Feminism works

Yesterday, Rachel Lucas wrote a great post called Girl Power about her observations of college students at a bar. She came away with three key points (caution for a teeny-tiny bit of language):

(1) It can be confidently asserted that it is, in fact, considered “stylish” and “hot” for young women to openly flaunt their doughy, protruding midsection regions and to dance like drunken strippers. Thank you, Britney and Paris. It seems the jellyroll exposure is necessary in order to display the tramp stamp lower-back tattoo that every. single. one. of. them. has.

(2) These same young women appear to have so thoroughly emasculated the males of their generation that there is now one AND ONLY ONE acceptable outfit for young men: horizontal-striped polo shirt with collar popped up, cargo shorts that hit midcalf ever-so-effeminately, and flip-flops or, alternatively, leather slip-on loafers. Hair must be moussed and gelled into either a giant spiky mess or a faux-hawk. Approximately 80% of the males sport multiple tattoos on arms and lower legs, clearly in a bid to simply keep up with the tattoo ratio the girls have achieved.

(3) Young females are every bit as, or more, disgusting, revolting, and downright nasty as their male counterparts. My sole foray into the “ladies” room (”ladies” - hehe - that’s a good one) afforded me the opportunity to breathe in the pungent odor of vomit; to hear one girl telling her cohorts, “I don’t want to go home OR puke! I want my drink back! Fuck off!” and another girl shouting into her cell phone, “She can eat shit! Gawd, what a whore!”; and to practice my cat-like tiptoeing skills as I navigated the floor which was littered with an almost solid layer of wet toilet paper and the shards from what were at least three broken glasses.

Ah, noble womanhood. We should definitely be running the world, as it is more clear now than ever that we have our shit together.

I will say that the fashion sense in Florida is [alarmingly] similar and different at the same time. A lot of Florida guys, for example, like to go for surfer chic instead of preppy chic. This means they wear ripped up cargo pants or board shorts, a t-shirt with one of the top three surfer brands (Billabong, Quicksilver, or Rip Curl), and flip flops, always. They top it off with this weird, messy hairdo that I can't really describe. It's long-ish, shaggy, and stylishly swept over their forehead and into their eyes, so that they can constantly be doing the girly hair flip.

She pretty much hit the female fashion sense on the head, though. I don't go to bars or clubs much anymore, and when I do, there are hordes of these girls running around wearing next to nothing, showing off the pre-requisite belly button piercing most of them got when they were sixteen and yes, the tramp stamp.

Now, the tramp stamp I can't really condemn. I have two tattoos, one of which is on my lower back. In my own defense, it has a very personal meaning to it, and I didn't just slap a butterfly, a dolphin, a sun and/or a moon, or some kind of weird tribal there just for the sake of having a tattoo that I thought was "sexy". Therefore, I don't classify mine as a tramp stamp. ;) I put it on my lower back because then it wouldn't be seen by the entire world -- it's for me and no one else. It's only seen when I want it to be seen.

But in any case, girls seem to lately pride themselves on being as "sexy", "wild", and "crazy" as they can be. They go to bars, cheering with their girlfriends about how they are going to get so f*cked up!, proceed to get drunk, and will do just about anything for a little attention. Dance like a stripper on top of a bar? No problem. Flash her little boobies for a free beer? Awesome. Make out with her best friend to get all the guys in the bar in a circle around them cheering? Great, now they know they're getting laid tonight.

It's like girls are in an unofficial race to keep up with the boys, to prove that they aren't lightweights and can outdrink the guys, can sleep around just as much as guys can, can be just as loud, rude, obnoxious, and disgusting as guys can. It's cool to talk in this breathy, ditzy little voice, to giggle at everything a guy says, and basically embody the blonde idiot stereotype as best you can. Strangely enough, slapping has come back, I guess. It's "cute" for a girl to do the little girly slap whenever a guy says something funny. "Oh my God, shut up!"

These little girly girls will act all tough if they see some girl they don't like, too, one of my favorite acts. They'll spot them across the bar and talk all tough to their friends about how, "If that bitch says even one word to me I'm going to kick her ass!" She'll then spend the rest of the night hoping that bitch will come over and say one word to her so that she can then prove what a tough bitch she is. They'll get in each others faces, talk a lot of trash, and then get into some kind of catfight before they're kicked out of the bar. The entire time, drunken boys will be cheering and no one will be trying to break the two girls up.

And feminists wonder why guys are so amazed and enthralled when they somehow meet a classy, intelligent, together young woman (I say "young" because most of these girls will grow out of this phase, but meeting a young twenty-something girl who doesn't act like a drunken skank is more unusual than it is common).

I hate those girls. And if you go out to a bar or a club, they're everywhere.

Thankfully, not all twenty-something girls are like that (hello!). The ones that aren't are the ones who don't feel the need to go to a bar and get plastered, and therefore, you won't see them if you go looking at a bar for them. The old adage that you'll never meet someone worth dating and/or marrying at a bar or a club is still true. It's just too bad that classy, intelligent, together, attractive young women are more of a minority than a majority.

At any rate, these girls will go one of either two ways. They'll grow out of it and be mortified at the way they once acted, and will go on to lead normal, healthy lives, probably keeping their daughters in a semi-prison to try to prevent them from acting the way that they did. OR, they'll grow out of it in the sense that they stop going to bars every weekend but look back fondly on those memories, take their daughters to get matching tramp stamps in an effort to still be "cool", and will probably never settle down with a good man.

And I also agree with another point of Rachel's -- the thanks can be put squarely onto the shoulders of Britney and Paris, for glorifying skankified stripper chic. Look at me, I dress like a whore, I'm so cool! Oh my gawsh, I made a sex tape, I'm so famous! Check it out, I party every single night!

I just hope that my [future] daughter's generation does not repeat these same mistakes. I hope they grow up knowing how ridiculous it is to be "liberated" enough to act this way, and are able to show more restraint than these girls do. We don't need a second generation of these Barbie Doll idiots.