The Acid-Trip World Of Feminine Beauty Ideals

My other two article from the last week, both re-vamps n' clean ups of former ideas:

Photo by Susan Anderson's High Glitz photo documentary

 Men's Guide To Women's Beauty Insecurities

Heidi Montag, our Hollywood poster girl for body dysmorphic disorder

 Shopping Online From Planet Fake Boobies

Lojo has something she needs to get off her chest.

A little over a year ago, the city that I now call home experienced a horrific murder of a young woman. Read about it here. Apparently the admitted murderer will be sentenced today. Read about that here.

I am pretty jaded when it comes to the potential darkness of people and I am not easily shocked when I read or hear about horrific events. But when my mom told me about this murder shortly after it happened, a lump welled in my throat and I just wanted to put my head in my hands and cry. Why? Because the young woman, Teagan Klein, was not the only person victimized at the scene. So was her three year old son. Who, if I recall correctly, was injured and found hiding in a closet(?) at least twelve hours after the murder took place.

Being the day of Douche Bag's sentencing, the event is resurfacing in the news as it has a few other times over the last year. What bothers me is how the media reports I am hearing now, and have heard throughout the year, fail to mention this poor child, let alone the fact that he was assaulted, potentially witnessed his own mother's murder, then hid in the house, terrified and alone for at least twelve hours.

While I don't expect the media to refer to the murderer as Piece of Shit Douche Bag when reporting on the event, I do think it's important to mention that he also victimized a helpless child and changed his life in one of the most emotionally damaging ways possible. That being said, I stick my middle finger high in the air, as I encourage all other people with a soul to do, and send a loud "fuck you" to Piece of Shit Douche Bag while he awaits sentencing today.

May he get fiercely ass pummelled by skinhead neo-Nazis in prison.

Girls Rock! The movie

I came across the trailer for this movie on the internet, and I babbled on about it like a tweaked out homeless person for three weeks before I surrendered to my unsuccessful search of torrent sites and local stores and bought it off Amazon.

Girls Rock! (note the exclamation point) is a documentary about a rock camp in Portland, Oregon where girls between the ages of eight and eighteen spend a week learning an instrument, writing a song within a band, and then performing that song in front of an audience.

Bear sat down and watched the documentary with me after spending the previous month enduring my incoherent babble about "GIRLS ROCK!", which usually involved a lot of air guitaring and riot grrrl growling.

"Are you sure you want to watch this?"

"Yes."

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

"You don't have to."

"UGH, I know. I want to."

"It's about girl empowerment and stuff."

"Babe, I don't pick up on half that stuff anyway."

"Aight then."

But about half an hour into the movie, Grizzly Man made a keen observation:

"Wow... girls are really fucked up."

The issues explored go much deeper than simple rock n' roll. The premise of the camp is to use music as a platform to help young girls develop their confidence, explore self esteem issues, and challenge the mold of traditional femininity. Witnessing a herd of young girls squirm within the confines of girl culture is a bit unsettling. Moderately heart breaking. Their preoccupation with the pressures of beauty ideals and social popularity is one thing, but their inhibitions in regards to breathing air, taking up space, being heard, speaking out, being individualistic-- themselves-- caused a lump in my throat. Apologies are abundant. Expressions are censored. Behaviour is uncomfortable and awkward. It made me want to hug them all and blubber in one of those nasal, hiccup, half cries, "it will be okay, IT WILL BE OKAY."

Girls Rock! is also really, really adorable, particularly the scene when little Palace overcomes her inhibitions and develops her own riot grrrl scream, as seen in the trailer above. However, my favorite camper depicted in the documentary is Amelia, an experimental, self proclaimed musician who writes songs about her dog, Pipi, and who very obviously would be classified as ADHD in a public school setting. She's the one in the trailer who is rocking out so passionately that she slumps down on the floor Jimi Hendrix style.

By the end of their rock camp experience, many of the girls documented come out of their shells. One of the older girls, Laura, verbalizes her realization that as a female she is equally as capable as males to write music, rock out, and be in the lime light rather than sit on the side lines and pine over rock stars-- could definitely be construed as a metaphor for many deeper gender issues that still, and in some ways, increasingly plague our culture.

For anyone who is interested in the subject matter and want to learn more about the documentary, I found a great review of Girls Rock! at KQED Arts.

In related news, has anyone watched that youtube video of the three year old girl crying over Justin Bieber (Canada's newest prepubescent pop star)? If you haven't already seen it, it's worth the watch if you hit the link above. You'll laugh. While cringing, of course. Do you think maybe, just maybe, we all need to collectively move on from celebrity culture? Re-focus? This shit makes me want to put a gun in my mouth.

So old school. So underground. So on the prairie.

I didn't know if I'd ever be able to find it, that one piece of television gold that shaped the person I am today.

And then I made a visit to the South Wal-Mart location. I battled through a maze of corporate evil, and poor merchandising, and blue vest wearing, part-time employees staring up at the florescent lights while drooling and walking in circles (LEFT TURN! LEFT TURN! LEFT TURN!). And I can't forget the People of Wal-Mart, like the forty-five year old cougar who wore a mid-drift FCUK hoodie paired with saran-wrap style jeans that squeezed her gunt into a lower level uni-boob to match her mom lumps ontop. I now have a new appreciation for my Mom's polo shirts: "Guess where I got this, Linds? VALUE VILLAGE. Guess what brand it is?! GUESS! DENVER HAYES BRAND. GUESS HOW MUCH! NO, GUESS! GUESS! $6.00! B-R-A-N-D N-E-W!"

Anyway, I finally found the missing puzzle piece of my soul:

I know, look at little Laura Ingalls. So precious.

And look at her here in an action shot. . .

"The crop was damaged by the hail storm?! For whatever will we do for winter, Pa'?!"

So I've decided that if I ever bare children, I will declare one day a year as Laura Ingalls Wilder day. We will dress up as prairie pioneers (when the children are between the ages of two and six and are too naive to wonder how mommy ever got laid) and we will visit the local Western Development Museum. And when I write "we", I really mean that they will dress up as little prairie pioneers, 'cause I am too cool for that.

As the World Turns

Earlier this month I made a very grown up decision, probably the most grown up decision I've made in the twenty six years that I've been alive.

I got rid of cable.

From pre-adolescence on, cable television was a dominant figure in my household. With both my parents working full time and the family living in a neighborhood that was segregated from my friends and my school, I had ample time to bathe in the glory of television. Dirty, rotten television.

I am proud to say that despite the strong media presence I experienced while growing up, I still turned out pretty well, and I didn't even have religion to guilt me into morality. A few of my close girlfriends had Television Nazis for parents and cable was prohibited in their households. This made me the media savvy one. Want to know what band this is? Dude, I know. Need to know the gory details of what happens during a face lift procedure? No worries, I just watched one on channel 11. Want to know about Tantric sex, or meteors, or how elastic bands are made? I know, 'cause I am cool.

Television has a reputation for administering powerful brainwashing agents that can whittle people into crazy morons. I do see the media affect morons every day of my life, but there are a lot of factors that play into people's state of malleability. As a kid it didn't take me long to start analyzing the media with a critical eye. Nowadays it is extremely difficult for me to watch something without dissecting it to the point of nauseaum. Ask my current boyfriend and he'll fall to his knees and foam at the mouth in a post-traumatic fit as he recalls what it was like to watch The Watchmen with me.

It's hard to say how I would be different as a person if I had not grown up with a television intravenously attached to my arm. Maybe I would have a more positive world view, or maybe I would be more naive and trip over my idealisms. The only thing that is certain is that I probably wouldn't be so transfixed on the prospect of becoming a zombie hunter. And that would totally suck.

Yesterday marked the day that my cable was officially disabled. I expected to experience some sort of withdrawal symptoms, like feelings of panic or uncontrollable weeping, but it just so happens that I haven't noticed its absence. That's the thing-- television isn't what it used to be.

As much as I love watching drunk, twenty year olds pee in a pool while grinding each other on Much Music's Spring Break Special, I'd rather go back ten years and tune into some Sook Yin Lee. Will I miss wasting minutes of my life watching a Fergie video, analyzing her crotch in an attempt to uncover the truth behind her transsexual mysteriousness? No. Nor will I miss Fox Television, or watching people die on Spike's Most Amazing Crashes Caught on Tape, or worse of all, enduring the horrid propaganda of CNN. Even HBO has gone to shit. True Blood? In Treatment? Entourage? Thankfully AMC has stepped up to the plate, but AMC is not Jesus or Tony Robbins or Mother Teresa. It cannot make my $55 cable bill worthwhile.

Come fall, I will be tuning in to the new seasons of Dexter, Heroes, and Breaking Bad, but it will be via file sharing and not through the increasingly disappointing means of traditional television. My current Utorrent roster includes the season premier of Mad Men, a Japanese horror movie, Open Your Eyes (the original Vanilla Sky), documentaries about Nosatradamus: 2012, Black Metal, and heroin use in the 90's, and biographies on Darwin and Satan: Prince of Darkness.

Yes, a biography on Satan.

Beat that, cable.