demagogue on 4/5/2013 at 03:51
Distilled nirvana.
Renzatic on 4/5/2013 at 04:17
I was gonna make a Nirvana reference, but thought it was too obvious. :P
demagogue on 4/5/2013 at 04:27
What I remember from that era was a girl in our class that people called Teen Spirit, and then that song came out. It just reminds me it was a thing before the song. I think that whole zeitgeist was just waiting to burst out.
Vasquez on 4/5/2013 at 06:59
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
many Muslim societies which are very patriarchal will have high levels of female hairlessness because it's religious practice
is religious, too??
It's so weird how God grows stuff on people and then tells to cut it off...
jtr7 on 4/5/2013 at 07:50
Not if you take sin and the consequential cursed nature into account, introducing pain and death and fucked-upness, and then it's a question of why did God allow THAT? But really it's about separating one's self from the bad side of nature. It's the very definition of "Holy", set apart.
I don't use antiperspirant anymore, though I did like Degree or Gillette gels back when I did. I've tried many different ingredients since, but in 1997, I started getting horrendous eczema from underarm anything, where my armpit would peel deeply like a 2nd-degree sunburn just above bleeding depth. Doing without caffeine will cut down on perspiration, but that's not bound to happen for most of us.
Removing the hair does greatly reduce the surface area and the billions of crannies for germs and their excretions to settle in. :p
faetal on 4/5/2013 at 14:31
Quote Posted by dethtoll
That's not what patriarchy is. It's voluntary, yes, but they do it
because society has told them they must shave their pits or be unsexy. This isn't women being physically or mentally subjugated by the men in their lives or whatever. This is a structured culture in which women (and men) are, through advertising and social pressure, told from almost the moment they are born that they must look and behave a certain way.
I don't have time to get into the rest of your post, but you really need to rethink it.
Patriarchy isn't about focussing on one thing which one sex does to attract the opposite sex. That's just biology/psychology. Else we can by the same logic say that men working out in order to look more manly is matriarchy because it attracts women. The logic goes both ways. It's not "society" telling them to shave their pits its people who shave their pits being seen as more attractive because of whatever reason that first become seen to be attractive. Yes, when something becomes normal, then not adhering to that norm is seen as "odd" somehow, but that applies to everything which is habitual, be that people shaving their legs / faces (don't forget men naturally have beards) or updating their clothing style so as not to look anachronistic (hipsters notwithstanding). It's all very easy to say "women only shave their pits because we live in a male dominated society", but it only works if you treat that one thing like it exists in a vacuum.
faetal on 4/5/2013 at 14:35
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Actually faetal, many Muslim societies which are very patriarchal will have high levels of female hairlessness because it's religious practice so we can't really correlate perceived freedom with hairlessness. They do it because rules, westerners do it because of society.
I did expect there to be an exception, it was a pretty lazy "wot I reckon" statement. It was probably a mistake to include that bit in my post as it muddies my point.
SubJeff on 4/5/2013 at 17:28
Quote Posted by jtr7
I don't use antiperspirant
Why am I not surprised?
june gloom on 4/5/2013 at 20:33
Quote Posted by faetal
Patriarchy isn't about focussing on one thing which one sex does to attract the opposite sex. That's just biology/psychology. Else we can by the same logic say that men working out in order to look more manly is matriarchy because it attracts women. The logic goes both ways. It's not "society" telling them to shave their pits its people who shave their pits being seen as more attractive because of whatever reason that first become seen to be attractive. Yes, when something becomes normal, then not adhering to that norm is seen as "odd" somehow, but that applies to everything which is habitual, be that people shaving their legs / faces (don't forget men naturally have beards) or updating their clothing style so as not to look anachronistic (hipsters notwithstanding). It's all very easy to say "women only shave their pits because we live in a male dominated society", but it only works if you treat that one thing like it exists in a vacuum.
The only vacuum here is the one you think society exists in. Your message basically boils down to "you're only oppressing yourselves!" Wrong. The logic does
not go both ways. The expectations placed on men and women's appearances are very different. Nobody expects you to shave your beard because people also recognize that you can generally grow that out as you wish; but women are EXPECTED to shave their various places, places that aren't even visible to general society, because men (through advertising and social pressure) said that's what's good. A friend of mine was called "hairy legged vermin" when she was ELEVEN until she relented and started shaving, are you going to tell me she shaved "because she wanted to shave" and not because she wanted to avoid ridicule? And of course the advertising biz has spent a shitload of money telling women what to look like. This is not a debatable point, (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWKXit_3rpQ) this is a well-known issue and you don't get to say otherwise.
