My life has themes now where it didn't before, like I'm following some sort of cosmic curriculum that integrates school and life. The theme ("unit"?) of these past few months has generally been sex and gender, which have been circumscribed by three events: I took a gender studies class, I saw Kinsey, and I just finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which is about the marriage between a brother and sister and the hermaphrodite it produces as a grandson/daughter, who narrates the book. So I seem to apply sex and gender everywhere, which is an eerie version of what happened when Milton High School tried to find an application for Farewell to Manzanar in pre-calculus. The most recent example of this is when I went to buy toiletries at CVS.
See, I forgot my toiletries bag in Chicago, so I had to go purchase everything as if I was starting my hygenic life over again: deoderant, toothbrush, toothpaste, even razor (the new Schick Quattro-- the first ever 4-blade razor). I also needed some stuff to do my hair.
I'll put this on the table now: I'm a man who values good hair. Or at least I'm neurotic about my thin, stringy hair which, when left to play on its own, falls flat on (its/my) face like the (weak 7 year-old kid nobody picked to play kickball/me). So if you've stuck with me since middle school, you're familiar with my incredible changing mop. And that mop requires certain equipment to make it dance. So I'm looking through the hair care aisle at CVS for Suave's Non-aerosol Styling Mist for Men, which comes in a sleek grey and black spritzer bottle, but CVS doesn't carry it. But I see something similar: it's also made my Suave, the shape and size of the bottle are the same, but it's not grey and black... it's teal and pink. Uh-oh. That's women's hairspray. Hairspray, not Non-aerosol Styling Mist.
I actually started to walk away before I finally confessed to myself that the two products made by Suave are probably chemically identical. When it came down to it, I didn't want to buy a bottle of hairspray that was teal and pink. I took the time to notice the genders of all the other hair care products. It's very easy to pick out the products for men because all of them are compensating with Puritan colors and descriptors like "Extreme Hold" and "Sport Gel," plus the crucial disclaimer, "FOR MEN." None of the other products, 90% of them, say "FOR WOMEN." Hairspray, it turns out, is the only realm of society where men get to be the Other. Like the men who find themselves in this aisle, these bottles have to recede into a highly gendered masculinity verging on parody. I hate to say it, but yeah-- those bottles are comforting in their manliness. They make the embarrassing task of buying hairspray a little easier; because, let's face it, even in the century that gave us Clay Aiken, men still aren't really allowed to use much on their hair beyond the modern equivalent of Dapper Dan pomade.
In the end, I didn't break down any gender walls, but I bought an overpriced bottle colored yellow and black with Gen-X smashed-typewriter font that was sufficiently androgynous, so at least I wasn't contributing to the status quo. I have a feeling, though, that when the gender war breaks out, the hair care aisle at CVS is gonna be ground zero.
See, I forgot my toiletries bag in Chicago, so I had to go purchase everything as if I was starting my hygenic life over again: deoderant, toothbrush, toothpaste, even razor (the new Schick Quattro-- the first ever 4-blade razor). I also needed some stuff to do my hair.
I'll put this on the table now: I'm a man who values good hair. Or at least I'm neurotic about my thin, stringy hair which, when left to play on its own, falls flat on (its/my) face like the (weak 7 year-old kid nobody picked to play kickball/me). So if you've stuck with me since middle school, you're familiar with my incredible changing mop. And that mop requires certain equipment to make it dance. So I'm looking through the hair care aisle at CVS for Suave's Non-aerosol Styling Mist for Men, which comes in a sleek grey and black spritzer bottle, but CVS doesn't carry it. But I see something similar: it's also made my Suave, the shape and size of the bottle are the same, but it's not grey and black... it's teal and pink. Uh-oh. That's women's hairspray. Hairspray, not Non-aerosol Styling Mist.
I actually started to walk away before I finally confessed to myself that the two products made by Suave are probably chemically identical. When it came down to it, I didn't want to buy a bottle of hairspray that was teal and pink. I took the time to notice the genders of all the other hair care products. It's very easy to pick out the products for men because all of them are compensating with Puritan colors and descriptors like "Extreme Hold" and "Sport Gel," plus the crucial disclaimer, "FOR MEN." None of the other products, 90% of them, say "FOR WOMEN." Hairspray, it turns out, is the only realm of society where men get to be the Other. Like the men who find themselves in this aisle, these bottles have to recede into a highly gendered masculinity verging on parody. I hate to say it, but yeah-- those bottles are comforting in their manliness. They make the embarrassing task of buying hairspray a little easier; because, let's face it, even in the century that gave us Clay Aiken, men still aren't really allowed to use much on their hair beyond the modern equivalent of Dapper Dan pomade.
In the end, I didn't break down any gender walls, but I bought an overpriced bottle colored yellow and black with Gen-X smashed-typewriter font that was sufficiently androgynous, so at least I wasn't contributing to the status quo. I have a feeling, though, that when the gender war breaks out, the hair care aisle at CVS is gonna be ground zero.
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