Feminine

I don't know what the fuck that word means, anymore.

A good thing. Progress.

I get a blossomy smiley feeling whenever a woman escapes the gravity sink of femininity. I can't imagine trailing that fuckload of conditions, pre-conditions and antecedents around, trying to conform to that shit.

I can't even bring myself to shave between September and July. Which says a whole lot, I think. Because no one expects me to. If I didn't have teenaged boys who'd pay a real price for having me do a public act, I'd spend a week traipsing about this shitty little dying mill city, me in a wedding dress. And that also says something, doesn't it? Because they would pay a price.

I look all Muslimy, with my greying chest length beard, my greenish skin and these black, black eyes. I've more than once been called a "raghead" and a "terrorist" (that, while trying to buy a burrito outside a laundromat, screamed by a woman driving* a minivan, blasting country music and trying to slap her kids into submission).

I'd love to combine the great stocky bearded Mediterranean looking thing with a shiny white wedding dress. And pink shoes. But not pumps. Whoever invented those gave Dr. Guillotine a run for his technician's mechanical cruelty.

I'm sure as hell not feminine. And the only thing which conforms the wedding dress to the term, feminine, is the doily brides-priced straightjacket of surrender and abjection that comes from stitching oneself into it.

Fuck that. Fuck it.

But, I don't have to put on "feminine" to get though my day. No one's going to call me the equivalent of "unladylike" if I just do my own thing, as long as I don't shit or piss in public spaces and can keep most of the crumbs off my chest when I sit down to eat. Hell, these is modern times. I can even cry in public and someone will care, as long as I keep it in my shorts.

(My wife? She got sent home for crying at work today.)

Whoa boy, "feminine" matters. In the expectation of it. And the expectation of its absence. I'm not telling any folks with female parts, or fluid gender, or gay attractions anything new on that account. I've got no illusions here.

But, I saw it all raw and unforgiving today, on our way to a box store, as a mother slapped her pre-teen daughter and told her to stop acting like a girl. The mother was in a skirt designed by a dude. The daughter was in the latest expensive hooker wear.

A world of eye opening, that.

You want to know the best part?

There were fashion model try outs in the Mall attached to the box store. We'd just stop to gawk, wife and I, at mothers conforming their daughters - some really, really young ones - by way of blush, eye shadow and clothing-as-effacement, while a company jerk explained what we imagined were the fee schedules for the portfolios and photo shoots.

We passed them, on our way back to the box store, less than a minute before the slap.

Which the universe lined up also nice and neat like. Outside of the Gap...



* - "driving" is a generous characterization of what she was doing with her urban assault vehicle