The Beaver: An Endangered Species

Happy Beaver, photo by Flickr user stevehdc, used under a Creative Commons license.

Weeks ago, I posted a Kotex ad featuring a cute, furry beaver. In comments, Euchalon Grandy asked where the term "beaver" comes from, anyway. At first I was surprised he asked, because I happen to know he came of age in the early 1980s, just like I did, at a time when there was lots of discussion (feminist and otherwise) about "beaver shots" in porn. And so I thought, "Duh! It's because beavers are furry. Everybody knows that."

But then I started wondering. Why a beaver, anyway? Why not some other mammal with a thick pelt? (I'm pretty sure this is what Euchalon was actually asking, and I just didn't get it.) Why not a raccoon, or a skunk, or a lemur? I suppose there's a stripe issue with those critters. Then again, the patterning of kitty fur is infinitely variable, yet the term "pussy" persists even though few of us sport calico or tabby markings. (I wouldn't rule out tortoiseshell, however, especially as we get older.)

Why "beaver," indeed? When I showed the beaver ad to the students in my women's studies capstone class, some of them were totally perplexed. They didn't get the ad, because to them a beaver is merely a furry woodland creature. They'd never heard the term applied to women. And so an ad with a beaver representing a pussy was just incoherent to them.

The reason for this came out in class discussion: The norm for pussies is now hairless, as anyone who's flipped through Cosmo in the past decade ought to know. If you don't take it all off, no guy will want to put his package anywhere near your vajajay (in Cosmo's anatomical lexicon). So our kitties are all supposed to be sphinx cats, and the beaver is on the verge of extinction.

Posted by Flickr user *n3wjack's world in pictures, used under a Creative Commons license.

This is a seriously generational phenomenon. It's not really possible for me to fathom it from my perch here on the far side of 40. I know young women, self-declared feminists, who believe that pubic hair is disgusting - that it makes them disgusting unless they're always smoothly waxed or shaven.

Maybe the closest parallel in my generation is that when I hit puberty in the 1970s, people took it equally for granted that girls would shave their legs and armpits. I've lived in hippy co-op houses, I spent years in Europe, I've considered myself a feminist since sixth grade. And guess what? I shave my legs. Inconsistently, irregularly, and often plain incompetently. (Being blind in the shower really doesn't help!) Ditto for my armpits, though more regularly and with less blood.

I choose to do this. But I don't claim that I do it without reference to social norms. That's where I part ways with my friend figleaf, who basically argues that any hairstyle is cool (so far so good) because it's a matter of personal style and choice (um, not entirely).

One of the college-aged women I know told me that a boyfriend pressured her to shave her pubic hair because she didn't look like the women in porn. She, too, made her choices. She shaved it. She hated the ingrown hairs and itching. She grew it out again. She ditched the douchey boyfriend.

She's not the only woman to discover that grooming pubic hair, even just the bikini line, is different from legs or armpits in some crucial ways. It's harder to achieve a smooth result by shaving. Waxing produces a smooth finish for a few days, but it can't be repeated until the regrowth is well past the stubble stage. (There's also some risk of infection, especially with Brazilians.) Laser treatments are expensive and don't work for all types of hair. Whatever the method, it's likely to result in red bumps and ingrown hairs. I'm not a dude, but I assume that red bumps are the very opposite of sexy.

In fairness, men, too, are subject to social pressures to shave. While we women can camoflage stubble under our clothes, they can't so easily hide their chins. Sure, a guy can get away with a ZZ Top beard if he's a lumberjack. For most white-collar jobs, he'd better make sure it looks distinguished and professorial - or just shear it off altogether.

I'm all for choice - but what exactly does choice mean when all the social pressure tilts in a single direction? Where is the pro-growth movement (as figleaf memorably calls it)? What magazine is extolling the glories of the unpruned bush? Organic Gardening, maybe?

I'm not saying women are anti-feminist dupes if they shave, and I sure don't want to shame anyone for doing it. I'm not opposed to grooming. Like I said, I do some of it myself. (And no, I'm not going to overshare on my more personal topiary choices.) But until there's actually a pro-growth faction, our choices will be tightly bounded and subject to pressure and penalties. That's not much of a choice at all. Especially when the pressures are greatest on young women who are still finding themselves and discovering their own bodies and sexuality.

Epiphany and Incarnation

Today is Epiphany. I've always thought it was a lovely word for a terribly important concept. Where would we be without those little burst of light in our brain - be they enlightment or supernovas? Arriving at an intellectual or emotional epiphany feels as satisfying as really dark chocolate or really good sex.

But it's funny, I don't use the word much in its original, spiritual sense. My best understanding is that the holiday got its name from the Three Wise Men's realization that Baby Jesus was actually divine: God incarnate.

Now, I'm not a particularly good Christian. I was raised in the United Church of Christ and a very liberal Presbyterian congregation. I've said before that I can probably best be described as a hopeful agnostic. But if I'm not so hot at believing in a theistic religion, I warm up better to pantheism.

I don't believe we're just animate clay. I feel a lot of awe at the world around me. I find it easy to believe that there are divine elements in the world: in nature, in human beings. That's where, on a much less literal level, I think the idea of Christ's Incarnation is extremely moving and maybe even, well, enlightening. If you understand the incarnation as meaning that there's something divine within all of us (as my yoga teachers said, back when I went to yoga), then the birth of Jesus is a beautiful allegory for the potential we all bear.

Of course, if we all carry a spark of the divine, that's both a gift and a burden. Or rather, I guess it's the sort of gift that implies all sorts of responsibilities.

Even if I've totally warped Christian teaching to suit my own muddled purposes, I do love the idea of a holiday devoted to enlightenment: intellectual, emotional, spiritual.

And so: Happy Epiphany, dear readers. May we all be blessed with starbursts of light in the year ahead.

Yes, my tree's still up, though the gifts are long opened and their contents now clutter the living room. And yes, it took up about a quarter of the floor space in our living room. All the decent cut-yourself trees were oddly triangular and very squat at the base. And yes, that's a small auxiliary tree growing out of it to the right. I wouldn't let anyone chop it off, absurd though it is.

Labiaplasty: How Common, Really?

Just a quick follow-up to last week's post on how the media deals with plastic surgery on women's genitals. I cited an estimate from Time magazine that put the number of labiaplasties and similar procedures at about a thousand annually in the U.S.

A study just came out that makes me think that estimate is way too low. In the December issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery ("Aesthetic Labia Minora and Clitoral Hood Reduction Using Extended Central Wedge Resection"), Dr. Gary Alter reports performing 407 surgeries over two years. This was just one particular procedure and just one physician - albeit one in Beverly Hills. I couldn't access the article's full text but Dr. Alter's website doesn't mention any partners, only that he's got a second office in New York and a teaching appointment at UCLA, so I assume he's a player in both of the main markets and is relatively prominent in his field. (He also has a hilariously perfect last name for his profession, doesn't he?)

If Dr. Alter alone is doing 200 surgeries per year, there's just no way only 1000 women are getting it done each year. Even if Dr. Alter is a big fish, he surely isn't covering 20 percent of this market. Googling "labiaplasty surgeon" turns up oodles of other practitioners scattered around the country.

My googling also enlightened me on some other aspects of this business. For one, I got the impression that dilettantism may an issue. While Dr. Alter specializes in genital surgeries (ranging from repair of botched surgeries on intersex people to penile enhancement and transsexual reassignment), he doesn't seem to be typical. Most surgeons who perform genital cosmetic surgery also offer a spectrum of other, purely cosmetic procedures ranging from facelifts to boob jobs (here's just one example among many). I'm not letting anyone with a knife near my O'Keeffean bits, but if I did, I'd go for the real specialist. I'd want that doctor to know the map of pelvic nerves better than his own hand.

Perhaps even more striking is the apparent absence of gynecologists and urogynecologists from this field - the specialists who repair the real functional damage that can result from childbirth. I can readily believe that large labia do pose functional problems for some women. But if that were the main issue, wouldn't regular gyns be more involved in labiaplasty?

I also found that most of these surgeons post before-and-after pictures on their sites. I'm far more curious than squeamish, so of course I looked. (They do not post pictures of the surgery or of fresh post-surgical wounds, in case you were wondering.)

What I saw: A few of the women who get these surgeries do have labia large enough that I can imagine it being uncomfortable. That wasn't the case for most, although obviously only the woman who inhabits that body can say for sure. It's also a little hard to tell, because many "before" photos show one or both lips being stretched to the sides as far as possible, while the "after" photos often omit the stretching.

My guess is that in most cases, "discomfort" is a label for insurance purposes. The discourse of discomfort may also help plastic surgeons conceive of themselves (and promote themselves) as serving a higher purpose than a pornified beauty ideal. It lends legitimacy when these surgeons publish their results.

Oh, and I learned that the amount of variation in normal color and shape really is tremendous. Even in the "after" photos. The flower analogy may be trite, but it is apt. And I have to wonder - once more - why bother taking dahlias and irises and tulips, and turning them all into uniform carnations?

I took this photo of a bearded iris in my garden last spring.

Two Pants Rants

One: Why did my little Bear - age 9 and smarter than both his parents put together - think it was a good idea to put sticky tack in his pants pockets??!! And how do I get it out? This stuff is like chewing gum!

Then again, I guess it could be worse ...

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Two: Yesterday, with my two kids in school and me on break, I seized the chance to shopping for pants. It was an unmitigated disaster. For one thing, my town's solitary "mall" is actually a ghost mall. Only about every fifth store is occupied; the rest are empty, apparently because the mall's owners have overpriced the rents.

In our one lonely remaining department store I tried on about 30 pairs of pants. Not one fit me. I tried jeans, dress pants, cords - oh, I would've tried clown pants if they'd had any! I even ventured into the junior department with its distressed and ripped denims. Nada. Zip.

It comes down to this: For over a decade now, these $%*&@ low-rise pants have crowded nearly everything else out of the market. Even my slenderest students - the ones I suspect wear a size zero or less - often have a muffin top in these styles. As for me, they consistently gape in the back and even the "moderately" low-rise ones still stop miles below my belly-button.

Hey, I've done market research on this and the results are indisputable: There's not an overwhelming public demand to see me wearing a girly version of the plumber look.

I realize some women seem to fit just fine into "modern" pants (which frankly aren't all that new anymore). My sister is one of them. But are the rest of us all just a bunch of freaks? I have a waistline. I'm the same weight and height that I was 30 years ago in junior high. I'm not boasting; I was a few pounds heavier but lost them in last spring's minor medical tribulations when I was reduced to eating plain yogurt for a few weeks; and now my existing pants are all too large, and I can't find new ones. I honestly don't think I'm such an oddity. Yet it's been years since I could find pants that really fit me.

Men don't quite have this problem, do they? (Well, okay, there's the variety of older gent who wears his pants over his belly and under his armpits. I think that's a personal style choice, though.)

Anyone up for a revolt against the fashion industry's rigidity? If not, I guess I'm stuck waiting for spring - and better weather for skirts. And if anyone has a line on clown pants, do let me know.

Staying Abreast of Men's Fashions

Y'all know that I teach women's and gender studies. You know I'd take to the streets for the right of all human beings to express themselves in whatever genderqueer manner they like - and to be safe and respected while doing so. That's a basic principle for me.

And yet ... the allure of some things just mystifies me. Exhibit A: Holly of Self-Portrait As recently linked to this feature on bras being marketed to men in Japan. (There's video but I couldn't see a way to embed it, so you gotta click and go there.)

As Holly said: "I don't know what to say." I'm not so sure I do, either, but I'll try anyway.

First, this strikes me as the latest example of the viral nature of capitalism, especially where bodies are concerned. The beauty-and-body market for women is so swamped, it's hard to find a new niche. Compared to women, men's bodies haven't been nearly so thoroughly shaped and fashioned, at least not in commodified ways. Enter the metrosexual, who spends a larger chunk of his budget on fashions, hair products, and the like than does the typical dude.

And it's not just masculinity that's in flux. Bras, too, have evolved tremendously since their invention just about a century ago. The bra emerged as the corset was on the wane, but it took decades to really catch on. For the flapper styles of the 1920s, the goal was to flatten, not support. In the 1930s, cup sizes became standardized and bras began to be sold as a ready-made garment, but they still weren't universal. Only in the postwar era, with its buxom icons like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, did bras become a staple in American women's wardrobe. By the 1970s, bras were in decline; though feminists didn't actually burn them, some women stopped wearing them. The bra made a comeback again in the buttoned-down 1980s. By the 1990s you saw bras being worn as outerwear - and the Wonderbra was born.

As Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, the history of the bra is primarily the history of its commercialization. Once the postwar market had been saturated, bra manufacturers cast about for a new market. They found one in young girls who hadn't yet begun to develop. Allying with physicians, they convinced mothers and their preteen daughters that for the sake of health and beauty, girls needed to start wearing bras even before they had breasts.

So I'm inclined to see Japan's new man-bra the intersection of the metrosexual with a saturated but always ravenous body-shaping industry. Engrish.com (an irreverent and not always PC blog on Japanese culture) notes that these bras are most likely targeting metrosexuals with transgender tendencies, since the bras are really too petite to be targeting full-fledged transsexual or transgendered persons. That seems pretty plausible to me: a man who's truly trying to pass as a woman won't settle for a AAA cup.

There may be something specifically Japanese about this product, too. Take a look at an ad for it (swiped from Engrish.com, which has more along these lines):


I totally don't understand Japanese culture beyond what I learned from the movie Lost in Translation, but I'm fascinated by how the ads for this product harness conspicuously Western models. I know that this is a common trick in Japan (and the whole premise for Engrish.com, which chronicles this tactic gone hilariously wrong). This makes me wonder if - within Japanese culture - transnational masculine beauty standards might somehow grant greater license for transgendered behavior. Or if Caucasian models just give the product a certain metropolitan cachet. I'd love to know more.

However you slice it, the advertising for this man-bra engages in some major gender-bending. Engrish.com provides a translation:

Times like these call for a Men’s Bra:

• Even us guys want to know how a woman feels!
• We want to reel in our emotions! (lit. “strain/tighten our emotions”)
• I have the body of a man, but I’m a guy who feels like a little girl!
• I want to remember a gentle feeling.
• I need support for my chest!
• There are sure to be many reasons, but the most important thing is to feel gentle/tender.

So far, there seems to be a modest market for wanting to "know how a woman feels." About 300 of these had been sold at the point when this hit the media a couple of weeks ago. That's not a huge number, of course, but it's definitely more than zero. I'm hoping that most of the buyers are hoping to "feel gentle/tender" rather than "like a little girl"; that diminutive sort of creeps me out, to be honest.

I guess my feelings about this are similar to my reaction to makeup for men: cool for those who really are into it. But at the same time, I'm glad my own mate won't hope to find a man-bra under the Christmas tree - and not just because airmail won't get it there on time. I may teach gender studies, but I guess I'm just kind of limited that way. Then again, one of the main things I've learned from feminism is to honor desires - my own and others - as long as they do no harm.

But the cat-bra? Now that's where I, personally, draw the line.

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Pussy Politics and the Media

From I Can Has Cheezburger? captioned by me, Sungold.

The November 19 issue of Time magazine has an article on "Plastic Surgery below the Belt." If you're thinking it's not a man's belt, you would be correct. The article is on cosmetic surgery for your girl parts.

It goes without saying that we here at Kittywampus are friend and ally to all pussies. Not to be a simpleton about it, but we pretty much endorse the old nursery rhyme - for felines and human alike:

I love little pussy, her coat is so warm,
And if I don’t hurt her she’ll do me no harm.
So I’ll not pull her tail, nor drive her away,
But pussy and I very gently will play.

To my mind, that motto rules out anything involving a knife. I'm not referring here to pelvic reconstructive surgery intended to repair falling organs or incontinence. The surgeries in question are done solely for cosmetic purposes. The best known of these is labiaplasty, which involves surgically trimming a woman's inner lips to look symmetrical, tidy, and small. While I think women's motivations for plastic surgery are much more complex and interesting than feminists sometimes assume, I also think that mutilating one's potential for sexual pleasure - just to meet some totally artificial beauty ideal - is plain stupid and wrong.

The Time article reports that about 1000 such procedures are performed in the United States each year. If so, that's not exactly a trend.

What's more significant: the fact that labiaplasty and similar procedures are now being publicized in a major American newsmagazine, thus introducing a whole new cohort of women to the world of genital insecurity. (Arguably, I'm fueling this fire, too, but let's be realistic about our relative readerships; Time has a few more subscribers than I do.)

Time definitely skewed the article in favor of the critics of such surgeries, and I'm grateful for that. They quote Leonore Tiefer, a feminist psychologist who is fighting the medicalization of female sexuality on several fronts, including the quest for a "pink Viagra." They also gave the final word to sexologist Laura Berman, who suggested

the best way to start enjoying your body could be far simpler than surgery: "You may need a new boyfriend."

That last line points to the article's major blind spot. Time fails to ask: whence the pressure for a tidy pussy?

Clearly, the usual culprits - Cosmo et al. - are not providing the visuals. Time notes that before-and-after photos can be found on the web; I won't link to any but if you're inclined to track some down, you can find key phrases (though mercifully also no links) at The Daily Bedpost.

But why would a gal start googling for photos of a pretty pussy if she weren't worried about it in the first place? Cosmo might be stirring up insecurities. I only ever read it at the hairdresser's but in every recent issue I've seen, it seems to harp on the new "necessity" of waxing one's kitty. Which, in turn, leaves every fold exposed. This is why I'm not in favor of Sphinx cats, even though I can warm up to just about every other breed. The feline form looks divine, regardless - but it's far more fetching when it's furry and pettable.

Then there are a few guys who regale their female friends and/or girlfriends with their narrow notions of pudendal beauty. I don't personally know any men in this category but Em and Lo at the Daily Bedpost report on this real gem of a guy, as described by one of their readers:

He said that some vaginas resemble "kebabs" and that a lot of guys are really put off sex when they get a hot girl naked and find that her vagina isn't as "neat" as they imagined it would be. It made me feel really self-conscious about my own, even though I never have been before.

If any man had ever said that to me, back when I was single, every last friend of mine - and every friend of theirs - would have heard about his sublime douchiness.

But maybe that was back in the day. Maybe young men today have raised their standards. Maybe it's not just younger men. I live in a pretty sheltered bubble that way, surrounded by men who are progressive, who genuinely like women, and who would never dream up that kebab comparison - and not just because we women would never let them live it down.

So what's changed? Porn has got to be at the root of this. Where else is there a plethora of images that allow women's labia to be scrutinized, judged, and found wanting? How else could a young woman feel so worried about her perfectly "normal" adult anatomy that she writes to sex columnists to inquire about surgery? (Em and Lo gave her a very sensible answer that's worth the read.)

Why are oodles of teenage girls (!) writing to Scarleteen (as Time reports) and expressing a similar self-loathing? By the way, that's another quibble about the Time article: It's great that it led off with a reference to Scarleteen, but dispiriting that it didn't mention the great work Heather Corinna and her associates are doing. Scarleteen has devoted a whole page - currently the first link on their homepage - to debunking the myth of the perfect pussy and advising these girls that they are really and truly lovely and sexy just as they are. Maybe Time was too prissy to link to a page with anatomical line drawings.

Anyway, I blame industrial porn. And frankly, I wonder - of the 1000 or so annual labiaplasties and similar surgeries - how many of them are performed on aspiring porn stars?

The Leathered Look

I'm sort of fried tonight because I just finished photocopying the syllabus for my new course on feminist theory. It's an existing course in the program but my first time teaching it; expect me to spout off about it for the next ten weeks. It starts with Mary Wollstonecraft and ends up with Judith Butler and intersectionality. It will kick my students' asses - and probably mine, too. Karmic justice.

But since I'm fried, I'm only good for a brief rant. Driving to the office at 9:30 p.m., after the kids were tucked in, was an obstacle course. With human bodies as the obstacles. Two days before classes begin, my little college town is a bacchanalia of late-summer partying. The college boys saunter along in their baggy shorts. The college girls teeter along, clad in strategically placed scraps of fabric. By the hundreds, they're tripping off the edge of the sidewalk or walking down the middle of the street.

Yeah, the dress code is pretty sexist. But that's not what got my dander up. I was struck, again, by how tan the young women are. I can appreciate the slenderizing value of a good tan. On the rare occasions when I've managed to get some color on my thighs, they seemed to shrink three sizes.

But as a pasty-faced native of North Dakota, I've rarely been tan. Best case: People stop asking why I'm so pale. If I live long enough, maybe my freckles will merge.

You know what? That's okay. I'm 44 now, and while no one will mistake me for 20 anymore, I'm holding up reasonably well. I'd be nothing but a mass of misplaced origami folds by now, had I visited the tanning salon as often as my young female students do. The demand to be tan has escalated dramatically since I was their age.

There are lots of things to criticize about the beauty ideal, but the imperative to be tan is particularly evil because it imposes a double bind with a time lag. What makes you "sexy" at age 20 will make you look haggard and old 20 years later. (I realize I'm leaving skin cancer out of the equation. Clearly, if you're having to undergo surgery and chemo, that won't make you prettier, either.) My students realize that tanning will lead to wrinkles later on, yet it all seems abstract. For them, aging is still something that happens to other people. I thought the same thing at age 20.

I wish there were a way to get this across to young women. I joke about it and my point sails right past them. I don't know how to discuss it seriously without sounding like an old scold. I suppose I could tell them that they'll still want to appear sexy and desirable in 20 or 30 years - but that's probably a little too close to hearing that your mother still wants to get off.

LOLcat in a bind from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Is Fruitful Sexy?

Photo by Flickr user klikomatic, used under a Creative Commons license.

Men get turned on by women who look fertile. Fruitful is sexy. Or at least that's the story we get from the popularized versions of evolutionary psychology: Men like large, firm breasts, a narrow waist, and curvy hips because it's this combo of traits that signals high fertility.

Okay. I know plenty of men who like smaller breasts just fine. That fact alone exposes the simplemindedness of this theory.

But let's grant the above premise. Even so, I poked a couple more gaping holes in this theory just in the time I needed to take a shower this morning. (I do my best thinking in the shower - maybe because the spray wakes up my brain, or maybe just because the kids usually leave me alone for five minutes. Too bad I can't take my laptop in there.)

So ... if fertility really determines sexual attractiveness ... then:

1. Why is menstruation almost universally subject to taboos? After all, it's a necessary precondition for fertility, and as such it ought to be celebrated! Men ought to consider it sexy! And yet - it's not just seen as totally un-sexy, we women often feel less feminine during our period.
2. Why the heck would anyone consider a supermodel attractive? The theory requires curves. Most supermodels don't have 'em - at least not lower than their ribcage.
3. Why have men historically preferred virgins? Why not prefer women who've already shown they can conceive and bear a child? Yes, I know that popularized ev psych paints men as competitors who want to avoid supporting another man's spawn. But assuming a man just refuses to do that, why wouldn't he prefer to try to impregnate a woman who's proven her reproductive "fitness"?

Hmmm ... maybe that last point explains the MILF phenomenon?

Yeah, I realize these are slightly goofy arguments. That's what comes from accepting a goofy premise. That's the penalty for taking seriously ideas that aren't fruitful; they're just plain fruity.

The Face in the Mirror and the Origami of Time

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

I don’t think I’m an exceptionally vain person, but I’m also not immune to wanting to look younger than I actually am. Every once in a while I catch a glimpse of time leaving its tracks on my face. This happened most memorably a couple years ago when I was rushing between classes and was ambushed by the view in a bathroom mirror. Looking sidelong, I thought: oh my goodness, it’s my grandma!

Now, matters could be worse. Yes, it’s true that my dad’s mother got rather jowly late in life, not quite Nixon-esque but still quite noticable, and I see the contours of that future in my own chin. Yes, her eyelids sagged by the time she was in her eighties, and instead of getting them fixed, she held them in place with tape. (Why she never pursued surgery remains a mystery.)

But Grandma also remained vibrant and attractive well into her middle years. She adored being the queen bee of Republican politics in North Dakota. Virtually the only woman on the scene, she basked in the admiration of all those men. Incipient jowls apparently didn’t deter them. And conversely, she appreciated an attractive man well into her nineties, pretty much up to the point when she lost her marbles.

So yes, things could be a whole lot worse. And yet, when I read this passage in a Stephen McCauley novel a few days ago, I thought, whoa, he got it exactly right:

I was barely awake when the doorbell rang at eleven the next morning. I glanced in my bureau mirror on my way to the stairs, amazed at how increasingly unkind sleep was as I got older, as if someone came in every night to practice origami on my face while I slept.
(Stephen McCauley, The Man of the House, 140.)

McCauley is recounting the very particular woes of a gay man around 40 who’s single but would prefer to be paired. But even if you’re not hunting for a mate, that morning tracery can be merciless. My one really noticeable wrinkle is a line near my jaw where I know my chin gets squished against the pillow. I suppose I could sleep on my back, but then I’d never sleep, and that wouldn’t exactly enhance my looks, either.

This isn't just vanity. It's also not merely a slavish response to the beauty ideal, as a unidimensional feminist analysis might suggest. It's partly a fear of mortality. It's also anxiety - as McCauley's anti-hero displays - that no one will want to have sex with you beyond a certain point of decrepitude.

Most interestingly, it's a sense of alienation from oneself, as philosopher Diana Tietjens Meyers has argued. In her book Gender in the Mirror, Meyers says when we look at our aging selves in the mirror, we no longer see our familiar, long-known selves. Our face appears as "not-self." It's no longer the image that is invested with and in our relationships. In this interpretation, the desire to look younger, be it through surgery, cosmetics, or merely the approving eyes of another, is an effort to recover what we perceive as our true selves.

Meyers presents this as a gendered phenomenon. It's true that women's social worth is still bound up with our appearance more than men's. I think Meyers may also be right that women's aging faces become a sort of proxy for everyone's horror of mortality. This was likely one strike against Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign.

But that loss of the familiar self is not necessarily gendered. The face with origami folds - and the resulting sense of unfamiliarity - can be male just as easily as female.

In some ways, recognizing myself as my grandma was a moment of pure alienation and unfamiliarity. I literally saw someone other than myself in the mirror. But if I have to morph into someone else, I could do worse. When Grandma died, she was just a few days short of 103. So if I get her jowls, I’ll hope to inherit her robustness, too. Certainly I got my ornery streak partly from her. But I promise: If my eyelids start to sag, I will get them fixed.

Female Desire Week - Klinsi Edition

Since it's been declared female desire week, I'm going to post a few pictures of one of my favorite all-time lust objects. This is not a theoretical post. Nor is it a fitting response to the original question from Laura at the F-Word, who was asking why there are so few images of sexy men on sex-positive sites or porn for women sites. Kittywampus is neither of those things (well, I guess we're sort of ambivalently sex-positive) but we do like us our men. That's not to ignore those like belledame who were asking - rightly - what about lesbian and bi and queer desires. It's just that I'm an unreconstructed hetero gal and so I'm going to post what makes my pulse quicken.

And I might feel goofier about this if purtek hadn't already covered the hockey beat, or if Lynn Gazis-Sax hadn't declared her earlier penchant for Björn Borg, but here's the thing: for sheer perfection of the male form, soccer players leave me weak in the knees. They don't have the overdeveloped upper physique that football or baseball players tend to cultivate; they're not inconveniently tall like many basketball stars. Some do have an unfortunate tendency toward mullets, but that can be easily remedied with some sharp scissors.

I do love the game, too. That's one of the main things I gained from my time in Germany. I love the excitement of it, the aesthetics. I even kind of love how - to paraphrase Clausewitz - soccer is the continuation of war by other means, because it usually gets no uglier than Zinadine Zidane's famous head-butting incident in the final game of the 2006 World Cup. It's a pretty civilized way to carry out national rivalries (apart from the occasional hools). I love how it can bring a million thrilled fans onto the streets. I love how it's okay not to have a winner at the end of the game.

But: I also really, really love those legs. Tremendously powerful, muscled, well-defined legs.


And they are devilishly hard to find on the Internet. Believe me, I spent a chunk of this afternoon searching for photos that show my all-time favorite soccer player, Jürgen Klinsmann (aka Klinsi), from head to foot. I didn't find many but I sure had fun trying.
















Mostly I found some lovely head shots, maybe because he's a coach these days (for the German national team in the 2006 World Cup and now for Bayern München, Germany's strongest league team). I guess once you're a coach, you've landed on the mind side of mind/body dualism? I'm pretty sure he still has spectacular legs, but I can't muster actual recent evidence.

So note the forearms in the next shot, which are pretty hot in their own right. And then scroll down for some video that gives you a fuller picture from his days as an active player.

(AP)

(Reuters)

I've provided photo credits where the original source included them, but many were uncredited at their source. Clicking on the photos will take you to where I found them. Usually I try to be overscrupulous about copyright, but in the service of lust this time I picked up the nicest pictures. If anyone objects, I'll take 'em down.

And finally, for a glimpse of legs and motion and the unrestrained joy that I think makes him not just handsome but sexy (hit mute if you don't think the Europop adds to the atmosphere):

Waking Dreams of the Perfect Breast Cancer Prevention Drug

Photo of a lilac-breasted roller by Flickr users Arno & Louise, used under a Creative Commons license. If you came here for a lovely photo of black-and-white breasts set off by orange Sungold tomatoes, too bad; I got annoyed at too many late-night hits from visitors seeking boobie pictures, which is not what Kittywampus is about, and so I took down the original breast photo. However, this fella's lilac breast is quite gorgeous in its own right.

So the other night I woke up in the wee hours and started thinking about breast cancer and how to prevent it. Now, the obvious rational approach is right living, on the individual side, and a much cleaner environment, when it comes to collective strategies. On the first score, I eat my veggies and I'm no lush (though also not the teetotaler that the latest study suggests all women should be). As for tidying up the environment? Unlikely in my lifetime, especially when it comes to those persistent estrogen-like plastic and pesticide compounds that are a likely driver of rising breast cancer rates.

But the great thing about half-delirious insomniac thoughts at 4 a.m. is that you don't have to be rational. And so I started fantasizing about an ideal drug to prevent breast cancer. Clearly, Tamoxifen and its cousins that induce menopause-from-hell symptoms don't come close to fitting the bill; they're harsh enough that they're only used in women at high risk. But if you only intervene after cancer is diagnosed, the current slash/burn/poison approach leaves women maimed, debilitated, and in constant fear of recurrence.

My vision was a substance that every woman could take, at least once she was pretty sure she was done with childbearing and thus wouldn't be using her breasts to feed anyone. It goes without saying that the ideal drug would be free of side effects. (I know, I know, but it was 4 a.m., so humor me.)

You'd want a drug that would stop mutations in their tracks before the rogue cells had a chance to replicate. And you'd need to deliver it to the location where those mutations are most likely to arise: the milk factory. Since virtually all breast cancers start either in the milk-transporting ducts or the milk-producing lobules, that's where you'd want to intervene. (I'm not discounting a third variant, inflammatory breast cancer, but that seems like a biologically different beast.)

You'd want a substance that would penetrate through the first layers of cells and selectively knock out any abnormal ones. Maybe it would induce apotosis; maybe it would stop such cells from reproducing; maybe it would just smother the bad guys. Whatever its mechanism, the key thing is that it would travel straight to the ducts and lobules and then act locally rather than systemically.

As anyone who's nursed a child knows, the milk factory has an amazing capacity to ramp up and, well, expand. And this is where such a drug could satisfy the prerogatives of vanity as well as health: If it acts locally by permeating the ducts and lobules, why couldn't it simultaneously cause them to inflate prettily? I'm not talking about mimicking the porn-star silicon look. I'm just suggesting that this ideal drug could cause a little bit of non-milk fluid to be retained. You'd get a little of the size and perkiness that pregnancy produces - but now without a belly eclipsing the boobs.

The great thing about this two-in-one function is that the drug would sell itself. Its developers would be reap wealth and good karma. Women would stick religiously to the dosage schedule.

The only downside? Plastic surgeons would be hanging around soup kitchens.

Not Shrinking Violets

One more time, the trolls and troglodytes are harassing women on the web. This time, sex columnist Violet Blue came in for a bunch of unwarranted crap. She fought back late last week with a column that's worth reading in its entirety (so go check it out). The proximate cause of it was this chivalrous comment in an online chat about sex scandals:

"Sorry, but being an unattractive skank is not enough to make you an expert. Watching Violet is like watching the female version of Bill Gates expound on sex — something you just don't want to see. Or hear (thank God we don't have smell-o-vision!)"

Eew. Thank God we don't have to see what this guy is insecure about! Does he look like the Geico caveman? Or is he just an ordinary guy who'd be lucky to get a date with a smart, witty, attractive woman like Violet Blue who knows way more about sex than he ever will?

See? I can play that game too. But mostly, when women attack men online, we go after the substance of what they've said. We do sometimes take aim at their personal qualities, especially when they've got a long track record of assholery and dipshittery. I'm speaking now mostly about liberal women, not wingnut women, who generally inhabit a different Internet than I do.

Women aren't angels. Online, plenty of women indulge in ad hominem attacks, launched at each other as well as at men. That's part of the general coarseness and incivility that online anonymity seems to breed in people. (For a particularly vile example of this, see this comment thread at Pandagon, which in general is one of my favorite-most blogs.)

But liberal women don't generally attack people's appearance as a first or even last resort, and I have yet to see a woman threaten another poster with physical and/or sexual violence. While men, too, can take the brunt of nasty and even bullying behavior online, I don't know of any case involving a man that went as far as the death threats that dogged Kathy Sierra and forced her to quit tech blogging.

Violet Blue's response to the targeting of women online was inspired - and inspiring:

I just write and talk about sex. But every woman on the Internet gets called slutty and ugly and fat (to put it lightly) no matter what; all we have to be is female. ...

The problem is, with so many women I talk to, the trolling is effective. The number of times I've talked down a crying girlfriend after she's been trolled in her comments about being fat, ugly, skanky, slutty or stupid is higher than I can count (no matter what she writes about). Trolls watch too much mainstream porn and TV, and believe stereotypes are real; they slap us with it and then we believe it, too. ...

In Margaret Cho's "Beautiful" tour, she talks about recently being on a radio show and having the host ask her point-blank, live, on the air, "What if you woke up one day, and you were beautiful?" When asked, he defined beautiful as blonde, thin, large-breasted, a porno stereotype. Cho says, "Just think of what life is like for this poor guy. There's beauty all around him in the world, and he can only see the most narrow definition of it."

So maybe if you're a woman, you're just going to be fat and ugly on the Internet no matter what you look like, say or do. Of course, I could swap out my SFGate bio photo for Jenna Jameson's. Then maybe we'd have some serious discourse about sex culture around here.

(I quoted at length because it's all spot-on, but do read the rest here.)

Right. It's a classic double bind. If you're sexy, you can't be smart and serious. If you're smart and serious, you'd better not reveal your sexy side or you won't be taken seriously. And yet, when women don't combine all those things at once, we fall short of what Anna Quindlen called "effortless perfection."

I'm not suggesting the guys need to shoot for perfection, too. But how about we all cut women a little slack, and let us be our imperfect, sexy, smart, silly, sassy selves - out loud, in public, without fearing attacks on our person or safety.

Photo by Flickr user Lady-bug, used under a Creative Commons license.

Occupational Hazards

I'm in the midst of grading a large stack of student essays, 80 of them, each analyzing an advertisement of the student's choice. While on the whole they're mercifully intelligent and interesting, they're bumping me up against some occupational hazards.

1) I stink. Currently the dominant scent is Calvin Klein's Euphoria, but I'm sure the top and bottom notes will become more complex as I page through more perfume ads (they're stapled to the papers) and pick up that weird mix of cologne and eau de colored ink.

2) I had to google the term "lipstick party" to see if it's the same as a "rainbow party." In case you were wondering too, the answer is yes. If you're wondering what a rainbow party might be, well, I've kindly done the work for you (but don't follow the link if you have delicate sexual sensibilities or are prone to moral panic). The ad that prompted this high-brow research is from Cointreau's Be Controversial series. (Warning: Cointreau's site is based on Flash-for-beginning-readers; it's excruciatingly slow. The ad here gives you the flavor of it, so to speak.)

3) I learned from this ad that I had my babies a few years too soon.


To think we could've at least taken turns!

4) I'm immune to ads after all this analysis. That's why I'm off to the kitchen to mix me a nice, cold cocktail.

Easy Targets

I'm going for minimalist commentary here, because I'm going to make my poor students check out these images and I don't want to pre-empt even the most obvious observations. Don't expect any analysis from me - just snark, ingeniously disguised as questions, which are as subtle as the images themselves.

So, is this ad sexist? Or just, y'know, kinda free-spirited and irreverent?


Does your answer change if you know the ad is actually a 20' x 20' billboard in Times Square?

What if you consider the original use of targets (and please don't think too hard about the arrows, it gets painful really fast)?

Can you imagine a male model in this ad?

If it's not sexist, then we shouldn't be upset if little girls want to be playful and clever in the same way. This shirt is being marketed to toddlers:


But the sexualization of little girls is old hat, as this ad from 1976 shows:


So maybe we shouldn't get too heated up about that, either. Besides, sexualization is now the hottest theme in the presidential campaign. Just take a look at the emblem of a newly formed non-partisan anti-Hillary Clinton group, whose sole purpose is apparently to sell this classy logo on T-shirts:


It turns out there are oh-so-many ways to creatively use the c-word in politics. Here's one for the music fans:

So, as you can see, if these images are just silly, or tacky, or maybe a teensy bit sexist after all, it doesn't matter anyway. Because we all know that women's issues are all about identity politics, or special interests. They surely don't have much to do with real politics.

Images:
Target ad via Shakesville
Hooter's toddler tee via Feministe
Love's Babysoft ad via copyranter
Anti-Clinton logo via Salon's Broadsheet
Anti-Clinton T-shirt also via Broadsheet

Bild Lilli - Proto Barbie and Porno Barbie

I always thought Barbie dolls were as American as apple pie and unfettered capitalism. But as I learned this week from one's of my husband's students, she actually has obscure roots on the other side of the globe. And her German predecessor, Bild Lilli, was a much bawdier gal than our Barbie.


The original sexy fashion doll was a spin-off of a West German tabloid, the Bild-Zeitung, which launched a cartoon in 1952 featuring a sassy, smart-mouthed young woman named Lilli who favored expensive boyfriends, and lots of 'em. The Lilli doll went on the market in 1955, one of the frivolous products West Germans could now afford thanks to their post-World War II "economic miracle.

Late in her career (which ended when production stopped in 1964), Bild Lilli was increasingly marketed to girls, and her wardrobe included dirndls and other folkloric German costumes. She crossed the Atlantic with Mattel's co-owner Ruth Handler, in 1956, and hit the American market in 1959, re-christened as Barbie.




But originally, Lilli was marketed to men, believe it or not, and sold in such venues as tobacco shops. The limited information available on the web repeatedly describes Lilli as a "sex doll."

Clearly, her blouses were scantier than the norm for the era ...

... and her skirts shorter ...


... but I imagine it was outfits like this one that clinched her reputation as the girl you'd want as your date on any occasion, as one advertising brochure claimed.

Some have viewed her literally as a prostitute, and she's also been compared to fetish model Betty Page.










Now, when I was in grade school my friends and I did as many naughty things with Barbie and Ken as were anatomically possible. (Which meant they had a very limited love life indeed.) But I'm still trying to figure out how the heck Bild Lilli could be a sex doll.

Apparently men posed her on their rear-view mirrors, which might be erotic, considering the relationship some men have with their cars. What else a man could do with an 11 1/2" doll escapes my imagination.

Then again, maybe this party get-up provided some inspiration. That champagne bottle is sure at a jaunty angle.















Sources for images:
first, third, and fifth photos are from Dollopedia
the fourth photo is by flicker user teadrinker
the second and final two photos are from Bisque-Dolls