Saturday afternoon I went for a pedicure, lunch, and shopping with my friend Anne-Carolyn and had a lot of fun. Not only did a very cute pedicurist with amazing cleavage tell us all about her birthday party that’s going to be an 80s prom (she invited us, can you believe it?) but also I bought a pretty skirt I plan to wear to a fancy dinner in Chicago with all my friends from inside the computer on Saturday. And then I had delicious Indian food, and I did this all with an alluring, compassionate, and absolutely hysterical opera singer. Yeah, what did you do on Saturday afternoon? Can you beat that?
I was shocked to learn that Anne-Carolyn had never had a pedicure before. She is always beautifully dressed whenever I see her and she knows things about makeup and high heels. “Yeah,” she said, batting her eyelashes at me. “My girl gene just turned on about a year ago.”
I found this rather amazing, and we talked quite a bit about what it means to be girly, and how different women express themselves and their femininity through things like clothing and makeup and stuff like that, and also through more attributional stuff like confidence or passivity. I thought a lot about the time of The Raspberry Fuzzy, where I was, for real, wearing Tevas with socks a lot and very unflattering hiking pants and shirts eight sizes too big. I cleaned up a little to go to work but I remember very clearly not thinking very much about my looks or what I wore. When I did think about that sort of thing I would switch to the default of a) I’m ugly so it doesn’t matter what I wear or b) it’s all a tool of The Man, anyway.
Sometimes I still feel like some aspects of more traditional girliness are tools of The Man…bikini waxes (OW) and high heels (even more OW) spring to mind…and other times I think that wearing pretty clothes is fun sometimes. I made a big decision a couple of months ago to commit to getting my hair cut every six weeks, even though it costs money to do so. I don’t like manicures but I definitely like pedicures so I’ll try to do that occasionally as well. I probably won’t ever wear makeup but I have started moisturizing at night and now that I put product in my hair my medicine cabinet looks a little girlier.
The biggest difference between now and three years ago is probably that I don’t wear all my clothes three sizes too big, except for my pajamas. I still wears jeans and tee shirts and sneakers a lot but my sneakers are red suede and my shirts give some indication of my waist-hip ratio. I don’t know, exactly, why this feels better. Because I’m not ashamed of my body anymore, or at least not as much as I once was? Because I like to look cute in public, if I can help it? I am not sure why I want such a thing, because I don’t always buy into the “if you look good you feel good” thing but maybe there’s some truth in that, even for me. I’m also not sure what the connections between femininity and sexuality are, and I even think there are probably several types of femininities, and I don’t really know why I’ve chosen the one where you sometimes wear a scarf in your hair. I’m still not sure what this has to do with sexuality, by the by. I don’t normally think of myself as dressing for sex purposes. Anyway, I notice that most straight women dress for each other and not for men, even though the purported purpose of dressing nicely and to showcase sexuality, in the case of straight women, is sometimes to attract men. I still don’t know what that’s about. All I know is that I no longer wear size XXXX tee shirts, that I’ve started to like purses a lot lately, and that I am anxiously awaiting sunnier times so that I may wear skirts and sandals with more regularity. I have also discovered that if you tell your absolutely adorable pedicurist that you place your feet in her hands, so to speak, and that she may do with you what she likes, she will immediately perceive your secret wish to be a drag queen in your heart if not so much in your ensemble, and she will give you these:
