Día de La Mujer

According to my roommates, International Women’s Day is a conspiracy fabricated by scheming capitalists to dupe the masses into spending money on frivolous things on an arbitrary date without any real significance or meaning.  That may or may not be true.  But I, for one, am not going to protest receiving chocolates from random friends on a Thursday.  

Perhaps at the ripe age of 22 I’m already becoming jaded with the youth counterculture, but it seems to me that shopping malls, golf courses and commercialized Christmases aren’t going anywhere so we might as well just enjoy them for what they offer and ignore the people who let themselves get hypnotized by sparkly kaleidoscope illusions.  Thus I have declared myself justified in soaking up Women’s Day for all it’s worth and, cliché or not, dedicating this post to the fabulousness of femininity. 

Where I grew up in Protestant Republican Land, “girly” was an insult on par with “dumb” “lame” and “gay.”  And in my Northwestern liberal arts university, things like fashion, makeup, and daily showers were considered vain excesses.   So despite the ballet classes and my ultra-feminist phase after a Women’s Studies class in college, I estimate very few people would use the word “feminine” to describe me.  I maintain, at least in theory, the philosophy that gender is a spectrum and there are no black and white differences between men and women as a whole.  But, I must admit, my roommate’s complete repulsion at the idea of a Women’s Day aroused my inner lionness. 

I bleed internally on a regular but unpredictable basis, goddamnit.  Do you have any idea how annoying that is?   I can’t wear spandex running pants without getting honked and hissed at by every truck driver and construction worker in the neighborhood.  The Pill makes me fat and Colombian’s aren’t ones to let that go uncommented, so I diet on orange-halves and “wheat” saltines (...and chocolate. Ok, I admit it!).  I spend an entire day preparing for a dinner party--shopping, calling, cleaning, chopping--and my boyfriend has to leave the kitchen after two minutes because the stove is making him hot.   

All of that is not to say that I live a suffered life as a woman.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  But--corporate conspiracies aside--I fully support a day to honor the unique, and sometimes misunderstood, aspects of Womanhood.  We are pretty awesome, after all.