If you're a woman, EVERYTHING, apparently. It's not only that patriarchy made us adhere to the beauty standards that make us women want to be thin as sticks, young-looking as prepubescent girls, and sexually inexperienced and chaste and quiet (pumping money into cosmetics and plastic surgery industries that literally prey on insecurities implanted in women since birth), it made us police ourselves. How many times when you go online you see women telling other women how to dress, what to wear, what makeup to apply, shave or not shave? Yeah, a lot. And what happens to anyone who dares to step out of line and do whatever the hell she wants with her body?
She gets yelled it, humiliated, shamed, punished, trolled. You name it.
Ever since I've announced that I'm growing out my armpit hair and my pubic hair and my leg hair and even my boob hair (well, there are like two hairs around each nipple), I've been having people commenting on my posts (about hair) with hostility, some of it polite, some passive-aggressive, some charged with personal anger that has nothing to do with me or with my hair. Amazing. So in the eyes of those people I have somehow crossed some taboo. As a person, I must be put back in place. Why?
BECAUSE OF MY DAMN HAIR.
This makes me laugh, and then at the end of laughing I start crying. Because I realize how strong this monster is, the monster against which I started fighting only recently. Because this monster as as ridiculous as the monster of racism, where people hate other people simply for the color of their skin. If you think about it conceptually, if you remove all the history of suffering behind it, how ridiculous is it? We're in infancy as society. We're fucking babies. We have so much work to do, it's not even funny. Well, I'm ready to keep fighting no matter what it takes.
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