part-meming

[freckles_and_doubt]

There's a meme going around called "Twenty Things You Might Not Know About Me", and great is the tagging in cyberspace. wytchfynder set me off, and I started thinking about twenty things you witterers out there might not know about me. This was hard - I appear to wear my heart on my sleeve, generally speaking - but actually what stymied me was the first thing I thought up. I got this far:

1. I don't wear make-up, and haven't for about three years. I tried making myself up the other day, and it looked truly weird and unnatural. (This is only partly because I'm no bloody good at it). The only make-up I still own is over ten years old, including some St. Michael's pencils my dad bought me in England when I was 17. I don't believe in make-up. Apart from the fact that I think that the cultural space occupied by cosmetics is profoundly sexist, it's silly.

Then I stopped and thought, why? and, even remembering all my actually quite good and sufficient reasons, is that true? and does this mean that I necessarily condemn all those women out there who do wear make-up? and if so, am I a ranting feminist bigot? and even if that's the case, should I be condemning them anyway? And the whole process wound down in the usual self-doubt and honed ability to explode my own mind by seeing all the sides of the argument at once. Damned academic training.

Then I found this rather nifty post that articulates a lot of the actually quite complex issues, which at least means I'm not the only person worrying.

Then my attention was madly redirected by suddenly stumbling across this article about proposed legislation in Indiana which is actually using the term "unauthorised reproduction", and I was so overwhelmed by the sudden sense that we're living in a Sheri S. Tepper dystopian future that I completely forgot about make-up. Because, see, while I actually agree, as a drooling Tepper fan-girl, that we urgently need serious brakes on our population, I definitely don't think it should be the Republicans controlling it.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't wear makeup because I can't be bothered. I never actually started doing it - although I have worn makeup on isolated occasions in the past, and really not enjoyed scraping it all off afterwards. I went through an all-colours-of-the-rainbow nailpolish phase, but eventually lost interest because it takes a long time to dry, and it goes lumpy when the solvent evaporates from the bottle, and if you leave it for a few days you get chips and pink roots.

I appreciate the Goth subculture because of its reasonably egalitarian standards of attractiveness. It really sucks that half of the population has been reduced by recent societal convention to looking boring and functional, and it's nice that *somebody* is carrying the torch for male beauty.

As for the "unauthorised reproduction" draft, which I have been following with morbid fascination, what gets me most is not the stupid criteria being discussed, or the obvious folly in letting conservative nutcases control who is allowed to breed, but the stunning hypocrisy and lack of logic in introducing draconian laws to restrict *assisted* reproduction, while letting people who happen to be able to manufacture spawn without medical help do whatever they like, no matter what awful, unfit parents they might be. WTF?

[(Anonymous)]

And that was me, Confluence. I am a spaz.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Are not! a moment's inattention is not spazworthy. I do it myself at times. Copy your comment text, delete the comment, and repost with attribution. Cheating is occasionally legitimate :>.

So with you on the "unauthorised reproduction" comment. What they should be doing, in my possibly fascist view, is restricting reproduction by any means, (a) to an upper limit for all, say 2, and (b) particularly for people who cannot adequately house, feed, clothe, educate and nurture a child (i.e. the British government teen-mother support scheme has it precisely backwards. Those kids should be getting contraception, not houses). Those who are looking to artificial means of reproduction are presumably the ones with the money and education, anyway, and therefore more likely to be good parents.

Human race, logic - it's been a bad break-up.