the business of educating?

I am a fan of uniforms for this very reason. Between the ridiculously overpriced preppy clothes that are so popular in the south, the attempting to dress for the temperature, also a Southern issue, and the constant uncertainty of what is or isn’t permissible, uniforms would pretty much solve all of those problems. I don’t understand why more parents don’t see it as a pretty easy solution.

That isn’t the only double standard that has me all riled up right now.

While young girls face all that pressure to look or dress a certain way, they have no end to the burden of maintaining an unrealistic and usually unattainable physical appearance. Women face an enormous amount of pressure to preserve their youthful look but men are allowed to age gracefully. I can name a handful of men that are still considered sexy despite their advanced age, wrinkled faces, and graying hair. I can only think of one woman with gray hair, Jamie Lee Curtis, and all she is fit to do is sell yogurt that helps you shit.

Men have somehow managed to turn bald heads into something so desirable that even men with hair want to shave their heads. I will never understand why anyone with a perfectly good head of hair would prefer to shear it off in the name of fashion, but it appears to be a trend that is here to stay.  Just a reminder, men, enjoy it while you have it. Chances are good that one day you won’t have it to cut off.

What’s your opinion of the hipster beard? I have to admit, I find them fascinating, but at the same time, how fucking unfair is that? I have been shaving my legs and armpits for over thirty years now, and for at least the last decade and a half, I have felt like I had to reduce the amount of hair in the basement because even pubic hair has been subjected to social pressure. Meanwhile, men have even less to do to maintain any sense of good hygiene. They can let both their face and crotch hair grow out to caveman proportions, and everybody is super cool with it.

The epitome of the double standard is something called dad bod. Dad bod is what a guy looks like when he drinks all the beer and eats all the bacon cheeseburgers he wants, leaving him with a borderline barrel gut and noodly thin arms from not lifting anything heavier than he can fit in his mouth. You know, like your dad. It isn’t a repulsive form, it’s just a normal body, maybe a little pudgy in the middle, maybe a little touch of gynomastia, not enough to make people cringe, but enough to say, hey, I don’t need to look like I do Cross Fit. I am comfortable in my body.

Name me one woman you know who is comfortable in her body, ever.

Men have reached a point where they have totally given up. They can be bald, hairy, flabby, gray, wrinkled, whatever, and they somehow make it not just acceptable but hip.  Women, on the other hand, are having Brazilian waxes and labial rejuvenation surgery because even their pussies can’t look old.

Why isn’t anyone talking about the fact that baby vaginas are in and have been for a while? Anyone else creeped out about that?

I would say it’s time to embrace the mom bod, but I too have been conditioned to think that mom bods are better not seen by the naked eye. I don’t want to gawk at another woman’s lumpy cellulite and stretch marks and wrinkles and sagging breasts any more than I want to look at my own. Blech. Droopy knee skin. Bat wing upper arms. Turkey necks. So many ways to self loathe. Are women going to be able to start growing out their upper lips and those three wiry chin hairs? If men can be lumbersexuals with questionable hygiene and dad bods, can we trend #lunchladylook?

In an ideal world, we would stop judging others and ourselves by our outer layer. We would go back to considering intellect, compassion, ingenuity, hard work, creativity, friendship, humor, empathy, and caring as the things that are important, the things that matter.  Kim Kardashian’s or Nicki Minaj’s butt wouldn’t be more important than ending world hunger or saving the whales. Girls at school would be more concerned with being top of the class and less concerned with who has the straightest, blondest hair. 

We have our priorities all fucking wrong, which is why a girl is excluded from learning because she wore the wrong pants to school. It’s also why a woman who grew another human inside her body feels like she needs to surgically remove her loose skin before she can wear a bikini, or why a post-menopausal woman feels she needs to continue having a moist vagina to compete with her husband’s Cialis prescription. We forgot how to value what makes a woman amazing at every age, and it has very little to do with how she looks.

The Love Canal Disaster

You know how you hear a story that is so wonderfully funny you want to share it, even if it would cause someone else terrible embarrassment? If it happened to you, you probably would only tell a few privileged individuals, really close friends, maybe, people who share your sense of humor and don’t judge.   This is one of those stories. It involves things you might not want to read about, like periods and tampons. Also, you have no idea who this story involves. Don’t jump to conclusions. You don’t know who it is about, so just shut up.  Names and details have been altered to protect the innocent and the mortified.  Stop it, because you don’t know who it is. Ok, kids, here we go…

Tampons are pretty routine for the long time user, but for a young girl who is new to them, they can be rather tricky. Some girls act like they are no big deal, but a great many  teenage girls balk at the mere idea of a tampon, the idea of sticking something inside their you-know-what, in order to absorb the worst thing that ever happened to them, that happens every month for like ever, well, it just can’t get any worse. The mere mention of a tampon sends fear to their very core, or possibly their vaginas, and that creates a big problem. Why? Because in order to use a vagina properly, it must be relaxed. A tense vagina is just not very forgiving.  You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

What happens when a vagina is too tense to accept the reality of a tampon? If it’s the initial stage, then that tampon just isn’t going to go in. Then you must resort to plan B, a pad, and everyone moves on with their lives until the next trip to the bathroom or, if not soon enough, the inevitable ruined pair of shorts and ensuing humiliation.

But here’s another scenario. What if you got the tampon in, but later, it doesn’t want to come back out? What if it’s in there like Punxsutawney Phil, scared of its own shadow or the light of day? How do you get it out?

It’s not unheard of. When I was in college, a girl in my dorm forgot she had a tampon in and inserted a new one. The two of them somehow knitted themselves together, and she had to go to the health center to get them extracted. Naturally, we all talked about her because that’s what girls do. I never understood how she didn’t know she already had one locked and loaded, but she could have been drunk or stupid or something.

Sometimes you just plain can’t get it out.  It isn’t that unusual, especially at the end of one’s cycle, to have a bit of dryness in the old cooch. If your flow isn’t heavy enough to saturate the tampon, it gets, well, stuck, too dry to be budged. After yanking on the string of a dryish tampon for a while, the vagina starts to have a panic attack, and bingo, the perfect storm, or drought, since we are talking about dryness here.

I heard this story about a teenage girl who couldn’t get her tampon out. She struggled with it for a good thirty minutes, but it wouldn’t move. She panicked, and that vagina went on lockdown. The girl did what she had to do. She texted her mother.

Her mother came to her aid. On the other side of the bathroom door, to ask how she could be of assistance. The girl explained that her tampon was stuck and that she didn’t know what to do. The mother offered a few suggestions. Relax, she said. Take a few deep breaths. The girl replied that she was beyond that and she needed real help, not new age meditative bullshit propaganda. The mother suggested that she open her legs wide in an effort to maybe help the vagina stretch and yawn and maybe spit the tampon out. The girl began to cry, convinced that she was not just going to remove the tampon, but that the uterus would come out as well. The mother asked to enter the bathroom, but the girl screamed for her to go away.

The mother, who was not fond of being yelled at, went into her room, and soon after, was joined by the girl. She had tears in her eyes, desperate for help. The mother thought and thought. She suggested the girl try a lubricant of some sort, perhaps the well-known brand KY Jelly. The girl stated she didn’t have such a product. The mother thought she had given the teen some when she began using the dreaded tampons, but she was, according to her daughter, mistaken. The mother told the girl she had some personal lubricant the girl could borrow.

This is where the story gets interesting. The mother realized that if she went to retrieve the personal lubricant, the girl would discover where she kept the product. This was a detail the mother did not want the daughter to know. She asked that the girl return to her bathroom and wait for the mother to return with the lubricant.

The daughter left the room, and the mother went to the father’s nightstand, where the personal lubricant was kept. Alas, when the mother removed the bottle, she discovered that the container was almost completely empty. She knew she couldn’t hand the empty lubricant bottle to her child. The day had been traumatizing enough as it was.

The mother devised a plan and joined her daughter in the bathroom. She instructed her child to close her eyes and hold out her hand, so that the mother could dispatch some of the lubricant into the girl’s outstretched palm. The child closed her eyes and opened her hand. The mother began to vigorously shake the lubricant bottle up and down, squeezing it over her child’s open palm. Nothing happened. The mother repeated the steps, up and down, squeeze.

Are you thinking of an empty ketchup bottle right now, one with just one glob of ketchup left at the very bottom? Good, you should.

Finally, with a loud wet noise, the bottle released the last dollop of personal lubricant into the teen’s open palm. The child was visibly disturbed by both the texture and the sound of the lubricant, and asked the mother what she was supposed to do with it. The mother instructed her to slather it around the opening of the vagina and perhaps a little inside if possible, and then to relax and open her legs wide and if everything went according to plan, the vagina would release its hold and allow the tampon to pass.

The daughter instructed the mother to leave the restroom at once, and to close the door behind her. The mother waited for about twenty minutes, but the daughter never left the bathroom. The mother texted the daughter to ask if it had worked, but alas, it did not. After more time had passed, the daughter had decided to take a shower, and the heat and the water were able to accomplish what the mother’s lubricant could not. They both decided to never discuss it again.

You should do what that mother and child resolved to do. Never discuss it again. Just be glad it wasn’t you.

Help Us Find a Cure

I thought we were going to be immune from it, but sadly, no. Bieber fever has hit our home. It was bound to happen. I have two daughters, one thirteen, the other eleven. If that isn’t his demographic, I don’t know what is. Maybe pedophiles. And grandmas, if they don’t have to listen to him sing, but can just pinch his smooth young cheeks. Regardless, I have somehow raised a Bieber fan, a Bieleber, despite my good intentions and years of careful emphasis on quality music and intellectual grooming. I am living the Teen Beat nightmare.

At this point, the fever has only hit the teenager, but it’s only a matter of time before the tween catches it too. The teen, who has been playing guitar for three, almost four years, and piano for eight years, doesn’t mind listening to his overproduced bubblegum pop. She is normally very opinionated about music, and eschews all things popular with the masses, so it makes no sense why she would like little Justin. He looks younger than her, for Christ’s sake. He’s shorter than her as well. He’s also way more feminine than her. He probably got his period before she did. He’s a pretty young boy, don’t get me wrong, but hot? Hunky? Sexy? Nope. Nonthreatening is about the best I can come up with. He looks like he hasn’t come out yet, so he’s safe for preteen girls. He doesn’t look like he will give them HPV; he looks like he could do their nails.

But let’s get back to his so-called music. He’s certainly not the first pop star who is more a product than a musician, so I’m not judging him solely on the fact that he doesn’t write most of his music or the fact that it’s so overproduced that it’s virtually all created in a studio, devoid of talent.  No one is going to say in ten, twenty, fifty years, Wow, that Justin Bieber, what an artist. They might say, What ever happened to that little Canadian lesbian? But mostly, they will say what they are thinking now, which is, hey, Justin, better save up that money. My beef with him is the over exposure. Bieber on tv. Bieber on the radio. Bieber cologne. Bieber is everywhere. Does he have to be in my home too?

Normally, I wouldn’t give a crap about the current Justin Bieber or whoever used to be Justin Bieber or whoever will be the next Justin Bieber. It’s all back to my teen. She flaunts her love of him in front of me, taunting me, daring me to forbid her from listening to his music. I’m telling you, this is a teenage girl issue. You lucky fuckers with your sons, what’s the worst they can throw at you? Speed metal? Hard core rap? Try a little Justin. I’ll take Wiz Khalifa over JB any day, unless they have collaborated, in which case, never mind.

The other day while driving my teen to school, a Bieb song came on the radio and she forced me to listen to it while she sang along. “I feel that I have failed you as a parent,” I said to her. “Don’t say that, Mom,” she said. “Well, I must have done something wrong if you’ve turned to the dark side of the radio,” I replied. “Don’t blame yourself, it just is. These things just happen,” she said, and I swear she winked at me.

But they don’t just happen. My girls were too young to be Hilary Duff fans. They were the Miley Cyrus generation, and we came out unscathed. They both hated Miley, either as herself or the evil Hannah Montana.Even now, they could care less about One Direction or any other boy band. They will listen to Florence and the Machine over Demi Lovato. Hell, they spend hours combing the internet looking for new artists that haven’t hit it big yet. How does my teen reconcile her edginess and trendsetting with her love of Justin?

I’ve decided that the only way I can accept this from her is by declaring it an act of rebellion. She doesn’t really like him. She just says that to get under my skin. She knows it makes me insane to hear her squeal when his voice cracks on the radio. She forced me to watch his hosting of Saturday Night Live, sacrilegious on its own, so she could see his twinkly brown eyes and ridiculous six pack. Even that looks wrong, like muscles on a baby.

I’m trying to not complain too much, lest this painful phase lasts too long. If I go along with her and don’t put up too much fight, I figure she’ll lose interest and move onto to something else. Of course, that could be worse than the Justin thing I am dealing with now, even if I can’t imagine how.

Back in the day, I had a bizarre haircut and color phase. I owned a Suicidal Tendencies record. I took up smoking at fourteen to earn a little street cred.  None of it got much of a rise out of my mom, so I kept upping the ante without permanently jeopardizing my health or my future. With her, nothing worked, so I stopped trying. You can’t rebel against someone who doesn’t exactly give a shit.

 I’m not sure how much fight to put up against whatever my teen throws at me. Do I do just enough to let her know I still care, or do I ignore until it goes away?I’m at a loss, and until I figure out the right approach, I will have to endure that puny heartthrob, with his stupid sneakers and crotch grabbing.

No amount of grabbing down there will make your testicles descend, Justin. Just saying. So stop, because it makes you look like you’ve got a rash, and rashes, like you, aren’t sexy. Also, stop your Svengali mind fuck of my, nay, all of our teenage daughters. Go take some voice lessons, maybe do a Broadway musical or something equally obscure and unpopular with the 13-17 girl demographic. Then maybe I can have my daughter back.