my boyfriend didn’t much like my post about surgical bras yesterday as he felt i was putting too much blame on men for these “great” advancements in female beautification and not enough on women themselves, i felt that i put JUST enough blame on women, in that i mentioned we have a hand in it as well, which was all that needed to be said. 

sidenote:  the boyfriend is not generally a fan of plastic surgery – whether it be facelifts or breast enhancement or whatever the next hottest grossest thing is.

he also made an argument that women advance many other beautifications that men are subjected to (he used male chest shaving as an example, and while i have no proof i have to say i am inclined to believe it was more likely invented by gay men than women).  my real answer to his complaint was a very intelligent “seriously?  i mean you’re kidding right? can you even compare what men have physically subjected women to with what women have possibly physically subjected men to?”  it was not my greatest rebuttle, but i was just stunned to find he even thought there was a comparison to be made.  i consider him pretty advanced for the male species, but i have to admit i felt pretty let down.  we got into a rather drawn out discussion about it and lets just say we had to agree to disagree on this issue, as with many in our life together.

however, it did bring up an issue that i have been wondering about for myself lately, which is that i’ve got a lot of man rage going on right now.  i feel just poised on the edge of becoming some militant feministe lesbian woman (not that there is anything wrong with that – but i feel that scenario will likely go badly for said boyfriend).  so i’ve been trying to pinpoint what it is that is causing all this feminist rage.  the question should probably be what is NOT causing my feminist rage, considering the current world at large, but whatever.  

i have felt listless, or restless, or pointless, i don’t know, something with a “less” on the end of it a lot lately.  as such i have spent more time than usual surfing the net and ending up on annoying sites like perezhilton.com and thesuperficial.com.  these sites are kind of ‘anti’ what i am about as a person, or since i have been going to them i should say that they are ‘anti’ what i WANT to be.  they are mostly about calling people out (mostly women) and talking about how terrible they look. 

the superficial is actually pretty funny and well written, but i’m going to have to pull the plug i think because its just bad vibes for a girl like me who thinks she’s got some feminist in her to be partaking of this stuff.  here’s an example: one day this summer he (the superficial dude) was bitching about how big Kim Kardashian’s ass is (it is – and it’s awesome), there was this point (probably a week prior) where he thought her ass was the greatest thing on earth, but at some point she apparently crossed some magical and INVISIBLE line in the sand and now it is suddenly considered WAY too big, i believe the words were “the body of a regular girl and the ass of an obese woman”.  to make matters worse, a day or two following that he was bitching about how flat Mila Kunis’ ass is (i believe he compared her ass to a board of wood).  so here’s the thing, we can’t win.  no matter what we do, we just can’t win.  we can be Mila Kunis level skinny with a tiny little ass and we will be posted on the internet and reviled, or we can be curvy with a giant awesome pornstar ass like Kim Kardashian and we will also be posted on the internet and reviled.   i know his job is to be funny and to tear apart “hollywood” and who really cares about these vapid little starlets and wannabes anyway right?  i know i don’t care about them, which is i guess why i get sucked in like anyone else, but it’s bigger than that.  i think we all have to step up and understand that it is bigger than that.  we have to take responsibility for what we are supporting, and by clicking on these sites i am inadvertantly supporting them.  just like by watching bad reality television that i then complain about i am still supporting it. 

so here’s my experiment, which is going to be completely difficult and painful, but which i hope will ease my man rage.  i’m going to stop clicking on these sites and i vow to not watch any more television that is something i would be embarassed to admit i watch (this will mostly include reality television i expect) for the next month.  the tv portion of this challenge should not be so difficult because i don’t generally partake in much reality tv that i don’t think is worthwhile (Project Runway is a good show and i’m not afraid to admit to watching it), but the internet clicking is going to be very difficult.

the other side to this is that by ignoring a whole facet of american life (and elsewhere?) that everyone is involved in perhaps i am just ignoring and avoiding a problem that i should instead face up to, i.e. just because i don’t click on things that make me mad and don’t get riled up and have man rage, doesn’t mean anyone is actually behaving any better and i am just kidding myself.  we’ll see how i feel in 30 days.  wish me luck.